A gripping journey from the fur trade of the 1600s to the stock trade of today, Mary Kathryn Nagle's MANAHATTA tells the story of Jane Snake, a brilliant young Native American woman with a Stanford MBA. Jane reconnects with her ancestral Lenape homeland, known as Manahatta, when she moves from Oklahoma to New York for a banking job just before the 2008 financial meltdown. Jane’s struggle to reconcile her new life with the expectations and traditions of her family and Nation are powerfully interwoven with the heartbreaking history of the Delaware Nation's expulsion from their land. Both old and new Manahatta converge in a lesson about the dangers of living in a society where there’s no such thing as enough.
A stunning play about self-discovery, MANAHATTA was written as part of The Public’s prestigious Emerging Writers Group. Obie Award winner and The Public’s Director of Public Works, Laurie Woolery, directs.
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.
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.
2023 | Off-Broadway |
Public Theater New York Premiere Production Off-Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2024 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Costume Design of a Play | Lux Haac |
2024 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play | Sheila Tousey |
2024 | The Lortels | Outstanding Costume Design | Lux Haac |
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