Review: Company One Theatre's HAUNTED Uses Humor To Make Case for Indigenous Land Acknowledgments

In recent years, public gathering spaces including theaters, concert halls, schools, libraries, and museums have posted indigenous land acknowledgment statements. At theaters, they are often also read aloud from the stage prior to performances.

To launch its 26th season, Company One Theatre (C1) has selected “Haunted,” a new play by Indigenous playwright Tara Moses, a Mvskoke and citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, that offers an engaging look at the Land Back movement, which calls for everyone to be responsible stewards of Earth’s natural resources, in solidarity with the Indigenous communities who have persevered against colonization, gentrification, and displacement across generations.

Finding humor in even the heaviest of subjects can often be an effective way of conveying significant messages to the greatest number of people. This horror-comedy – a thought-provoking ghost story written, directed, and choreographed by Moses, with dramaturgy by Quita Sullivan from the Shinnecock and Montaukett nations, and being given its National New Play Network rolling world premiere by C1 in partnership with the Boston Public Library – does just that, in a funny and at times poignant production, at Rabb Hall in the BPL’s Copley Square location through February 15.

Ghosts have been used effectively in plays from “Hamlet” to “Blithe Spirit,” and they are here as well when their comedic antics focus us on the importance of understanding and accepting the Land Back movement if centuries of wrongs are ever to be made right.

It’s been 20 years since Indigenous brothers Aaron (Chingwe Padraig Sullivan, a two-spirit actor from the Shinnecock and Montaukett Nations) and Ash (Bradley Lewis from Acoma Pueblo) passed away, but their struggle to free their spirits while supporting one another prevents them from finding peace in the afterlife as they haunt potential new residents of the house where they landed after a fatal car crash. All the while, the pair wonder if they’ll ever free themselves from the racist stereotyping that has so long encumbered them.

Ash, played with humorous abandon by Lewis, never misses a chance to cut loose to a pulsating playlist of hits by Mariah Carey and Britney Spears and never fails to frustrate the tightly wound Aaron, who Sullivan shows us to be almost literally crawling the walls with impatience.

Numerous tours by prospective buyers – played by the versatile trio of Evan Turissini as White Man, Katherine Callaway as White Girl, and Tanya Avendaño Stockler as White Girl 2 – are disrupted by the brothers, and while the many raucous “hauntings” can sometimes seem repetitive – witness the numerous low-light clean-ups undertaken by the hardworking stage crew – they make their points with humor.

Eventually hope that these two trapped spirits may make it to the Spirit World arrives in the form of empathetic real-estate agent Vincent Jones, portrayed with winning sincerity by JāQuan Malik Jones, a self-described explorer of the Black diaspora from Chesapeake’s South Norfolk community.

The present-day setting of “Haunted” is captured well in Danielle Delafuente’s scenic design, which is shown off to good advantage by Elmer Martinez’s lighting. Fine work is also done by sound designer Aubrey Dube and fight choreographer Marisa Diamond. And special kudos go to props designer Shanel Lashay Smith for sourcing the largest container of Goldfish crackers likely ever seen on a Boston stage.

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