Where We Belong Accountability

Madeline Sayet's WHERE WE BELONG includes an Accountability Rider which has stipulations for theaters who are producing the play. One of these requirements is that a theater acknowledge if there are any past instances of redface at the institution, as well as committing to not present any programming in future seasons that includes redface. This prompted us to look back on 30+ years of Jungle Theater productions and the deep dive into our history has been fascinating and revealing. 

We did find a production that included redface. The Jungle's 2006 production of Shipwrecked! by Donald Margulies featured Aboriginal Australian characters portrayed by non-Native actors. 

We are disappointed that this was the case. We do not want to shame any of the performers, artists, or craftspeople who worked on the production; However, as an institution we want to acknowledge this as part of the Jungle's past. We are committed to making sure this it not a part of the Jungle's future.

The undertaking of this responsibility prompted some thought on these two works, Where We Belong and Shipwrecked!.

When we went back to the text of Shipwrecked! we found noteworthy comparisons between Where We Belong and Shipwrecked! that illuminate the significance and themes that Madeline Sayet's work highlights. Both scripts feature the use of Shakespeare's language and plays, particularly The Tempest, as examples where language is wielded as a colonialist weapon. 

In Shipwrecked! the main character, who is an Englishman, tells a story where he goes on a journey, becomes shipwrecked, and lands on an inhabited island where he teaches English with the use of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, one of his prized possessions. The play has a level of self-awareness and describes itself as hyperbolic and satirical. The story leans into the phoniness of self-mythologizing and the delusional ego of the central character - positing himself as Prospero (In The Tempest, the former Duke of Milan who becomes a self-proclaimed ruler of the island the play takes place on) in comparison to the indigenous people of the island. The stark difference between the two plays, however, is in the storytelling strategies: in this play we can all have a lot of fun pointing out the absurdities of the colonialist mindset. There is much laughter and entertainment to be had in criticizing colonialism. But only if you are the colonizer. 

In Where We Belong, The Tempest is also invoked. But the main character sees herself in Caliban, the character in The Tempest who is indigenous to the island. He is described as sub-human and is enslaved. He has lost his native language and has to learn English. This play's relationship to colonialism is not comedic at all. What is there to laugh about?

Madeline Sayet's storytelling approach confronts truth via personal vulnerability and well-researched historical knowledge. The stakes are higher, here, because she is not sharing tall tales of romantic adventure, this is the actual history of the Mohegan people. You do not need to have read or seen the specific stories in Shipwrecked! because you already know them. They are the well-cemented origin stories of the U.S. and the glorifying movie-history of Indigenous peoples' relationship with British colonizers. 

It so happened that Shipwrecked! works well as a counterpoint to Where We Belong, but really, the lies and assumptions of America and its greatness are so deeply ingrained that they saturate an endless number of plays. And movies, history books, policies, laws. Where We Belong is in conversation with the self-mythologizing of the country, which has been able to successfully mute the intentional erasure of indigenous lives, cultures, and languages. 

There is a line in the play the main character shares when talking about how her non-Native colleagues in academia are wowed by her scholarship on Shakespeare's relationship with Indigenous peoples: "I realize the power that comes with showing people a different way of seeing the world." For many white-led theaters who have produced the play, the work of examining one's institution is profound because it forces the present-day organization to look at how it came to be, artistically. All of us, really, but especially theaters are in the business of storytelling, and it is necessary to scrutinize how we do it - how we used to do it and how we want to do it in the future.