5 minute read
MUSES & MUSINGS
by SDC Journal
WITH MADELINE SAYET
Who or what inspired your pursuit of theatre?
My mother’s family were Mohegan culture bearers, teachers, medicine people, and leaders, and my father’s family were attorneys. Words had power and stories did something. Whether at ceremony or at court, words could save or destroy a life. I learned words must be used carefully. that every story we put into this world has the power to do real world harm or healing. What are the stories that have helped heal you?
I committed to a life in theatre while performing in a production of Pippin in eighth grade, inspired by the idea that we had “magic to do.” I loved escaping my own reality and treasured the opportunity to take audiences on adventures with me. No one around me understood theatre as a profession, but Mohegan Chief Ralph Sturges encouraged me, saying “it required great latitude of mind.” Only later did I realize he meant that theatre is not just a tool to escape the world but to transform it into something people do not need to escape.
Where do you get your inspiration?
Ecosystems. Stories and inspiration are everywhere. I could watch an ant for hours and there would be a saga there. Just as there is in a kindergarten classroom, or inside a single painting or line of poetry, or a handful of soil. The world and art are entwined. Making theatre means synthesizing the bigness of it all into questions with which I can grapple.
You’ve talked about the idea of “Story Medicine,” the belief that every story we put into this world has the power to do real world harm or healing. What are the stories that have helped heal you?
In 2013, I watched Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, thinking, “Don’t they know we aren’t allowed to talk about this?” Hearing Mary say, as mother of her son, “I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.” Those words broke down a societal wall for me regarding what we are allowed to talk about. That phrase “It was not worth it” still echoes in my mind.
In 2019, I directed Cathy Tagnak Rexford’s beautiful play Whale Song, about an Inupiaq girl who transforms into a bowhead whale and marries the whale leader to maintain the ancient alliance between their nations. There’s this exchange between the young leaders under unsurmountable pressures: “Let me ask you this. An impossible decision is before you. Two choices, both equally life altering. Both equally tragic and magnificent...What do you do?” “You do the best you can.” “Yes, but...” “That’s really all you can do.” These two young leaders navigating the stakes of the world, the truth, and the release of pressure in that answer: this still heals me.
Lastly, in summer 2023, I served as a dramaturg on Ellen McDougall’s production of As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe. I love this play and have worked on it many times, but in this production, Rosalind didn’t change back into female-identifying attire at the end; they got to stay the person they became in the Forest of Arden. Witnessing that felt like breathing for the first time.
You’re directing Beth Piatote’s Antíkoni later this year. What is inspiring you as you prepare to work on that piece?
For millennia, Antigone has emphasized the importance of burying the dead. Beth wrote this adaptation wondering, “Don’t they listen to their own stories?” Why keep our Native ancestors in their museums? I’m inspired by thinking about how we carry the audience with us on this perspective shift. Beth’s adaptation is a merging of both the Antigone story and traditional Nez Perce stories, so they reflect and refract and make new meanings. What does it mean to tell a Greek story in the Nez Perce tradition?
A Nez Perce story in the Greek tradition? What would Greek masks for Nez Perce stories look like? How do we immerse non-Natives in what a museum experience is to us? Working with inspiring Native actors on this fresh, poetic text, written for this moment by a Native woman, each word can carry many meanings at once.
What’s a great play, musical, or performance that you love that people don’t talk about much, or may not have heard of?
Here are just a few Native plays that I’m obsessed with: Dillon Chitto’s Pueblo Revolt and Pigeon; Vera Starbard’s Native Pride (and Prejudice), Fog Woman, and A Tlingit Christmas Carol; Ty Defoe and Tidtaya Sinutoke’s Hart Island Requiem and Clouds Are Pillows for the Moon; Tomas Endter’s Built on Bones and Hostile; Joy Harjo’s Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light; Rhiana Yazzie’s The Nut, the Hermit, the Crow and the Monk; Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Miss Lead; Lee Cataluna’s Sons of Maui; Marisa Carr’s Sturgeon Play; Tara Moses’s Arbeka; and Frank Katasse’s The Spirit of the Valley.
But also, I still spend time thinking about the David Greig adaptation of The Lorax and how all theatre should be intergenerationally accountable in that way.
Madeline Sayet is a Mohegan director who serves as Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP) and clinical associate professor at Arizona State University. She is a resident artist at Center Theatre Group, member of Long Wharf Theatre’s artistic ensemble, and recently completed the national tour of her solo play, Where We Belong.
