Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta explores an unusual and intriguing concept — the juxtaposition of the 17th-century Dutch cheating the Lenape people out of Manhattan Island and the fraudulence that led to the 2008 financial crisis.
Through creative writing and staging, Nagle draws a stark, straight line between these seemingly unlikely centuries-apart strategies of economic avarice.
Manahatta, Aurora Theatre, through March 10
The same talented actors play the greedy 17th-century Dutch East India Company bigwigs who “purchased” Manhattan and the power-hungry 21st-century investment bankers about to go under. Similarly, another group acts the roles of Lenape people, the original residents of Manahatta (as they called it), and a Lenape family in modern-day Oklahoma who pay the price for the all-too-easy real estate loans in the early 2000s.
As Manahatta begins, we meet Jane (Livia Gomes Dimarchi), a Lenape MIT and Stanford graduate, interviewing for an entry-level Wall Street position while her father is dying on an operating table in Oklahoma.
We then see Jane at home for her father’s funeral, with her sister Debra (Oogie Push) and their mother Bobbie (the excellent Linda Amayo-Hassan). Mother Bobbie is overcome with medical bills. The local banker, a Christian church leader (Victor Talmadge), talks Bobbie into an adjustable-rate real estate loan she doesn’t understand. Luke (Ixtlán), who works for the bank but also straddles the Native American world, is ambivalent about the loan and sympathetic toward Jane’s family.
Meanwhile, Jane quickly moves up to the C-suite in her Lehmann Brothers-ish investment bank, and we see her in jargon-ridden phone conversations without apparent awareness of the adverse consequences of her success or her family’s precarious financial situation.
The high spot of Manahatta is the scene where Dutch Peter Minuit (Anthony Fusco) “buys” Manhattan from the Lenape natives. It’s certainly not the apocryphal story I was taught in my New York City public school. The disconnect between the parties regarding their understandings and misunderstandings of the concept of land ownership is evident and distressing.
Inevitably, there is a downfall for the “vulture” capitalists in both centuries, whether caused by tulip bulbs or bundled mortgages. The two business groups show neither understanding nor concern for the people they are damaging. And a divide is shown to still exist between the Lenape’s sense of land ownership and that of the white world.
I’m happy I saw Manahatta, with its unusual and significant subject matter, some excellent performances and Shannon R. Davis’s able direction. Still, I hoped for more depth of emotion and theatrical bite — more drama and less didactic moralizing. And some of the characterizations of the capitalists, mainly the Lehmann Brothers-ish Dick, seemed unnecessarily one-dimensional.
Author Mary Kathryn Nagle grew up in Oklahoma as an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, bringing authenticity to Manahatta. As a lawyer in New York, Nagle first worked for a firm that dealt with some of the 2008 financial crisis fallout. Being geographically close to lower Manhattan’s Native American origins (Beaver Street, Pearl Street, Wall Street) heightened her awareness and certainly informed this play. Nagle first developed it at the Public Theater New York Emerging Writers Group (2013- 2014). Manahatta enjoyed a successful run there last year.
Live performances of Manahatta at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre run through March 10. The play is one hour and 45 minutes without an intermission. Wednesday evenings and Sunday matinees are designated mask-required performances. For all other performances, masks will be encouraged but not required. Tickets are $20-65, plus some discounts. Streaming and post-show discussions are available on specific nights. For information and tickets, visit the theater’s website or call 510-843-4822.
