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Gary Cooper or the Landscape In the Red Nation, everybody, and here I mean everybody, knows Sheila Tousey. This is because she’s appeared in what seems like every Indian movie in the past fifteen years. She was Maggie Eagle Bear in Thunderheart, a Ghost in Silent Tongue, Louise Heavyman in Medicine River, and Mollie in Grand Avenue. These are modest films but for North American Indians, they are classics. For us Sheila Tousey is a big-time movie star. Outside the Red Nation, she’s probably best known for her work on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. She plays a judge named Danielle Larsen. One of her costars is running for president. Sheila Tousey also has a parallel, less well known career in theater, as an actress, writer and director. So it was not surprising that when the New York Public Theater looked for someone to develop an Indian project, she was the person they selected. A grant from the Ford Foundation made it possible for Tousey to create and workshop a play with professional actors at the Public. It was surprising, however, when she announced that the project would be a play based on the short fiction of Sam Shepard. Two things are obviously true about Shepard: he is arguably America’s greatest living playwright, and he is not American Indian. The Ford Foundation felt it was important to record the process and therefore included funds in the grant to hire a writer (me) to document the workshop. It took place in May, 2006 at the Public’s storied Anspacher Theater, a stage that has seen everything and everyone. Usually I was the only person other than the actors and crew around, privileged to watch as words on paper came to life. Sheila brought in Maria Vail, a colleague and alumni from NYU’s Graduate Acting Program (Sheila’s alma mater), as director and co-creator. With the exception of Josh Ritter, the actors were all alumni of the same program and were experienced in familiar ways of working Maria, now a professor at Ramapo College, was particulary experienced in techniques developed by Joe Chaikin and Paul Walker, and it was these techniques that formed the basis for the creatiove process. They were a fearless bunch, and what premiered on Sunday evening before a select audience of theater insiders was not very much like what I saw on Thursday afternoon. Almost every scene had changed, some were cut, others added, and even the name had changed from Bullet Dreams to Hunted. I imagined it would probably be amazing, but I also believed those eight hour days from late afternoon to nearly midnight would include big chunks of tedium. But I was never bored. Too much was happening, and none of it ever happened the same way twice. Through it all I kept asking myself the question that I would eventually ask Sheila Tousey herself: How exactly is this an Indian play? The thing is, it’s not like I didn’t know the Indian theater project wouldn’t, on the surface at least, appear to be very Indian. In fact, it was this contradiction that drew me to the story. But first I asked her other questions. Like, why Sam Shepard? “His sense of humor. It’s gallows humor. Black, sometimes warped and very rez like; laughing at the pain of people under extreme circumstances or finding the ludicrousness of the very mundane. He also manages to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, and it’s often exquisite.” She told me what she learned from the rehearsals: “I learned I loved working collaboratively with actors. My actors were smart and were a continuous inspiration. They would be divided up into groups, given an ‘assignment’ and always came back with something creative. Sometimes the ideas couldn’t be used, but many times the improvisation they were working on became the basis for something else. It was a deeply rewarding experience, with no egos involved. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. It seems to me we’re living in a time when, even among my peers, artistic idealism is laughed at. It’s cheesy to some, I guess. But if you’re an artist why wouldn’t you want to do the best work possible? Even if it’s not seen by a zillion people.” If she wasn’t a star of stage and screen, what would Sheila Tousey be doing? “I’d like to be in a band playing the guitar or I’d like to be a doctor.” Months later she’s in Portland, Oregon, in a playing a Russian grandmother in Uncle Vanya. William Hurt is Astrov. I ask about her dream projects, and she says, “Mother Courage, with me playing Mother Courage, music by T Bone Burnett, and directed by Joe Chaiken or Paul Walker. I doubt that will happen since Joe and Paul are dead, and I can’t sing worth a lick.” She considers the question for another moment, and dreams of something else: “A full production of Hunted at the Public and Sam playing the Hawk.” Then she says she’d love to do a play about Jack Abramoff. He being the uber lobbyist who ripped off more than $82 million from Indian tribes in the first great political scandal of the 21st century. Jack Abramoff is in prison now, and nobody in Washington or in Indian country is very interested in remembering his accomplishments. They've moved on. Among other things, it is the job of artists to keep us from moving on, to remember things others would have us forget. Tony Kushner immortalized Roy Cohn (Joe McCarthy’s thuggish lawyer) in Angels in America, and like Cohn, Jack Abramoff is an oversized prince of darkness whose humanity and contradictions make him unforgettable. Finally I ask her what makes Hunted an Indian play? She pauses a second, maybe two, and says, “It's Indian because I'm doing it.” It’s a brilliant answer, delivered with a drop-dead coolness, one that raises only more questions. Today we have all kinds of Indian theater. For example, during the past year in Washington at the National Museum of the American Indian, audiences saw Macbeth performed in Tlingit by a Native cast, and Berlin Blues, by the acclaimed Indian playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, which takes on globalization and tourism. Hunted isn’t like any of those plays. If Hunted is an Indian play, then it exists as a category unto itself and in this way becomes a challenge to rethink our current definitions. In the lives of Shepard’s characters, Indians are peripheral yet perhaps somehow central, as if suggesting that any true reading of American emotional landscapes must have Indian experience at its core. By refusing to take any of the obvious strategies in turning Shepard’s prose into Indian theater, the New York Public Theater experiment breaks new ground, raises new questions, and expands our idea of what American theater and American Indian theater might become. Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) is associate curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. He is the coauthor of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New Press, 1996), and has written numerous essays that meditate on art, politics, and honest confusion.
As a result of this experiment, Sheila is now serving as consultant to the public theatre in creating and curating its first Native American Theatre Festival in December 2007. The program will present 4-5 readings of new plays by Native playwrights in addition to presenting a finished work by Native artists. Sheila will work closely with the Public Theatre artistic leadership to select participating artists. In addition, during the course of the festival, the public will convene leading Native artists, critics and thinkers to address important issues facing the field and conduct post-show discussions open to the general public.
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