Tribal thinking and tribal identity factor heavily in Richard Montoya's new play “Palestine, New Mexico,” running through Jan. 24 at the Mark Taper Forum.
There's the close-knit tribe otherwise known as the U.S. military. An American Indian tribe that must deal with the loss of one of its sons, Pfc. Ray Birdsong, killed in Afghanistan under mysterious circumstances. The tribal intrigues of the Taliban forces sowing mayhem throughout Central Asia.
There's even an allusion to the lost tribes of Israel -- and to the diaspora that brought Jews from Europe to the American Southwest -- in Montoya's comedic drama, in which strands of Chicano, Jewish and Native American history are knotted together in one thick, complex braid.
So when director Lisa Peterson convened the play's cast on the first day of rehearsals several weeks ago, she gamely asked each member to say "what tribe you think you might come from."
Well, actor Russell Means, an Ogala Sioux and longtime Indian rights activist, told Peterson, that's a word that we don't use, actually.
"It's demeaning, and every time the white world talks about American Indians they use all the demeaning words they can to describe us, like we're nothing," Means said in an interview this week with Peterson, Montoya and two other Indian cast members, Geraldine Keams and Brandon Oakes.
Yet as the rehearsal process and the production unfolded, the performers agreed, the word "tribe" took on many deep and respectful shadings, of "family," "community" and the comradely bonds forged among a group of artists drawn together for a brief moment onstage. Not only the play's characters but the production team and cast became a tribe, of sorts.
"It feels like we are all here together in this screwed-up world that we're trying to make right," said Means, who had never done live theater before. "Like Lisa pointed out to us, everyone's lost in the play. And they're trying to find their way. And we're a tribe. A tribe of people."
The pitfalls of cultural misunderstanding and the risks, as well as potential rewards, of venturing outside one's comfort zone into alien terrain, form the play's thematic heart. "Palestine, New Mexico" is named for the fictional town where the earnest U.S. Army Capt. Catherine Siler (Kirsten Potter) comes looking for answers about Birdsong, who was one of her soldiers, and ends up getting pulled into a series of personal and romantic intrigues, a feud between neighboring rival reservations and a peyote-induced dream redolent of Carlos Castaneda as interpreted by Federico Fellini, with an assist from Looney Tunes.
The cast includes Montoya and his artistic brothers-in-arms Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza of Culture Clash, the L.A.-based Latino-vaudevillian-agitprop ensemble marking its 25th anniversary season.
Writing several dramatic parts for American Indian actors, and setting his play on a reservation, presented some major challenges in terms of researching his subject and depicting it with sensitivity, Montoya acknowledged. That included the use of the concept of tribe.
"I think we always meant it as 'family,' " Montoya said. "It's a loaded word, like 'Hispanic' is a loaded word. The Nixon administration came up with that term, precisely to get us away from our Indian-ness. They said, 'Remind these Latino people they're Spanish, they're not Indian.' "
Peterson, who also directed Culture Clash's "Water & Power" at the Taper in 2006, said that plays such as "Palestine, New Mexico" intrepidly go against certain "expectations in art, and especially in the theater, that people should write within their parameters."
"I think there is a movement in the theater right now, especially led by, for lack of a better word, writers of color, writers who are defined by their ethnicities, and also writers who are identified by their gender, to break out of that, to say, 'No, I can go where my imagination and my interests take me,' " she added. "But it is risky."
Perhaps especially when depicting one of the most misrepresented and cruelly stereotyped of all U.S. ethnic groups.
"One of the traps would have been, OK, we're depicting this rez and it must be positive," Montoya said. "Because we get that in the Latino, mostly movie and television world, 'We must project positive images.' And I think we do feel like, yes, there's something important about that. But when I look at how complicated a rez or a tribe can be with traditional folks versus this casino movement versus there's some abject poverty. . . . There was one rez in New Mexico where there were 16 heroin overdoses."
