Performing Justice in Recent Native American Women’s Theater: Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty and Manahatta

Abstract

Lawyer-dramatist Mary Kathryn Nagle’s plays and engagement are significant in the twenty-first century movement to transform received modes of perceiving and staging Native America, particularly through Indigenous women’s theater emphasizing the continuing capitalistic “rape culture” of colonization and the resurgence of Indigenous approaches. This article analyzes Nagle’s plays Sovereignty and Manahatta, with their experimental past/present dialectic, focus on strong women, and unblinking treatment of painful intratribal clashes arising from the imposition of Western-based hegemonic postulates. Chronological and geo-cultural telescoping, crossfading between scenes, character twinning, dialogic immediacy, parallel or cross-language, and enactment of judicial documents or treaties are among the dramatic techniques Nagle employs. This article examines theories of active, performative sovereignty from the individual body to the political that support linkage among the “restored acts” of performance theory, performing (in)justice on stage, and the participatory audience’s virtual experience of collusion and reparation.