Manahatta Off-Broadway Reviews

“Manahatta” dramatizes two pivotal, and shameful, moments in New York City history, occurring four centuries apart — the Dutch West India Company’s “purchase” of the island of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians (who had no concept of land ownership), and the world-wide financial crisis of 2008, In Mary Kathryn Nagle’s sharply written play, which is wonderfully acted under Laurie Woolery’s seamless direction, the two events tell much the same story.

What Manahatta can take pride in is the cast brought together by careful director Laurie Woolery and the Public’s casting folks, Heidi Griffiths, Jordan Thaler, and Joy Dickson. In his bio, Nassi mentions he’s an enrolled member of The Otoe-Missouria Tribe/Cherokee Nation. Great to know. How times have changed with the advent of this play and others of like origins across the populations. How finally current they are.

It’s hard to avoid the sound of gears grinding while you’re watching Manahatta, now playing at the Public Theater. Mary Kathryn Nagle’s drama takes place both in modern times, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis, and in the 1600s, when both Native Americans and Dutch settlers were populating the island that gives the play its name. As the action shifts back and forth in time, it painstakingly accentuates the similarities in the manner in which the country’s original inhabitants were screwed over by the European colonists and modern-day Americans by exploitative financial markets. By the time the evening’s over, you’ll be impressed by the playwright’s logistical ingenuity. But you won’t have been particularly moved. Manahatta ultimately feels like a thesis in search of a play.

If our culture were fearless and thriving, we’d have more plays like Manahatta—which is to say, ones better written than it. We’d also have more big-budget movies like Killers of the Flower Moon (but made by Native filmmakers) and more series like Reservation Dogs. Not to mention more Native theater critics. The play disappoints because it could have dug deeper, told us something research materials don’t or can’t. May it inspire other, beginning writers. Anyone can scribble a moral; mapping a journey to the revelation is hard.