Assimilation (review)

Jack Dalton's Assimilation, which premiered at Cyrano's Theatre Company in Anchorage in November 2010, presents an imagined future in which Western culture has collapsed amid plagues, eco-catastrophe, and failed states. The play focuses on three white male students at an Alaska boarding school where, reversing racial history, they are forcibly assimilated into Native cultures that are rising to replace the nation-states. Here, the white students experience an inverted chauvinism: as "barbarian savages," they are compelled to learn the language and manners of the "Real Human Beings," to sew skins, and to surrender Christian teachings for Native spirituality, capitalist ambition for sustainable communitarian values, and urban for village life. In performance, this mirror-reversal of white and Native, past and future was immediately engaging. But Assimilation also offered unexpected aesthetic originality and, ultimately, a complex viewpoint that embodied the tension between traditional Western theatre and the expressive modes of Alaskan Native culture.

Dalton, a Native American storyteller of half-Yup'ik, half-German American heritage, writes with special sensitivity to the measured pace and nonconfrontational style of Native conversation. His theatrical style is characterized by frequent pausing, avoidance of eye contact, and reticence, as opposed to the usual dynamics of Western dramatic dialogue, which favors self-assertion, one-upmanship, emotional climaxes, and a dread of silence or stasis. As directed by Ed Bourgeois (a Mohawk), Assimilation's teaching scenes were simultaneously quiet, playful,

Bradford Jackson (Michael) and Debra Dommek (Teacher) in Assimilation. (Photo: Jamie Lang Photography.)

Ethan Petticrew (Elder) and Debra Dommek (Teacher) in Assimilation. (Photo: Jamie Lang Photography.)

wayward conversations and unending micro-battles between languages. Teachers and students struggled over habits of listening and collective pronouns, over written versus oral agreements, and over the rhythms of speech when contractions are forbidden and interruption abandoned. Dalton's dramatic agon was realized in halting, troubled efforts at mutual communication.

The students' bodies also became a battleground for their instructors, as the unyielding Elder (played by Ethan Petticrew, an Athabascan actor) confronted the younger and more compassionate Teacher, written for and played by Debra Dommek, an Inupiaq actress, educator, and Native dancer. The Elder began the play by barking orders at audience members as if they were white students, imposing Native behaviors by correcting their seated posture and sharply commanding, "You do not stare! When an elder speaks to you, you cast your eyes down!" Through Teacher, however, Native body disciplines, particularly those of Native performance, became modes of spiritual transformation. In a powerful scene, a tormented white boy, seated and gesturing fluidly, narrated his seal-hunting triumph through Native dancing (his dance was composed and choreographed by Dommek), in a sudden access of calm theatrical grace.

Dommek, a striking stage presence, spoke, danced, and listened with an ineffable stillness that became the irresistible center of an alternative theatrical energy. The rest of the production moved in the more conventional and tragic direction of rising tension and violence, and the performance sometimes struggled for balance and proportion between these modalities. One of the young actors exploded in Method extravagance as he bemoaned the difficulty of acquiring the Inupiat language. Elsewhere, as if imitating generations of white abusers, the Elder suspended the most resistant student by his wrists and interrogated him with flamboyant sadism, complete with villainous laugh. Both of these expressions felt excessive. The final moments, however, poignantly balanced Western and Native performance. The principal plot ended in an empty setting marked by racial murder, while across the stage, a white student, abandoned in the frozen wilderness, silently danced a Native tale in a desperate reaching out for hope and peace. On the one hand, we beheld Western tragedy; on the other, Native storytelling.

Following this final image, the stage darkened and a screen filled with projected data on the sinister history of the international boarding-school movement, a history of cultural genocide by forced indigenous assimilation achieved through appalling, systematic abuse. This history is too...