“Manahatta,” Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play about the Lenape, comes home

Mary Kathryn Nagle moved to Manhattan in 2010. Back then, she often ran to work along a path that skirted the East River, taking in the city and its history from the shoreline.

“I wanted to know more about whose country I was,” she said.

Nagle, a lawyer and playwright, grew up in Oklahoma and was an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She didn’t know much about the Lenape, the original inhabitants of Manhattan, although Lenape tribes (some of whom called themselves Delaware Indians) lived in Anadarko and Bartlesville, not far from her birthplace. That year, through contacts at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York she discovered more, including details of the purchase of Manhattan, then part of the Lenape homeland of Lenapehoking, by Dutch settlers.

This was not long after the 2008 financial crisis. Nagle’s firm, Quinn Emanuel, was embroiled in lawsuits, suing banks involved in the crisis. The ceding of Manhattan and the subprime mortgage catastrophe began to mix in her thoughts, especially when she discovered that Wall Street, a fulcrum of the subprime collapse, was named after the wall the Dutch built to to keep the Lenape out.

These dueling histories, recent and long ago, inspired Nagle’s play “Manahatta.” The premiere is now showing at the Public Theater and runs through December 23. Named for the Lenape word for Manhattan, which translates to “island of many hills,” the drama volleys between the 17th century and the early 21st century, and between Manahatta and Manhattan and Anadarko. The seven actors in the cast each play a character in each period. This is the third production of the play, but the first on the island on which it is largely set.

“It really became a reality when we all descended into Manhattan,” he said Rainbow Dickerson, an actress who has been involved in the play since 2018. “We feel it. We feel it every day.”

I met Nagle, who was nine months pregnant, earlier this month on a warm Saturday evening just after rehearsal. She had agreed to walk through Lower Manhattan, along streets associated with the piece. We started on Pearl Street, named for the piles of oyster shells left there by the Lenape, Nagle said.

She then walked along Beaver Street, named for the fur trade, to Wall Street, where no trace of a wall remains, and then to Broadway, which runs at a diagonal angle and reflects a Lenape trade route. “It’s not a street built by the settlers,” she said.

It was dark then. And all the remains of the Lenape had long been covered. “At the end of the day, even if you see grass in Manhattan, it was probably concrete and then turned back to grass,” she said. But she could still feel a remnant, she said, especially at the tip of the island.

“They had a ceremony, they had prayers at the water’s edge,” she said. “So even though we’ve changed the contours of the island in terms of where the water flows out, that coastline is still there.” That also applies to the sun, she continued. And the moon. “We have put so much on this island,” she added. “But in a way, nature is still there.”

Nagle, 40, has the focused, no-nonsense attitude you’d expect from a lawyer specializing in federal Indian law and appellate matters, and the occasional touch of lyricism befitting a playwright. She wrote the first draft of “Manahatta” in 2013 as part of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group. She moved back to Oklahoma in 2015, but the play stuck with her. “Manahatta” had its world premiere in 2018 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was produced in 2020 by Yale Repertory Theater.

“Nail,” one reviewer of the Oregon production wrote: “expertly weaves the stories together, one mirroring the other, often in the same language, to drive home the point that the American story has always been one of placing commerce over people, especially if those people aren’t. white. It’s devastating.”

As “Manahatta” evolved, it focused on Jane Snake, a Lenape econometrics expert hired by a Manhattan investment bank. (The same actress also plays Le-le-wa’-you, a 17th-century Lenape woman.) Through Jane’s conflicting ambitions, desires, and loyalties, Nagle explores issues of ownership and loyalty. In some ways, Jane reminds her of herself, a young woman who thought she had to leave Oklahoma to make her way in the world. The character’s choices aren’t always the ones Nagle, who has since moved to Washington DC, might have made, but it was important to her that Jane felt real and active, and not just the victim of a broader, not -indigenous world.

“Probably every piece of mine criticizes a white power system that has been imposed on us,” she said. “But it is also 2023, we are all living in it now. How are we responsible then? How are we involved?”

The director Laurie Woolery has been involved with the play since its premiere in Oregon. Initially, she was attracted to the challenge of the play and how it required the actors to move back and forth in time without any major scene changes.

“I’m really drawn to work that seems impossible to stage,” she said recently during an interview at the Public Theater.

But traveling between two eras was only one difficulty. Avoiding stereotypes was just as important. “There are so many different ways we are portrayed in American culture that are not based on facts, reality or truth,” Nagle said. “If you want to present the truth, you do it in a space where your representation has not been authentic. So you have to deconstruct that before you can fully introduce the authentic, and that is a challenge.”

Although there is no Lenape performer in the cast (casting directors are said not to have asked about certain tribal entries during auditions), the production has hired Joe Bakerco-founder and executive director of the Lenape Center in New York, as a cultural advisor.

Baker advised the production on costumes, props, language and Lenape aesthetics. “We’ve had a lot of conversations about different traditions, different characters,” he said in a telephone interview. When asked if Nagle’s play felt true to the Lenape experience, he said it did.

“There is clarity,” he said. “She fully understands the protocol and practice.”

Lenape artists also contributed some of the show’s props and design elements, including a wampum necklace, which Woolery shared when she recently led a tech rehearsal. “It’s a gift to us,” she said, holding up the three-strand necklace, “to keep us rooted.”

Avoiding stereotypes may be a little easier now than it was a decade ago, when Nagle began her career as a playwright. (Her other plays include “Sliver of a Full Moon,” “Sovereignty” and “Crossing Mnisose.”) In recent years, many more depictions of Native Americans have appeared on screen, often in projects created by or with indigenous writers and directors. And indigenous playwrights are also becoming increasingly known. Nagle mentioned colleagues like DeLanna Studi (“Flight”), Madeline Sayet (“Where We Belong”) and especially Larissa FastHorse, whose “Thanksgiving Play” made its Broadway debut last season.

“The whole landscape has changed,” Nagle said. “It’s not enough. It’s absolutely not enough. But we had our first Indigenous woman on Broadway, which is a big deal.

What would be enough?

“While we are as much in the American theater canon as any other group,” she said.

Nagle’s ambitions have always been as political as literary. When she feels the need to tell stories, she also has the shrewd insight that stories can be more persuasive than any number of appeals.

“In playwriting, you can make an argument and force people to listen to it in a way that they will never listen to it or hear it in a legal argument,” she said.

The arguments here have to do with the way history repeats itself and the dangers of turning homes into tradable commodities. And since the piece began previews just before Thanksgiving — the rare holiday that concerns Native history, no matter how mythologized — and begins just afterward, it also serves as a corrective to previous forms of representation.

“My hope with ‘Manahatta’ is that we can offer non-Native Americans an authentic story about Native people that might just replace one or more of the false narratives that American society has embedded in them,” Nagle said.

The significance of telling this particular story just a mile or two from where it happened is not lost on any of the cast or crew of “Manahatta.” “How can we acknowledge that we are at the root of Lenapehoking and the genocide and forced removal of that tribe?” Woolery asked just before a rehearsal. “That’s a lot to hold.”

Baker, Lenape’s cultural advisor, was happy to see the piece come home. He sees traces of the Lenape everywhere in Manhattan. “All you see is Lenape,” he said. “The breath and vitality of this place continues.” He hopes the public will learn something about the history of the place and its indigenous people.

“It’s an important, important moment,” he said. “And it’s exciting to share this moment.”