Where We Belong by Madeline Sayet

I write this review from the ancestral and unceded homelands of the Tongva people, a place now known as Los Angeles, California. A pro for-ma acknowledgment of that sort has become common before academic and theatre events in North America, and often the show or the talk must go on, with little more to be said about past or present mechanisms of dispossession and cultural genocide. Rarely is there more than a moment of pause to consider legacies of settler colonialism and erasure, for audiences to question their English inheritance. As a scholar living in California, it is worth reflecting why I write about Shakespeare with his language rather than that of the Tongva or the Catawba who lived on the piece of earth where I was born, and how traditions of canonical drama can serve to excise the stories and people who do not fit into a readymade cultural script. Where We Belong, by Mohegan playwright, director, actor, and scholar Madeline Sayet, not only demands a critical interrogation of Shakespeare, Indigeneity, the violence of borders, and the costs of exclusion, but asks how theatre might become a site of historical recuperation and collective care.

Madeline Sayet in Where We Belong. (Photo: Jon Burklund/Zanni Productions.)

In an extended autobiographic monologue that shifts back and forth in time and varies widely in tone, Sayet narrates the story of how she became a bird. True to her Mohegan name of Acokayis, or Blackbird, the playwright left the Mohegans, or Wolf People, taking flight across the world to direct plays, present lectures, and pursue a doctorate in England. Where We Belong navigates among her experience of studying Shakespeare in a nation by turns oblivious to or proud of its imperial legacy, vignettes of Mohegans who traveled from their land (now called Connecticut) to England before her, and a personal journey of vocation. That path finally leads to stories that cannot be found in the plays of Shakespeare, who could never know how his rich and expansive language would be weaponized as a tool of assimilation and emblem of white European supremacy in the centuries following his death. Refusing to be "the Native American in front of the word Shakespeare," Sayet shapes Where We Belong with the imperative to decenter the early modern English playwright who is so canonized as to be erroneously deemed universal. Toward the end of her dramatic monologue, she says "I need to work with living people again" and decides to return to North America.

Madeline Sayet in Where We Belong. (Photo: Jon Burklund/Zanni Productions.)

First performed before a live audience at Shakespeare's Globe in London in 2018, the current iteration of Where We Belong is stylishly filmed by Mei Ann Teo, whose camera mirrors Sayet's emotional state as it follows her various journeys. The visual movement is mostly fluid and unobtrusive, moving from close-ups to wide shots as Sayet narrates her story on a set that consists only of a trail of soil snaking its way across a bare stage and blue LED lights that descend to mark both literal and metaphorical borders. Moments of particular intensity are heightened by quick cuts, as the lights suddenly shift into a staccato strobe. In a scene both structurally and thematically central to the play, Sayet recounts the rush of inspiration and optimism she felt when directing a production of The Tempest that restored Caliban's language by giving him a Mohegan voice. The mood shifts as she narrates the disheartening realization that scholars and audiences would respond by pushing her to be a Native representative of Shakespeare's greatness, reducing the complex variation of Indigenous cultures to serve a narrow, preconceived bardolatry. As a voice from a loudspeaker asks her repeatedly about Caliban, Sayet crouches close to the ground and rapidly recites the lines of his freedom song: "Ban-Ban-Caliban." Minutes later, a more composed Sayet straightforwardly tells us, "We are so much more than the fucking Tempest. Than what Shakespeare could imagine us to be. He never met us. Never heard our stories. Our language."

The reclamation of language and history as medicine propels the final scenes of the show. Stretching her story across temporal and geographical borders as she walks along the path of earth onstage, Sayet continually returns to the opposition of Mohegan and colonial worldviews. The scene "Indians in Boxes" places her stunned and stilled within the sharp angles and harsh lighting of squares composed of LED bulbs. Invited to the British Museum for her opinion of the Native American exhibition, Sayet finds herself in a labyrinth of "sacred relations," where not just objects, but human remains are treated as mere things to be discarded or shoddily presented as the spoils of empire. As she shifts between the upper-crust English accent of the academic who is giving her the tour and her own voice, which cracks with anger, shock, and sorrow, Sayet presents the British Museum as a monument to cultural erasure and an institution that refuses to acknowledge the life in the artifacts and the people behind them. Sayet reminds us of those people and the countless languages lost, as English, Shakespeare's tongue, came to occupy North America.

Standing in direct contrast to the British Museum is the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum in Uncasville, Connecticut, established by Sayet's aunt, Medicine Woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon. More of a lodge than solely a repository of Mohegan culture, the museum is a space to protect stories and lives; Sayet recalls that "it was warm and dusty and always smelled like good medicine."

Where We Belong illustrates that the playhouse also is a gathering space, an assembly of the living, in which the reclamation and transformation of stories and histories and acknowledgment in service of healing might take place. Structured around the harm done by borders, the play concludes by moving from past and present colonial violence into a future of response and responsibility, where theatre itself, as a living site of belonging and social repair might stage acts of cultural recovery. Sayet sings the final lines of the play in Mohegan: "wigomun wigwomun wami skeetumpak, oh hai, oh hai heyuh heyuh weyuh hey." Those words voice a song of welcome.