<i>Evening at the Warbonnet and Other Plays</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Evening at the Warbonnet and Other Plays Jane Haladay (bio) Bruce King. Evening at the Warbonnet and Other Plays. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies, 2006. 323 pp. With its roots in indigenous traditions of oratory, ceremony, and communal genesis and performance, American Indian theater is arguably the most holistic form of Native American literature. As noted by playwright Bruce King, author of this collection, theater’s “structured illusions transcend time, languages, and cultures” to bring immediacy and originality to every new performance of a staged production, because “theatre is a living art.”1 King is a member of the Turtle Clan of Hodenausaunee-Oneida Nation and has been a vital member of the Native theater scene since publishing his first play, To Catch a Never Dream, in 1969 at the tender age of seventeen.2 Evening at the Warbonnet and Other Plays is King’s first published collection. The six-part dedication of the book (to his wife, to his kids, to his mother and siblings, “to all the Vietnam War veterans[,] / to the Hodenausaunee and / to the American Indian Studies Center”) provides a fitting outline of the content and concerns of the five plays gathered within this volume. The plays grapple with subverting stereotypes and representing the complexities of Native communities’ contemporary concerns: the continuance of ancestral beliefs, cultural practices, and spiritual expressions; addressing the backstabbing and jockeying for political power that arises between community members; and facing shame over acts of betrayal, deception, and violence to return to living in a good way. Written between 1979 and 2003, King’s five plays (Whispers [End Page 110] from the Other Side, Dustoff, Threads: Ethel Nickle’s Little Acre, Wolf in Camp, and Evening at the Warbonnet) are prefaced with brief “Production History” notes that will be helpful to students and scholars of American Indian theatrical history. The collection demonstrates King’s artistic development across more than two decades and takes us for “a ride into an American Indian twilight zone,” as Hanay Geiogamah notes in the collection’s introduction, where we meet a range of characters including corrupt tribal officials, shattered Vietnam vets, and old Coyote himself/herself, who—because of an aborted scam on Creator—has been working cleanup crew in an Indian bar called The Warbonnet for the past three hundred years. As this scenario makes clear, King frequently weaves threads of humor and playfulness even into some of the plays’ most serious moments. Perhaps the most complex play in this volume is Wolf in Camp, which addresses the ongoing and controversial theme of what and who is “authentically Indian” within the community of American Indian theater itself. The play focuses on a Native theater company in rehearsal and opens with a romantic image of idealized “Indian experience”: actors in beautiful regalia appear dreamlike onstage toting such signifiers of Nativeness as “an otter-skinned war lance” adorned with feathers while burning “a sweetgrass hoop.” This idyllic scenario is punctured, however, when one actor, Fish, flubs his lines and begins to improvise; the director cuts the scene, and readers/audience members are made aware that we are witnessing the playwright’s representation of Native actors representing Native Americans. Cast members begin bickering about the value of “playing Indian” in this manner for paying audiences, and King further complicates the rehearsal by gradually revealing that Fish (a late replacement for a hospitalized cast member) is actually an elder whose awareness and eventual exposure of the “wolf in camp” of the play’s title comes from his genuine knowledge of traditional stories and culture, much of which is neither known nor remembered by the younger actors. Fish and Otiyahneh (“Wolf” in Oneida language), who poses as a potential backer of the ensemble, square off over the control of character and voice through written [End Page 111] versus performed story texts. King expresses his opinion on the matter through multiple characters including Delores, who asserts that drama is “not in the book dear, it exists in the living.” Still, by the end of Wolf in Camp an exhausted Fish exclaims of the storytelling project: “Boy, you really got to be careful how you write, inet?” King consistently teases...