‘Manahatta’ and ‘Life & Times of Michael K’

At the back of the set for Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta is a wide mirrored wall. Look at yourselves, it says sternly as we mill about, finding our seats. It’s not the subtlest metaphor, nor the newest (Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play did the same thing five years ago). But later in the show, Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lights shift so we can see through the mirror to a world of old-growth trees and sun-speckled forest paths. We don’t get to see it very often, or for very long, but we know it’s there.

It’s an elegant surprise, and it’s a shame Manahatta as a whole never feels as graceful as this gesture. There’s a stodgy quality to the play, a mantle of self-seriousness it refuses to shed. Underneath this bulky garment, its characters gasp for air. They don’t live so much as fill out a lesson plan, doing and saying what Nagle needs them to do and say in order to make her argument. This clocks: Nagle is also a lawyer — one of the leading national advocates for tribal sovereignty — and she has previously pushed back against the critique of didacticism in her plays. Speaking to The New Yorker in 2021, she objected to a review of her play Sovereignty in the Washington Post. “My plays are educational because we’ve been erased,” she said. “By sharing our stories, we’re educating a non-Native audience. A lot of white male critics think they’re supposed to go to the theatre and not learn anything but be entertained. And as soon as they start learning something, then it’s educational — it’s not art.”

At the risk of raising further objections, I highly doubt that any critic believes edification, entertainment, and art sit in discrete circles. The problem is that edification isn’t in and of itself dramatic or even necessarily nuanced. Despite what myriad contemporary plays would have us believe, theater — at least theater based in narrative, conflict, and character — is a poor conveyor of corrective righteousness. Efforts to smash the two together have a terrible tendency to render the former dull when it should be revelatory and the latter tedious when it should be galvanizing. So it is with Manahatta. The play aspires to create a dynamic palimpsest (the forest behind the mirror) but all too often feels forced and flat, failing to populate its potentially resonant container with vibrant, struggling, complicated people.

The people who do inhabit Manahatta are played by seven actors performing in two overlapping stories, one set 400 years ago and one in the near past. (Sometimes minimal costume adjustments signal the switch; sometimes a shift in language, verbal and physical, is all it takes.) Nagle’s title is the Lenape name for the island on which the Public Theater now stands, where we’re all sitting, and where, just downtown, the world’s biggest temple to unlimited gain holds its high-stakes services 24/7/365. It’s here, in the Financial District in 2002, that we meet Jane Snake (Elizabeth Frances): math whiz, MIT valedictorian, Stanford M.B.A., and, in her own words, “the first Native, ever, that I know of … that anyone knows of, to work on Wall Street.” Jane’s family is back in Anadarko, Oklahoma, the present-day seat of the Lenape (or the Delaware Nation) after centuries of repeated forced displacement. As she’s winning her flashy investment-banker job at Lehman Brothers, her father is in the hospital in Anadarko, dying from complications of open-heart surgery. Jane’s dizzying, ill-fated rise (we know the 2008 crash is coming) and her increasing alienation from her family and her communal values form the first of Manahatta’s superimposed narratives. The other is Nagle’s telling of how, in 1626, the Dutch West India Company treacherously “bought” all of Manahatta from the Lenape — a brutal act of colonizer capitalism that laid the cornerstone for what Manhattan would become. As the hulking, heartless company director, Peter Minuit (Jeffrey King), says, “There’s no such thing as enough in the New World.”

King also plays Dick Fuld, a version of Lehman’s real-life CEO at the time of the global financial crisis. He too hulks and leers, shouts abuse and glorifies greed. “There’s no such thing as enough on Wall Street,” he snarls at Jane before trying to fire her for “not closing enough deals.” If there’s a dispiriting predictability to Manahatta, it’s partly because Nagle is too fond of the neatness of her setup. Her method of showing us that what’s past is prologue is to lock her characters into an echo chamber: Frances doubles as Le-le-wa’-you, a driven Lenape woman who becomes so caught up in trading with the Dutch that she’s blindsided when the hammer falls. Joe Tapper plays both Joe, Jane’s hardball-talking but sympathetic supervisor at Lehman, and Jakob, a would-be-good-guy Dutch fur trader who befriends Le-le-wa’-you and resists (but is ultimately powerless against) his boss’s brutality. Enrico Nassi is the heroic Se-ket-tu-may-qua (“Black Beaver”) and the affectionate, dependable Luke — one loves Le-le-wa’-you, the other loves Jane, and both are strong, sincere, moral-center types. In each time period, David Kelly plays a well-meaning but blinkered man of the cloth; Sheila Tousey does the wise, wry matriarchs; and Rainbow Dickerson gets the reproachful sisters.

Like that back wall, the play gives us a direct reflection, one that’s meant to feel profound but comes off as too tidy, too conclusive. Yes, on a structural level, we can see history repeating itself; we see the crimes of the past continuing to shape the present. But what of these human beings? What are their nooks and crannies and crevices, their contradictions and eccentricities and messy desires? Who are they when they’re not conveying themes? Nagle’s overt rhymes push her characters toward archetype, leaving little room for vitality or ambiguity.

At the same time, it doesn’t help that much of Manahatta’s dialogue is stiff and hackneyed. People consistently say pretty much what we expect them to. “Shut the fuck up and bring me some Starbucks,” bellows Dick. “That’s the problem with your generation,” says Jane’s mother, Bobbie (Tousey). “Ya got no idea where you came from.” Debra (Dickerson), Jane’s sister, is particularly weighed down with boilerplate resentment: “I guess they don’t teach you to use common sense in grad school,” “You have no idea what I’ve had to give up,” and “You left, Jane. A long time ago. And no one, not even Daddy, could convince you to come back.” Jane’s first interview with Joe sounds like every hard-ass boss talking down to the ardent, aspiring applicant in a Lifetime movie (director Laurie Woolery pushes the tempo hard, maybe on the theory that speed compensates for textual staleness), and of course, all it takes to flip Joe from withering cynicism to a “Welcome aboard, kid” handshake is a short, resolute speech from Jane that culminates in “I went to Stanford because I knocked down every obstacle they placed in my way.”

Overfamiliar writing like this, however earnest, doesn’t introduce us to fascinating people; it confirms narrative tropes. Even the unapologetically ambitious Jane, who offers the play’s most potential for flawed complexity, remains frustratingly thin. We know very little about her apart from the fact that she’s great at math, she can underwrite bonds with the big boys, and she likes kale. (This is a sign that she’s becoming scarily like a white lady.)

Manahatta positions Jane Snake as a tragic hero, someone whose vast intelligence and drive are both gifts and her moral and spiritual downfall — a Native woman who forgets her ancestral principles, assimilating not wisely but too well. But when the shit hits the fan in both timelines, as the Dutch launch their genocidal attacks on the Lenape and as the housing market goes to hell, tragedy’s swift jab to the heart is markedly absent. We know what we’re witnessing is devastating, but what we feel is abstraction, as if we’re looking at the chalk outline of a body without the body in it. Though Jane gets blood on her hands and on her pristine white trousers during Manahatta’s climactic sequence, she gets to wash up and change pants before the next scene, a literal choice that eschews the possibility of richer theatrical layering. The forest recedes behind the mirror. The outline remains empty. The blood doesn’t stick.

If theater often curdles when mixed with explicit, solemn-faced activism, that’s not to say it isn’t, in its very essence as a collaborative, civic endeavor, always political. There is an unmistakable ethical stand being taken in Life & Times of Michael K, an adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize–winning novel created by director Lara Foot with South Africa’s virtuosic Handspring Puppet Company (famous for War Horse — or, if you’re me, for the goose in War Horse). And indeed, if Foot had set out to dramatize Coetzee’s story with human bodies only — or by converting his sparing, lucid authorial voice entirely into dialogue — she might have ended up with a heavier, more sentimental and moralizing, production on her hands. But Michael K is an exemplar of media complementing message. Handspring’s stunning puppets, with their calm carved wooden faces and their delicate, penetrable rib cages of curving cane, are as much creatures of air as of earth. They come to life when the ensemble, inhaling together, breathes it into them, and like so many gorgeous balloons, they keep a play that’s plenty weighty in theme and content beautifully aloft.

Written in 1983 and set in a South Africa ravaged by both apartheid and a (fictional) civil war, Michael K tells the story of a quiet gardener, a man considered “simple” by the world, who seeks a kind of platonic independence — from society, from race and caste, from the limitations of his physical body, from everything but his connection with the earth. When his sick mother asks to be taken home to the farm where she was born (a utopian green mirage doomed to dissolve even as it’s reached), he begins a long, misfortune-wracked journey. We watch his body strain, stumble, get stripped naked, and, in a devastating piece of puppetry, repeatedly crumple in grief. And in Yoav Dagan and Kirsti Cumming’s projections, we see film of his wooden face, unchanging in looming close-up, or his little form, moving slowly and intently through the real hills of the Karoo. We see him both in detail and as detail — as a suffering individual, as a built object, and as a tiny piece of the hard, vast landscape. The bio given in the show’s playbill for Coetzee, a Nobel Prize winner, says, “J.M. Coetzee is an environmentalist.” Michael, who is born with a harelip and, from infancy, experiences caution and repulsion from all who encounter him, seeks nothing but the ability to live alone and unfettered as “a tender of the soil” — but over and over again he is detained, enclosed, imprisoned.

From Life & Times of Michael K, at St. Ann’s Warehouse.
Photo: Richard Termine

“How can a puppet — an object so obviously controlled by others — become a symbol of independence?” asks Basil Jones, Michael K’s co–puppetry director, in a note in the show’s program. (Adrian Kohler, who designed the exquisite puppets, is the other puppetry director; together, he and Jones helped to found Handspring in 1981.) Perhaps it has something to do with the kind of control that consummate puppeteers practice: It isn’t authoritarian or restrictive — it’s a kind of channeling, a total abandonment of solipsism, a conversion of one’s own body into a conduit for the life and breath and personality of another soul. The faces of the three puppeteers animating Michael — Markus Schabbing, Craig Leo, and the wonderfully heart-open Carlo Daniels, who also voices the character — are rapt. Each is passionately, meticulously fixed on the twitch of a hand, the expansion and compression of a torso, the turn of a head. Michael is the result of their deep craftsmanship and their free self-sublimation. He is the alchemy of their attention (“the rarest and purest form of generosity,” said Simone Weil), and as such, Michael possesses his own indelible integrity.

He is also, at times — and this is a delightful innovation of the production — their friend. He is enough his own being to have a relationship with the trio whose hands are constantly affixed to his limbs, back, and head. When Michael needs to eat, he turns to Schabbing, Leo, and Daniels, his unmoving face seeming to say, “Could you help me with this?” or, perhaps, “Since I can’t, you’re welcome to it” — and the three actors happily munch for him. At one point, the sleeping puppet is awakened by a meddlesome goat (Handspring’s animals are always astonishing) but not before the puppeteers are startled out of slumber one by one — the last one up finally waking Michael.

It’s a lovely lazzo, and more broadly, it adds to the humanity of the production. Though Michael K seeks solitude, we understand through his connection with his puppeteers that he’s no misanthrope, and neither Coetzee nor Foot is advocating for rugged individualism. Rather, they’re interested in the kind of freedom and wholeness of spirit that is trampled by the violence of bigotry, poverty, and war. How can we create communities, find solidarity, move toward peace and healing, they ask, when our own souls are so stunted, so brutalized, so cut off from our first and most generous mother, the earth?

Manahatta is at the Public Theater through December 23.
Life & Times of Michael K is at St. Ann’s Warehouse through December 23.