Groping for identity Cultures clash in William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.’s Better-n-Indins BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Better-n-Indins By William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. Directed by Bob Jaffe. With Nick Bear, Tom Buckland, Tom DiMaggio, Marcella, Marya Errin Jones, Brad Thoennes, Krista Weller, and William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. At Perishable Theatre through February 26.
	Examining humanity Come this fall, Trinity Repertory Company will stage William Yellow Robe’s Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, which deals with racial mixing between a Black cavalry regiment and Native Americans. The play is a co-production of Trinity Rep and Penumbra Theater Company of St. Paul, Minnesota, and will tour nationally next year. Yellow Robe was a 2001-2004 playwright-in-residence at Trinity, where his new play Pieces of Us, How the Lost Find Home had a staged reading in December. An Assiniboine Sioux from Montana, he has had numerous plays produced, from the Group Theater in Seattle to Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven. The playwright met Providence-based actor and director Bob Jaffe at an impromptu play reading at AS220 a year ago, and they have been working together ever since. He also has staged readings of Yellow Robe’s plays at Brown and Georgetown Universities. Jaffe has directed works by local writers Rose Weaver and Bill Harley and is the founding president of Rhode Island Citizens for the Arts. Yellow Robe and Jaffe spoke at Perishable before the premiere of Better-n-Indians. Q: What was the genesis of this play? Yellow Robe: Better-n-Indins came about simply because I wanted something that would cause dialogue. A lot of these scenes are based on real moments of life. In fact, the only really fictional character in the whole play is [narrator] Adam Redman. The whole purpose of the play is an examination of humanity. What to do to feed your soul? What to do to feed your heart? In the past, coming from Montana, theater was whites only. I mean, you had in the summer across the state of Montana 25 theater companies that are doing summer stock, but nothing for the native community. So when you enter their world, it’s really difficult. Working with Bob, there’s a lot of trust that normally I don’t have. I mean, God bless Trinity Rep, but as far as I’m concerned Bob has first option on a lot of my work. Then too, working with Bob there was this process of discovery — he would ask me questions about what I had forgotten existed in this material. He would say, "Why did Murray say this?" Or: "Does this happen in casinos?" "Well, yeah, Bob — I had forgotten." Jaffe: What attracts me about Bill’s work is that it speaks to a broad audience. That people like me can sit in the audience and find something to hold onto that carries me through the play, that raises emotions on the visceral level, but also raises questions on the intellectual level. And raises the need to know more. Q: Stereotyping comes in a lot in your plays, as in your life. Would you say it’s the dominant theme in your work? Yellow Robe: It’s the dominant theme of my life. I mean, I’ve walked down the streets of Providence, and being a large, dark male, automatically the cops will give me a second look. I used to take the bus at Kennedy Plaza quite a bit, and people would actually come to me and never say, "Hello, how are you?" They would say, "Hey, you’re an Indian! Wow — you’re a real Indian!" They don’t see a human being. Q: To what extent has turning experience into art, into plays, helped you assimilate what was undigested before, helped you personally? Yellow Robe: It goes back to the whole process of healing. You have to know where the wound is. And then you have to know what type of poison has gotten into the wound. Then you have to know what types of medicines are available to get rid of the poisons and to allow it to heal. A friend of mine has a bison ranch. I saw this one buffalo and said, "He’s doing more for this world than I will ever do in my life. By just being himself . . . ." He’s overturning dirt. He is allowing seeds to grow. When he rolls on his back, he’s allowing seeds to drop off — he’s planting. He’s making a contribution to the ecology of the whole world. Q: He’s not disconnected from this world, as we tend to be unless we reconnect. Jaffe: And also in this work. There are two young women in this work who are in two different scenes searching for their identity, searching for the connection to their identity. But the message that comes through is that they don’t need to prove that, they don’t need to justify that . . . they only need to identify themselves to themselves. They have to be comfortable with the fact that if they know who they are, that’s sufficient. — B.R.

Native Americans are more American than the rest of us, so it’s ironic that their identity — sometimes to themselves as well as to us — should be a problem for anyone in this country. In the comedic Better-n-Indins, playwright William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. concentrates on what remains when most of the anger boils away from that situation.

Some in this series of scenes work better than others, and some don’t work well at all. But in this world premiere at Perishable Theatre, directed by Bob Jaffe, we do get a wide-angle view, from a fresh perspective, of what it is to be misunderstood as a human being, Indian or not.

Helpfully, a turntable stage by scenic designer Jeremy Woodward cleverly allows the many scene changes to flow swiftly. Bracketing the stage are two contrasting images of cultural iconography: the totem pole, which depicts clan histories of Northwestern tribes; and the two faces of the buffalo nickel, showing a bison on one side and a Native American profile on the other. (A Google search comes up with 331,000 hits for that designation and only 29,000 for "Indian head nickel." Cultural priority check, anyone?)

The play owes its structure to George C. Wolfe’s 1986 The Colored Museum. Better-n-Indins is a tour through the First Nations of the Western Hemisphere Gallery and Museum, with some of the scenes performed before a woodland background of the sort we see in natural history museum dioramas. Introducing the animated tableaus is Adam Redman (Yellow Robe), who maintains a twinkle in his eye and wry endurance in his voice no matter what is to follow. (The exception is his snarlingly funny Angry Red Man portrayal of a bad poet, Bill Large Lips to Kill.)

One of the first things the narrator tells us is that most of the problems in this part of the world stem from colonialism. Since this isn’t an historical narration, that reminder fades into the sub-text background, except when the Bureau of Indian Affairs and their notorious paternalistic policies come up. We are reminded that before the bureau was in the Department of Interior it was in the War Department. Scary origins.

If you’re a clever colonialist, you decrease the self-identity of your subjugated people so their self-respect plummets, like starvation follows exterminated buffalos, and a tractable population is possible. (Don’t blame Yellow Robe for the mini-essay — he is showing more than telling.)

Better-n-Indins is at its best when it demonstrates the consequences of groping about for identity — culminating in a very funny closing game show, Hey — You an Indian? Before then, at Sacred Sam’s, a fast-talking TV-commercial spielmeister (Tom Buckland) is eager to sell us everything from American Spirit "natural" tobacco products to trinkets with serpent and pyramid symbols. At a $500 spirituality workshop, a womanizing young lecturer (Nick Bear) has nothing to say, so he has participants practice their drumming for the rest of the two hours. In another scene, Marya Errin Jones is hilarious as a wild-haired, tranced-out shaman-ette. A similarly funny and more pathetic wannabe is a caped Brad Thoennes as Maury Roth, who mixes up shamanism and stage magic (sacred hoops as Chinese linking rings) with wide-eyed, one-world good intentions.

There are several two-person encounters. Uncle Del (Buckland) sounds like a capo regime out of The Sopranos as he explains to a nervous Benny (Tom DiMaggio) that the reservation casino gambling powers whacked Bobby "Big Slots" because, sporting a headdress that looked like a feather duster, he was pretending to be an elder. The most skillfully written scene is a well-performed encounter between two women in the woods. They are at a powwow traditional dance, and Mina Rose (Krista Weller) is trying to comfort Janelle Tibbs (Marcella), a Goth from LA, visiting the relatives of her parents. Janelle wants to join the dance, but her homemade black garb is hardly traditional dance regalia and has drawn jeers. The scene accomplishes what the play as a whole is trying for: to bottle the courage — the lightning? — that it takes to be oneself.

In a similar mood, toward the end of the play, Yellow Robe/Redman offhandedly tells of his grandfather being chased, caught, and shackled by someone from the bureau, then shipped far off to school, not allowed to return while he was a minor. We know that had to be hard to relate, and the incident echoes back through what we have seen.

When these vignettes weren’t working for me, someone in them was lacking dimension, usually a Bad Guy. When a cardboard character turns edgewise, he disappears from view, after all, and fades from interest. The uneven acting here, sometimes from the same actor, tends to depend on how fully drawn the character is. Sometimes a character in Better-n-Indins wants to pipe up but is shut up. For example, when two Bureau of Indian Affairs officials are trying to come up with a formal apology for past offenses, one of them wants to mention genocide. But he immediately folds, and we never glimpse even the guilt, never mind the thoughts, that prompted his suggestion.