"What is one man that he should make much of his winters?" asks actor Ned Romero, playing the title role in the Native American stage epic "Black Elk Speaks." Not much, perhaps, unless those winters belong to the Lakota Sioux medicine man who fought in the battle of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee, toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and, with the help of poet John Niehardt in 1932, recorded the spiritual history of the American Indians.
The stirring, heart-rending book, by the same title as the play, spans 400 years and in the 1970s captured the imagination of playwright Christopher Sergel, who adapted it to the stage. Sergel died last year just before the Denver Center Theatre Company premiered his final draft of "Black Elk Speaks," which proved wildly popular, eventually winning one of the American Theatre Critics Association's New Play Awards.This year "Black Elk Speaks" returned to the Denver stage with essentially the same cast - but with some script and design changes - for an October run.
It moves to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles this January. In December, director Donovan Marley will open a new, Cantonese version of the show, employing Chinese actors at the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre.
For Marley, who is also artistic director at the Denver Center, "Black Elk Speaks" has been one of the most exciting and challenging projects that he has ever undertaken. "I was astonished," he says, "at how many people came last year to the show." He sees the Denver production as a continuation of the melding of Indian and European art forms that began when Niehardt recorded Nicholas Black Elk's oral history.
"There is no Lakota written language," explains Marley. "Black Elk made that reach to English and we're trying to take the same reach now." The stage format of that endeavor is the winter telling, a traditional, interactive Lakota gathering for the purpose of sharing the histories, myths and legends of the tribe through speaking, music, dance and role playing.
In the play, which begins on a South Dakota reservation in the '30s, Black Elk's grandson (David Medina) is critical of his grandfather's protracted prayers and fasting. "Yesterday is gone," the young man says of Indian "superstitions." "Thomas Edison, a white man, caught the Thunder Beings and stuffed them in a glass bottle." Since the battle at Wounded Knee, the apex of Indian genocide, the elderly man has been tormented and has retreated to a mountain peak to pray.
In an earlier vision, claims Black Elk, he was commissioned by the "spirit grandfathers" to bring the Indian people back together. The Indian sense of community identity or "sacred hoop" of the Lakota people has been broken, he bemoans, and it is his mission to mend it. But, now that he is approaching death himself, how will he do it?
"People without a history are like wind on the buffalo grass," he says, believing that passing on the story of his people is part of the answer. And so he proceeds with the winter telling - his people sitting in a circle - while his grandson, dressed in a white man's suit, skulks around the circle's edge, silently watching.
Like many Americans, Marley grew up unaware of the details of Native American genocide. Not far from his boyhood home in New Mexico lies the Bosque' Redondo, the barren site of a concentration camp where 12,000 Navajos and 1,000 Apaches were contained for four years about the time of Black Elk's birth. Three thousand died in three years.
Such are the horrors that "Black Elk Speaks" so compellingly presents with Native American actors who play multiple roles - both white and Indian - beginning with Christopher Columbus. Backed up by his dogmatic priest, Columbus (Adan Sanchez) discovers a golden bangle on the wrist of a Tainos squaw. "If there was any hope for us," says Black Elk, who narrates the show, "this was the moment it was lost."
The historical roll call continues with Andrew Jackson, the realist Little Crow (both played by Ken-neth Martines), the spiritualized military tactician Crazy Horse (Peter Kelly Gaudreault, who also, ironically, plays George Custer), the Cheyenne Yellow Woman (Jane Lind), Red Cloud (Andrew Roa), Queen Victoria (Maria Antoinette Rogers) and many others.
Peppered with the skirmishes that led to battles and finally the Indian Wars, the presentational-style show, featuring traditional Indian dance (choreographed by Jane Lind) and music ends at Wounded Knee in 1890 before dissolving back to the South Dakota reservation and the winter telling. The grandson has, not surprisingly, been drawn into the story to the point of participation and a renewed sense of a collective Indian past.
For the actors, representing nearly every North American Indian nation, appearing in "Black Elk Speaks" has worked its own personal wonders. Canadian actor Gaudreault, whose intensely graceful portrait of Crazy Horse is one of the show's most memorable, commented during last year's premiere of "Black Elk Speaks" that before coming to Denver he couldn't have been more distant from his Indian heritage. "I've come home in a lot of ways," he said. " I've discovered a correlation between my thought processes and this play."
"Black Elk Speaks" is "more than just a play," says DCTC's director of communications Deborah Voss. The actors, she says, "all lost ancestors in the Indian Wars. They're playing their
ownT holocaust."
As with other epics, a style that appears to be making comeback on the American stage, the Denver Center Theatre Company's production of "Black Elk Speaks" appeals to more than one race or group. During the show, a traditional hoop dance is performed by Stephan Ray Swimmer, who single-handedly manipulates as many as 42 hoops into a fantastic geometric complex. It is this unified design of an otherwise loose aggregate of the world's nations that "Black Elk Speaks" generously presents as a peace offering, a healing vision for our own troubled day.