Review: SOVEREIGNTY BY MARY KATHRYN NAGLE at Three Bone Theatre

An impromptu survey of four people, myself among them, after the Charlotte premiere of Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty at The Arts Factory, confirmed what I had strongly come to suspect during a long, sometimes difficult, and immensely rewarding evening of theatre. More people have heard of the 1838 Trail of Tears than have heard of VAWA, the acronym given to the Violence Against Women Act passed by Congress in 2013 (with Native Provisions attached).

We get to see how both of these events have impacted the Cherokee Nation in a groundbreaking Three Bone Theatre production directed by Carolyn Dunn. Thanks partly to a grant from the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, the production will pull up stakes when its Charlotte run is done on September 6, and sojourn for the next six days in Cherokee, NC, offering free theatre workshops to Cherokee High School students on the weekdays and two special performances at the Qualla Boundary on September 11 and 12.

The Cherokee largesse is also evident in the casting and production team, since all the actors portraying Nagle’s Cherokee characters can claim Native American descent, converging on this labor of love from near and far. Admirably bolstering this ethnic authenticity are Dunn, Costume Designer Lorna Bowen, cultural consultant Yona Wade, and language coach David Jumper.

Quite audacious. Three Bone is already fairly unique among local companies in acknowledging – on their website and in all their digital playbills – that they rehearse and perform on the traditional, ancestral, stolen territory of the Catawba Indian Nation, including the Catawba and Sugaree tribes.

So they haven’t stopped there. They’re walking the walk and touring the tour.

With respect to the Trail of Tears, we are taken very much to the center of the agonizing preamble, both at the White House and back on tribal land in Georgia, where an impossible ultimatum begins to break the Cherokee Nation apart into a devastating ideological fracture. Written in 2015 and premiered three years later, the depiction of President Andrew Jackson already foreshadowed the current monster in the Oval Office.

It reaches us now in a 2020 edition, which likely makes Sovereignty even more pointed and relevant. There’s more wallop to this history than ever.

Nagle knows how to personalize both of her stories. The first begins in the 1820’s and climaxes in the signing of the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. The second begins in the “Future” – 2019, four years after the original script was completed – and stretches up to a decade afterwards. Or as long as it takes for a couple to meet, fall in love, have a child, dramatically break up, and create legal disputes that are not resolved until the US Supreme Court issues its judgment.

So each of Nagle’s crisscrossing timelines has enough breathing room for their lawyer protagonists to grow into their history-making roles. In 1835, we first see John Ridge as an effete invalid, convalescing somewhere in Connecticut, proposing to a local schoolmaster’s daughter. Transitioning to 2019, we encounter the betrothed couple’s future descendant, Sarah Ridge Polson, a Yale Law School graduate returning to her Cherokee Nation home in Oklahoma, visiting her ancestors’ graves at Polson Cemetery.

We’re talking about what is likely the most radical jump-cut this reviewer has ever seen onstage. Since John’s bride-to-be is also named Sarah, when her mom calls to her offstage in Cornwall, Connecticut, the overlap between the two scenes has Flora, Polson’s cousin, greeting her as she returns to her homeland and pays homage to the lovebirds who are exiting. In a split second, 184 years have elapsed, and we’ve traveled 1370 miles westward.

Dunn doesn’t bother explicating these transitions – nor even specifying that we’re time-traveling to a freely imagined future – any more than Nagle’s dialogue provides, a source of bewilderment and disorientation throughout the evening. While I’d be happy to see such guideposts flashed somewhere as projected visuals, or in the printed and digital programs, it’s pretty clear that Dunn is taking her cue from the circumspection of Nagle’s manuscript.

Unless you already know that Tahlequah is the capital of Cherokee Nation, you may not be any surer that Polson is back on Native American soil than you will be about VAWA when it is offhandedly mentioned a few times. Anyone who emerges from Sovereignty thinking that Nagle’s script is didactic would probably be layering on the helpful info on VAWA and the historic timeline that Three Bone has posted on the wall of the corridor as you enter the theatre space.

We’re more firmly grounded when Nagle takes us to the White House and to Georgia Before Removal. Multitudes of chilling lessons – or reminders – bombard us as soon as we’re in the presence of President Andrew Jackson.

He is charming and candid to the Cherokee delegation, including Major Ridge, who fought by his side in the Creek and Seminole wars. Casually horrifying: “I say this as your friend. You find yourselves established in the midst of a superior race, and although you do not appreciate the cause of your inferiority, if you do not yield to the force and progress of civilization and move West, you will disappear.”

Affable and chilling. When Americans lecture Israel on how they treat Arab citizens and residents of Gaza, they might look to their own history as this so-civilized atrocity unfolds with the zealous assistance of John Forsyth, Governor of Georgia. What Jackson and Forsyth are cooking up (after encouraging the rape of Cherokee women) is a startling pair of alternatives that flout the Supreme Court judgment of 1832, in Worcester v. Georgia, ruling that Georgia's unilateral extension of its laws over Cherokee territory was illegal and unconstitutional.

Cherokee Nation had sovereign status, true nationhood, so only the Federal Government could legitimately deal with them. To John Ridge’s claim that Jackson must enforce the law of the land, our President, with a heartlessness that would not be duplicated in the Oval Office for nearly two centuries, curtly replies:

“[Chief Justice] John Marshall made his decision. Let him enforce it.”

Bang. With malignant lines like that, it’s no wonder that Kyle Riggs as Jackson often upstages our Cherokee protagonists. He’s no less shocking when, in a matter of seconds, he first transforms from Sarah’s genial 2019 fiancé, Ben, into the sourpuss “Old Hickory” of yore, simply by turning his back to us, donning a formal overcoat, and changing his expression.

Yet Lance Claymore as John must face up to Jackson’s perfidy and decide what’s best for his family and his people. He can be pragmatic and abandon his ancestral home in Georgia, signing away his people’s heritage in the Treaty of New Echota with the consolation of being allowed to relocate to a specified territory in Oklahoma, which wouldn’t achieve statehood for over 70 years. Or he can stand on principle and the decided law of the land and watch Jackson & Co. take their homeland by force and drive away its people.

Without any consolation at all.

Cherokee Nation had been a democracy since 1827, with a constitution, a court, and elected governmental leaders, so John wouldn’t be making this decision alone - or signing any treaty alone. He finds himself united with his father in the pragmatic “Treaty Party” while the opposition National Party, headed by Chief John Ross, stands by principle and refuses to sign.

The political fracture ensured a deep-set antagonism between the Ridges and the Rosses that still lasts – and it made a horrible emigration mess inevitable. Whichever party you were affiliated with, you were leaving the sovereign Cherokee Nation, willingly or by force. Obviously, if you were among the majority who re-elected Ross, in Georgia and Oklahoma up to the middle of the Civil War, you were brutally forced of your home and likely blaming the Ridges for your ensuing sufferings.

That’s why Polson, applying for a job in the attorney general’s office in Tahlequah, controlled by the Ross family, is being so careful not to mention her Ridge ancestry. As Cousin Flora tells her – with genuine historical precedent – “The day you trust a Ross is the day they kill you.”

So while Billie D. Merritt as Sarah Ridge is quickly on the receiving end of Ben’s goofball marriage proposal, she is also a supplicant when she appears for her job interview. As you’ll see, Sarah is a long way from fully asserting herself both professionally and in her mixed-race relationship. Much like John before her, she’ll need to make a weighty, risky decision before she can make a positive difference.

On opening night, it was unfortunate to find Sarah’s personal growth coinciding with Merritt’s progress from the threshold of audibility to full authority after intermission, when she argues her case to tomorrow’s Supreme Court. Whether she wins or not does not diminish the fact that Nagle, in her conclusion, is envisioning a long overdue reconciliation between the Rosses and the Ridges. Hopefully, Merritt has turned up the volume and the Three Bones’ run continues.

Of course, the power of Nagle’s reconciliation depends on Mvnte July’s portrayal of both Chief John Ross back in Georgia and his descendant, Jim Ross, in the Tahlequah attorney general’s office. He is pivotal in creating the breach with the Ridges and, in the near future, in healing the rift. As a proud Cherokee citizen of Tulsa, it must be beyond a dream for July to be playing such a prominent historical figure, and as a past performer in Unto These Hills, no less a kick to be circling back to Cherokee, NC, with this production.

With opposition coming from July at home and Riggs from the White House, two powerhouse performers, Claymore’s softness and resilience as John Ridge come across all the more poignantly. Toughening the challenge for Marco Fuller as Ross’s most formidable opponent, Major Ridge, he must speak most of his lines in Cherokee, without any transliterated assistance from our playwright.

Josh Orsi helps Nagle to make a couple of key points on Cherokee sovereignty and free speech. Assaulted by a white drunk on Cherokee soil as Watie, Sarah Ridge’s brother, he has no power to arrest or prosecute, even though he’s a police officer. As Elias Boudinot, Major Ridge’s brother and founder of The Cherokee Phoenix, that nation’s first newspaper, he must face down threats from Chief Ross when their political opinions clash.

Along with Keely Kidwell as Sarah Northrup and Flora Ridge, Nathan Ahlgrim can exude a nice splash of goodwill and rectitude from non-natives. As Mitch, he’s a credulous modern-day lawyer, and as Samuel Worcester, he’s a soft-spoken – but iconoclastic – preacher who gets arrested for settling on Cherokee soil. Governor Forsyth and a redneck sheriff are Ryan Dunn’s chief cameos, but he also gets to play a good guy or two.

There is more than enough forgotten history here to richly educate most Charlotte theatergoers, and the posted materials, the digital program, and the discussion guide are fine accoutrements. If Sovereignty is greeted as warmly as we can expect, then it may linger in Cherokee as required reading for schoolchildren. Assuming that those kids to our west are as ignorant of their true heritage as ours, an annotated edition would be quite valuable.

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