At Pyramid Lake

Ten: Pyramid Lake as Theater

t e n � � 234 The sky forms a proscenium arch over Pyramid Lake, framing the everchanging scenes of atmospheric drama and acts of human nobility and cupidity. Little wonder that the lake attracts histrionics, from the entrance of Kit Carson and J. C. Frémont with a howitzer in tow to the exit of an environmental artist plowing circles in a playa. The lake served as a backdrop for the religious ceremonies of the Kuyuidokado for centuries, and continues to do so, but the coming of Christian missionaries moved religious spectacles indoors. “In 1890,” Lorraine Wadsworth explains, “the Paiutes of Pyramid Lake were assigned to the Episcopal Church.” The federal government assigned various denominations to reservations. The first Episcopal services were conducted in 1894 in a building at Nixon loaned by the bia. Two years later mass was held in a small frame church called St. Mary’s. Another Episcopal church, St. Michael’s, was built at Wadsworth. The ritual of the Mass is, like Elizabethan drama, usually divided into five parts (acts): a gathering with hymn singing, a sermon, an offering of prayers, an exchange of greetings by the congregation, communion with sacred bread and wine, and dismissal with a prayer of thanksgiving. Since five is a symbolic number in Paiute culture, this ritual may have been especially appealing. Photographs of St. Mary’s in Wadsworth’s book show a spare interior with about eight rows of pews seating 150, a simple raised altar about the size of an upright piano, but no pulpit. This church was built of stone and concrete blocks in 1917, after the first structure burned down. Gothic-style arched windows with stained glass illuminate the interior. St. Mary’s introduced the Kuyuidokado to the spatial conventions of Euro-American theaters as well as churches. How that space was used depended on the performer and the audience. brother david Why Brother David, born William John Hughes in Wales in 1894, and known to theater and movie audiences as Gareth Hughes, chose the Paiutes of the Pyramid Lake asTheater Pyramid Lake as Theater 235 Pyramid Lake Reservation for his religious mission remains a mystery. He took the name David, he told me, because the biblical David was a musician and author of many of the psalms. Hughes’s presence at the lake coincided with the sojourns of Liebling, Miller, and Bellow, and he appears as “Brother Louis” in Bellow’s short story “Leaving Yellow House.” Liebling appreciated Rabelaisian characters and took time out from his investigation of the conflict between Senator Pat McCarran and the Pyramid Lake Tribe to have tea with Brother David in Nixon. Liebling was curious about a man who had “held in his arms the pulsating forms of the most beautiful women in the world’s history”—Theda Bara, Pola Negri, Viola Dana, Nazimova—but he was intimidated, he wrote, by Brother David’s cassock. Liebling records that they shared a pot of Lapsang, and Hughes “spouted Shakespeare in a musical Welsh voice and warned me of the machinations of the Mormon Church, which, he said was laboring to convert the Indians and exploit the untapped mineral resources on all the reservations.” Brother David was at one time a thespian, then an Episcopalian, finally, perhaps, a Jansenist, and always uninhibited. Brother David’s early career has been tantalizingly described on websites by his acolyte Stephen Lyons of Cwmcaddon, Wales. According to Lyons, Hughes left home in 1910 and became an actor, touring England and Wales, playing boyish roles in Shakespeare’s plays and popular melodramas. In 1914, not yet twenty years old, he arrived in New York and soon became part of James O’Neill’s touring company, famous for its production of The Count of Monte Cristo. James’s son Eugene was just beginning his career as a playwright, and Gareth Hughes’s association with the O’Neills may have helped him get good roles in New York and in Hollywood. In 1916 Hughes played Ariel in a Broadway production of The Tempest. Hughes appeared in more than fifty movies between 1915 and 1931, notably in the 1919 version of the comic novel Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch and in James Barrie’s Sentimental Tommy in 1921. He apparently made a considerable amount of money, counted Isadora Duncan, Lionel Barrymore, Jack Dempsey, and Sally Rand among his acquaintances, and lived the good life in the 1920s, but his career did not survive the coming of sound and he lost most...