GULPING FOR BREATH BETWEEN TWO-HUNDRED LAUGHS
What a unique, congenial, brilliantly imaginative show! You will laugh for a very long time and, if you are a European descendant, you will feel guilty but in the right way. Don’t fall for insecure people who think of history and facts as “woke” matters. Between Two Knees, at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, is a play you cannot miss, and I hope it will land on Broadway very soon, but let’s start from the beginning.
James Ryen and Shaun Taylor-Corbett
Justin Gauthier plays Larry, a master of ceremonies who is our guide through Hell on Earth. He reminds us of how very little we know about what happened after the European colonization, and to make it easy he starts with a game show “Wheel of Massacres” involving atrocities most of us have never heard about. Horseshoe Bend, Tippecanoe, Sand Creek, to name a few, until we end up at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the most famous.
Justin Gauthier, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Wotko Long and Sheila Tousey
It’s 1890, and three hundred Lakota people were just shot, tortured, and killed by soldiers of the invading United States Army. At the end of the bloody massacre, we find Ina (Sheila Tousey) who is dying on a rock with her infant son, Wolf, in her arms. Don’t worry if you are squeamish: arms are removed, but blood is an endless stream of red ribbon, and soldiers are anything but menacing. The baby is stolen by a priest, and raised by nuns who want to brainwash him. In the orphanage, Wolf becomes Isaiah (Derek Garza) and meets Irma (Shyla Lefner); they fall in love and escape engaging in a Battle Royale against the wicked nuns, just like video game heroes.
The Company
Irma and Isaiah build a family, have a beautiful baby who grows up feeling his true roots even if the colonizers force all Natives to adopt European lifestyles. During World War II, William (Shaun Taylor-Corbet) joins the army to go help the “good white people” in Europe who were being massacred and displaced by the “bad white people” like his ancestors. His parents are now older, Irma is played by Tousey, Isaiah by Wotko Long, and they try to stop William but it’s too late; they raised him to be a proud warrior, and he has a vision.
Shaun Taylor-Corbett and Wotko Long
So he goes to Germany, and the story of Irma and Isaiah’s family continues pretty much on the same wave: reality keeps making their lives impossible, no matter how much they try, and how much they are forced to give up with nothing ever in return. They end up in the Oglala Lakota County again, near Wounded Knee, where it all started. In the finale, instead of Colonel Forsyth and his troops, it’s 1973 and they have the FBI destroying their lives.
Rachel Crowl, Shyla Lefner, Derek Garza and James Ryan
You may think it is no laughing matter, but I haven’t laughed that much in months. Rachel Crowl superbly interprets the evil priest, the new-age guru who loves the plant-based psychedelic ayahuasca and Jerry Garcia, and many other crazy characters; she is a true Harlequin! Lefner is charming and feisty as young Irma, flawless in her musical numbers, an all-around actress. Tousey, who was delightfully wry in Manhatta at The Public last December, showed us she has no problem delivering burlesque. Gauthier’s jocosity kept it all together; he never left us a second between scenes, with hysterical all-eyes-on-me skits that cracked everybody up. Together, the Ensemble of eight, which includes a riotous Kholan Study, interprets a wide range of characters, animals, therianthropes, props, and ghosts.
The Company
The Company
Presented by Yale Repertory Theater and Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Between Two Knees is a tragedy based on a true story, our story, but the way The 1491s recount it makes it a one-of-a-kind jewel of wit. They are a Native American comedy group based, as they describe, in the wooded ghettos of Minnesota and buffalo grass of Oklahoma. Dallas Goldtooth, Sterlin Harjo, Migizi Pensoneau, Ryan RedCorn, and Bobby Wilson wrote an irreverent, quick punch-lined dramedy that has all the satire, puns, hyperboles, and slapstick you can imagine and then some.
The Company
The writers and the Ensemble were directed with originality and artfulness by Eric Ting (The Comeuppance, Gloria) helped by comical projections by Shawn Duan; a set with a big proscenium that vaguely reminds us of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Revue, with so many creative spot-on props, all created by Regina GarcÃa; cartoonish costumes by Lux Haac; delirious songs by Ryan RedCorn; elegant lighting by Elizabeth Harper; and fitting, vaudevillian choreography by Ty Defoe.
The Company
In the epilogue, white people have evaporated. The Ensemble, wearing future props, encouraged the public to join them in the chorus “Goodbye white people, some of you were cool, most of you were not,” and everybody got up to clap and sing. When the show was over, we all had large smiles on our faces, people couldn’t stop talking about the play all the way down the elevators, even on the many steps of the Perelman Performing Arts Center that take you to the street where it was freezing. Maybe these 2 and 1/2 hours should be called “The Great Thaw.” Bravi, bravissimi!
Shyla Lefner
production photos by Jeremy Daniel
poster photo by Jai Lennard
Between Two Knees
The 1491
Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Yale Repertory Theatre production
Perelman Performing Arts Center’s John E. Zuccotti Theater
World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan, 251 Fulton Street
two and a half hours with one intermission
ends on February 24, 2024
for tickets (starting at $29), call 212.266.3000 or visit PACNYC
