review of
Arthur Kopit's Indians
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 19, 2012

A wk or so ago, my g-friend Amy & I were sitting around at nite, bored, & she proposed that we go into our personal library, that I hold her & prevent her from knocking into things, while she walked thru the library w/ her eyes closed & picked out a bk to become "our bk" in the way that people have an "our song" etc.. We did this & she picked Kopit's Indians & Mary Manning's Passages from Finnegans Wake. Then things changed so that we had two "our bks". The idea was that each of us wd read one of the bks & then we'd trade. THEN things changed so that we were back to only one bk: Passages from Finnegans Wake. Welp, I've read them both now (you can see my review of Passages.. here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13546721-passages-from-finnegans-wake) & reading Passages.. has spawned a new Finnegans Wake-related sampling project of mine.

Both of these bks were in my "Plays" section of my library. I'd never read either of them. In a sense, I came to 'maturity' in an era of 'performance art' (see my own history here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOutlineIndex.html). An aspect of this was that theater no longer seemed very exciting in contrast. 'Performance Art' (a term I still reject to this day) was the way of performing that took risks & manifested contemporary praxis. Theater was entirely too 'safe'.

Nonetheless, I was ever on the look-out for what struck me as the most innovative, the most daring, the most political in theater - & I wasn't entirely disinterested in the theater of the past. Fortunately, I turned 18 in the same yr that the Baltimore Theater Project was founded, 1971, & found much of interest there - at least at 1st. There were groups like Studio Scarabee & Plan K. Scarabee presented what was probably the most technically sophisticated stage show w/ projections that I'd seen as of the late 1970s.

Some of the same people who had pioneered 1970s performance art in Baltimore then went on to create Impossible Theater in 1982. It was probably thru them &/or their successor project that I learned about John Schneider (of Theater X), w/ whom they collaborated on a performance called "Social Amnesia", & playwright Caryl Churchill. All very interesting stuff.

Of the other 20th c playwrights to catch my attn, some of them were: Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Jean Genet, Peter Handke, Rolf Hochhuth, Eugène Ionesco, Alfred Jarry, Arthur Kopit, Jean Paul Sartre, & Peter Weiss. Since Jarry is of substantial importance to both Amy & myself it was quite possibly his work that Amy was groping for w/ eyes shut - either consciously or unconsciously.

My adding Passages from Finnegans Wake & Indians to my library wd've been part of this research. Nonetheless, I'd never read either play until now - basically b/c I don't enjoy reading plays very much. In my review of Passages I barely mention much about the actual play b/c, aside from Joyce's fantastic language, there's really very little to it. The stage production notes are minimal & it seems that Mary Manning's role was mainly to pick the text (no mean feat in itself) & to pick characters to speak/sing this text (also somewhat difficult given how Finnegans Wake is written). Indians, I'm happy to say, is quite different in that respect - considerably more attn is pd to the theatrics by the playwright.

It's a strange thing, tho, that in bk form the presentation of plays often focuses on the 'superstar', the playwright, & neglects altogether the people who flesh out the playwright's vision - wch is often a huge job. A playwright might call for Buffalo Bill to appear on a horse in a Wild West Show setting but, then, someone has to build the horse prop & make it so that it moves in the desired way. That ain't nothing to sneeze at. It's also a very political thing when the people who make shit happen are treated as so minor that they're barely worth mentioning.

Indians is a political play that uses the imperialistic wiping out of Native American culture as a mythical stand-in for political struggles contemporaneous w/ the writing of the play such as the Vietnam War & the suppression of black radicals in the US - w/o alluding to either of those things directly so that the play can stand apart as a critique of how such crimes against humanity are justified in general. I'm sure that the play, when witnessed live, wd've been very 'effective' - at least 'educationally'.

Smack dab in the ± middle of the bk is a long discussion of issues of the play between its author, Arthur Kopit, & John Lahr (theater critic for the Village Voice). This discussion is very well-informed & is accompanied by photographs of US atrocities in Vietnam, the shootings of students by imbecilic National Guard robopaths at Kent State, the murder of the brilliant Black Panther spokesperson Fred Hampton by racist cops in Chicago, & images relevant to Indians & to the history it draws on. The combination of the play & this discussion was enuf to convince me that Kopit was/is a very important playwright indeed. From the discussion:

"Kopit: We imposed our will on them and then justified our will morally, in terms of some godly sensation that we felt was for a general and moral good. It seemed to me that possibly what was evil was the concept of good itself.

"Lahr: Our powers of rationalization are still very active. Richard Nixon's 1960 Election Eve speech could have been spoken a century before: "My friends, it is because we are on the side of right, it is because we are on God's side, that America will meet this challenge and that we will build a better America at home and that that better America will lead the forces of freedom in building a new world....""

& from the play in a scene where Buffalo Bill tries to explain the attitudes of the Indians to a committee of Senators sent from the government to investigate their reservation & treaty conditions:

"Another difficult problem is land itself. The majority of 'em, ya see, don't understand how land can be owned, since they believe the land was made by the Great Spirits for the benefit of everyone. So, when we do buy land from 'em, they think it's just some kind o' temporary loan, an' figure we're kind o' foolish fer payin' good money for it, much as someone 'ud seem downright foolish t'us who paid money fer the sky, say, or the ocean. Which . . . causes problems."

Now, I think this is a great play & Kopit's political perspicuity doesn't disappoint me. BUT, the astute reader will've noticed that I wrote earlier: "I'm sure that the play, when witnessed live, wd've been very 'effective' - at least 'educationally'." wch brings me back full-spiral to the beginning of this review where I wrote "'Performance Art' (a term I still reject to this day) was the way of performing that took risks & manifested contemporary praxis. Theater was entirely too 'safe'." In other words, I'm very glad that plays like this exist b/c they help to educate & stimulate the general public into a political awareness. But, in the end, what we need to do is change society in more direct ways that aren't so isolatedly intellectual - & plays just aren't enuf. ( )

it's just about Buffalo Bill Cody's Life and his conflict with native Americans
It could be a good western movie, but a play? i don't think so... ( )

Copy used when I played John Grass at ND

13 scenes