MANAHATTA at Aurora Theatre Company

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2. MANAHATTA

Intimate. Informed. Indefatigable. A young Lenape woman, Jane Snake, returns to her ancestral homeland, Manahatta, to work as a securities trader on Wall Street – the once walled street built by enslaved Africans to keep the Indigenous Lenape out. Set against the backdrop of the Occupy Wall Street movement and across time, Manahatta draws parallels between the forced removal, taxation, and fiscal impact on Native Americans during the 2008 financial crisis and the 1626 Dutch purchase of the island of Manahatta/Manhattan. Playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle (a citizen of the Cherokee Nation), teases the duality in Jane as she seeks to uncover her complicity in infrastructure designed to destroy her people; Jane’s career is thriving on “the island of many hills” (Manahatta in Lenape), while back home in Oklahoma, her mother and sister are grieving the loss of family, and struggling to maintain their culture, language, and their finances to stay in their over-mortgaged home.