Native American Drama: A Critical Perspective by Christy Stanlake (review)

Christy Stanlake’s book is a theoretically sophisticated analysis of Native American drama that discusses nine plays in relation to three specific Native discourses: platiality, storying and tribalography, and survivance. The book begins with a history of Native American theatre practitioners from the early twentieth century, featuring, among others, Lynn Riggs, author of Green Grow the Lilacs (the basis for the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!) and Will Rogers, the theatre and film actor (both were biracial Cherokees), together with Te Ata (Mary Thompson Fisher), a Chickasaw actor who left Broadway to concentrate on one-person shows about Native traditions. It also reviews the history of the Native theatre companies and venues that blossomed at the end of the 1960s and later, such as the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), the Native American Theatre Ensemble (NATE), Spiderwoman, and Native Voices at the Autry, in the United States; and the Native Theatre School and Native Earth, in Canada. After this historical background, she devotes the rest of the book to the three theoretical discourses and the plays that exemplify them. In terms of platiality, which provides the longest discussion, she analyses Lynn Riggs’s The Cherokee Night, JudyLee Oliva’s The Fire and the Rose, and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s The Story of Susanna. Regarding tribalography and storying, she considers Spiderwoman Theatre’s Rever-ber-berations, Vera Manuel’s The Strength of Indian Women, and Tomson Highway’s Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout. And for survivance, she offers interpretations of Hanay Geiogamah’s Foghorn, Diane Glancy’s The Woman Who Was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance, and Marie Clements’s Urban Tatoo.

Applying the perspectives of both western theorists (Bertolt Brecht, Una Chaudhuri, and Elin Diamond) and Native Americans (Paula Gunn Allen, LeAnn Howe, and Gerald Vizenor), Stanlake demonstrates how Native American drama differs from western drama, emphasizing the Native characters’ unique relation to place, their spirituality and storytelling practices, their history of displacement and loss of sovereignty, and their transformative deployment of the trickster tradition. At the same time, Stanlake situates some of the plays within the western tradition, showing, for example, their relationship to Greek tragedy, the Biblical tradition, or the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Perhaps the most interesting chapter, “Acts of Survivance in Native American Drama,” applies Gerald Vizenor’s notion of “survivance” (survival and resistance) to plays that employ strategies for maintaining a positive sense of identity in the face of the traditional stereotyping of Native Americans as victim, noble/savage, princess, or vanishing race. Rather than being trapped by problems of authenticity, victimhood, and stereotyping, this strategy enables mutability (as in the role of the trickster), allowing radical possibilities for self-identity and processes of becoming that seem almost Deleuzian. Stanlake argues that the three plays expressing survivance (by Geiogamah, Glancy, and Clements) “theatrically demonstrate the deconstruction of simulations and categorical limitations, while they also present strategies for developing a critical positioning of self that works against the constant threat of new simulacra” (208).

Though Stanlake provides a rich theoretical analysis of specific plays, there are some surprises in her selections and related gaps or silences. First, female rather than male playwrights predominate, and some well-known figures, such as William S. Yellow Robe, are omitted. Second, one of the featured writers is from Hawaii, and it might have been useful to discuss whether Hawaiian performance traditions are different from those of the mainland. Third, Stanlake indicates that she is concerned only with the United States and Canada and deliberately ignores Latin America, allowing, as she says, a future scholar to tackle this area. Still, in her history of Native American theatre, there might have been some mention of performances in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico, such as Chicano/a theatre and, more specifically, the work of Luiz Valdez, who explores Aztec and Mayan roots and writes plays about Yaqui myths. Fourth, although Stanlake contextualizes the book’s...