How do you deal with Truly Fucked Up Shit?
How do you keep from crying?
I have found that people, largely, try to ignore it.
Music is a good way to cope, I think. Melancholy melodies or just some impassioned vocals.
Laughter is key too.
Not only the emotional release from the act itself. But humor offers powerful context. Tragedy, truly grotesque crimes of human atrocity, is like looking into the sun. It’s too much. It’s physically painful and literally damaging. So in order to really look at the sun, you have to project its image. You reflect it, in order to actually engage with it at all.
That’s humor.
Such is the way with “Between Two Knees,” a black-humored satire of Native history and American violence. The evolving work from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Yale Repertory Theatre now finds its way to Seattle Rep and the McCarter Theatre Center at Princeton. Written by “The 1491s”, the Youtube-based indigenous comedy troupe has most recently found success with their FX show “Reservation Dogs.” The show, created by troupe member Sterlin Harjo and beloved Kiwi goofball Taika Waititi, has garnered much deserved attention on a perspective long overdue in American Media– ideas and themes very familiar to me growing up in New Mexico.
“Between Two Knees”, however, is quite a bit more madcap. After a blisteringly silly introduction, we settle into the core of the show: an exploration of one family’s lineage through about a century of American history.
An infant boy found with his dying mother at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. Christened Isaiah, he is then raised in one of the many tortuous “Indian Schools” created for native assimilation. He escapes with Irma, a young woman also interned there, and they light up America as a fiery pair like a revolutionary Bonnie and Cylde. Their children go on to fight in the various American wars of the 20th century and all dramatic threads come together at the 1973 stand-off with the FBI at the very same site of Wounded Knee.
The show plays with realism, but also history. While the family centering the play’s events is fictional, the historical horrors are certainly not. Though the text will occasionally claim things like its characters were instrumental in forming the FBI’s Most Wanted List.
Any gag is utilized here. Mostly visual, always silly, with a particular taste for Looney Tunes-esque signage. A healthy amount of the absurdity mocks the white lens of native peoples (the repeated audio sting of an eagle cry in the distance is never not funny). The set itself, designed by Regina Garcia, echoes this, the caricatures of sports mascots held onto far too long by wealthy franchises long into the 21th century.
One thing is definitely for certain. White People are cringe.
Some gags are just gags. “These things don’t get any easier”, says one ensemble member prepping to talk about death, then hands someone a Rubix Cube. Not only that, but the prop has a payoff in the final scene for some reason– a sort of “Chekhov’s Rubix Cube”.
The pacing of the gags is relentless, too, all with a largely filmic sensibility, like mimicking slow-motion effects. Any opportunity for a dance break and musical number are taken. Hundreds of technical cues scoot the ensemble through countless costume changes and characters. Sure, our two young heroes are having their histories and identities erased by Catholic clergy tormenting and abusing them. But now they’re fighting a horde of nun ninjas (“nunjas” for the initiated) while the cackling priest (ensemble member Rachel Crowl) sprouts monstrous tentacles as the production design references both Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, respectively.
For a show interested in discussing and dissecting American atrocity and genocide, it’s pretty fun.
While the family itself is the dramatic throughline for the show, it’s the MC, Larry, (played by Justin Gauthier) who connects the disparate bits together. As a narrator, he propels events and provides an array of detached commentary, but also just jokey jokes.
Only MC Larry really sticks to his part alone. The entire ensemble, even major parts like our core couple, Isaiah and Irma, (played by Dererk Garza and Shyla Lefner, then later by Wotko Long and Jennifer Bobiwash) is doing double, triple, quadruple plus duty.
I found myself most strongly drawn to the fully dramatic moments simple in their presentation: an extended silence between two actors onstage was all the more compelling when the rest of the show rushed along to deliver the next gag. The lights cut out for the breathtaking vocal finale, breaking the brittle tension with raw and stunning emotion.
The conclusion of “Between Two Knees” is impactful, sudden, and powerful– both visually and narratively invoking the Ghost Dance.
It is also, thankfully, very funny.
I don’t want to spoil the ending. But the escapist fantasy of it is pretty bleak. It’s silly and absurd. Even more as our reality is not.
That’s the edge of satire. It’s a gut punch of certainty that matters to real people.
Personally, I like the reminders. I like that land acknowledgments are slowly and suddenly everywhere.
Do you think about it? Do you think about it every day? That the land under our feet was stolen, its people murdered, marched, conquered, and massacred. That so many live their lives today in innocence and ignorance. This is land we were born into.
Decolonization isn’t just a buzzword. And the suffering of today reverberates from the past and far into the future. The scope of damage, and the work needed to enact change and healing, is on the scale of Seven Generations into our future.
This pain is not so ancient. And is not forgotten.
So don’t forget to laugh, either.
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“Between Two Knees”
By The 1491s
Directed by Eric Ting
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McCarter Theatre Center’s Matthews Theater
91 University Place, Princeton, NJ
Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 pm, Sunday at 2 pm
Runs through February 12
$25 – 60 General Admission
For More Information:
609-258-2787 or visit https://tickets.mccarter.org/
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Seattle Repertory’s Bagley Wright Theatre
155 Mercer Street, Seattle, WA
Preview Performances run March 3-7
Friday – Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 pm
$20—$75 General Admission
March 8 Opening Night
Wednesday – Sunday at 7:30 pm, Saturday and Sunday at 2 pm
Wednesday, March 22, at 2 pm
ASL/Audio Description, Saturday, March 25, 2 pm
Runs through March 26
$23 – 96 General Admission
For More Information:
206-443-2222 or visit https://www.seattlerep.org/
Graham Gentz 