Saying It Like Indians: The Wooster Group’s Cry Trojans!, Sa(l)vage Ethnography, and the Politics of “Playing Injun”

Abstract

In The Wooster Group's Cry Trojans!, the Trojan characters are depicted as Red Indians. The theatre company's play with white, American appropriations of Native American culture is the latest in a long line of controversial engagements with race in the company's history, dating back to Route 1 & 9 and The Emperor Jones. It also forms part of their more recent engagement with classical theatre, in particular Shakespeare, as Cry Trojans! has it origins in a much-reviled collaboration between the Wooster Group and The Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012. By their own admission, the Group chose to "Play Indian" to be "as American as possible," and also because (to quote Kate Valk, who played Cressida), they felt they "'... should say it like Indians,’ because I was thinking of English as a second language." The choice then comments on the Group's own play with authenticity, another constant enagement throughout its thrity-plus years history. By mimicking and appropriating Native American and First Nations cultural production (Smoke Signals and Atanarjuat in particular), the Group performs its own uneasy engagement with authenticity. However, in contrast to their staging of The Emperor Jones, which employed blackface to unpack Eugene O'Neill's "idea of a Negro," Cry Trojans! reduces native culture and history to a white, elite history of appropriation and genocide without positing alternative histories of resistance and/or re-appropriation. It does so most expicitly in the final scene, where a blanket, a property associated with Euro-American germ warfare and Native American genocide, is applied first to Troilus and then to Pandarus, the bequeather of poxy diseases, to suggest the imminent demise of the Trojan-Injuns. The Wooster Group seems to be aware of part of their appropriative formulations, and put on display both the work (their adoption of an Indian manner) and the work of art (the acts of appropriation that lead to their adoption of Indian manner): but for a Company so invested in the ironies of post-modernity, they do not in this production seem so aware of the depth of their own unironic complicities in the erasure of indigenous cultures and cultural forms. The production's employment of Native American/First Nations cultural production undermines their own claims of native cultural loss.