Jump Kiss: An Indian Legend (review)

Jump Kiss: An Indian Legend by Diane Glancy (Cherokee) and directed by Randy Reinholz (Choctaw) had its world premiere at the Wells Fargo Theatre in Los Angeles's Autry Museum of Western Heritage on 5 June 2002. This was the first Equity production of Native Voices at the Autry, a collaboration initiated in 2000 to develop new works of Native theatre. This work was a fitting choice for a Los Angeles opening because Glancy's beautifully textured play negotiates multilayered issues of Native identity and urban relocation, concerns highly relevant in Southern California's largest Native American urban area.

Based loosely on Diane Glancy's own life, Jump Kiss: An Indian Legend is described in the program notes as an "explanation ceremony, a recovery of events and relationships for the purpose of understanding what has passed" (3). The play flows through disjointed memories, arranged by plates as thematic scenes, of more than four decades as Narrator, a middle-aged daughter of a Cherokee father and a German/English mother, returns to her childhood home in Kansas after her mother's death. Interweaving fragments of Western linear time from the 1990s, 1970s, and 1950s with Cherokee mythic time, Glancy artfully integrates poetic remnants of memory with traditional Native ceremonial elements of unity and balance.

Literally and ceremonially a homecoming on multiple levels, Jump Kiss focuses on an urban Native woman displaced by mainstream assimilationist pressures, from outside and within her own psyche. Throughout the piece, Narrator, sensitively performed by Dolores Apollonia Chávez (Chicana/Yaqui) struggles to come to terms with her past. Catalyzing these issues are her conflicting emotions about her parents and two sides of her family—Cherokee and European American—and the unresolved historical contests of her mixed heritage. On the father's side are mythic connections to the Cherokees in their ancestral homes in the Southeast, and subsequent U. S. governmental oppressions—the Trail of Tears, Dawes Allotment Act, and forced urban relocation. On the mother's side are European immigrants' pursuit of the American Dream and the ensuing Westward expansion, conquest, and settlement of Native lands.

Narrator embodies her conflicted family memories in mid-life and as a young girl with her family in the 1950s. Her younger self and family include: Sister (Tonantzin Carmelo, Tongva/Mexica), Brother (Robert Vestal, Cherokee), Mother (Ellen Dostal), and Father (Gil Birmingham, Comanche); and later in the 1970s, Son (Phillip Dunbridge) and Husband (Mark A. Cross). On stage throughout the entire performance, Legend, a Cherokee ancestor, masterfully portrayed by Vincent Whipple (Oglala-Santee, Sioux, and Navajo) accompanies Narrator (as herself and as Sister) on her journey home with ceremonial intertribal music, selected, arranged, and performed by Whipple. Through these memories—both personal and mythic—Narrator comes to understand and embrace her Cherokee heritage.

Opening night, Randy Reinholz's taut direction powerfully dramatized the tensions in Narrator's life while maintaining the Native ceremonial integrity of the piece. Through the carefully crafted combination of Jeffrey R. Stander's split set—initially dividing the stage between ancestral Cherokee homelands and a Midwestern 1950s dining room—strong ensemble performances, Christina Wright's meticulous costume designs, and three-screen projections of more than 300 family photos and slides of Cherokee history, the production physicalized the fractured geography of Narrator's family history and her own psyche. Reinholz deftly intensified the performance by probing the complexities of these relationships, past and present, thereby pushing the psychological stakes higher for each character. Program notes on Cherokee history, culture, and spirituality would have further illuminated these issues for those audience members unfamiliar with them.

In the family sequences, the most powerful moments occurred with Narrator's memories of Father's struggles as a Cherokee forced to assimilate. Gil Birmingham's remarkable performance filled the stage with Father's dignity, strength, and love for his children, poignantly capturing his yearning to remain a Cherokee...