Sitrep 11: April 20, 2025: Still Kind of Lousy

Marie Clements’ Unnatural and Accidental Women is one of those “accumulation” plays where the rising action is achieved by stacking up stories until the audience begins to be emotionally impacted by the volume of dramatic incidents rather than the tension of a taut singular storyline. This technique is especially evident in the Act 1 climax. Here, the relentless unspooling of historical newspaper quotes builds up the needed sense of scale to tell a larger historical story and transcend any singular protagonist’s journey. Admittedly, these kinds of plays can be difficult to read on the page. Given my level of tiredness this past week, yet still desirous to engage with the material, I sought help from several online production photos for ideas about how Clements’s play might at least be visually organized. The dollhouse-like set designs helped me contextualize how each of the different women’s stories are both part of the accumulation Clements is showing us (all stories are visually present at the same time), but also how each woman’s story is still given individual dignity and space (providing them each their own frame, if you will). This play’s structure has the feeling of a devised work, using elements of text, technology, movement, and dark humor to humanize the various women whose tragic stories are being told. I confess though, I’m still a novitiate when it comes to unpacking this play. It is one of those plays where one feels they never have quite enough context to fully experience everything the play has to offer. It is rich enough and dense enough to require multiple readings, and really, a viewing to start to sort it all out.

For me right now, the play illustrates Bethany Hughes’ proposition that “Indigenous performance asks more than theatre and performance studies often acknowledge; to engage with it robustly and productively, the field must be open to singing a song it is just beginning to learn” (498). In one way, her quote is comforting, because it allows me to be a beginner. And in another way, it asks me to be uncomfortable, just as singing a song one is only beginning to learn is a disorienting and destabilizing experience. Hughes might argue that the destabilizing experience I have when encountering Indigenous theatre - here I am thinking not only of Clements’s play, but live productions I have seen by playwrights Michelle Thrush, Drew Hayden Taylor and others - mirrors the larger sociological and political reality, where reminders of the “sovereignty of the hundreds of Indigenous nations in the United States and Canada…threatens the stability of settler colonial nations because it illuminates the histories of violence, theft, deceit, paternalism, coercion, and abuse that have led to the current state of affairs” (504).  My destabilization might be the whole point, a necessary condition for my own and society’s growth.

Still, encountering a play like Clement’s feels like a very small gesture that doesn’t go far enough. As Hughes puts it, “We have come so far. But where we are is still kinda lousy” (508). This clever turn of phrase, at first amusing to me, lingered in my head all week. Hughes is trying to motivate, to help me and all of us believe that the situation isn’t hopeless, but also that growth isn’t yet complete. To prove her point, she critiques academicians’ notable but incomplete efforts: “Honestly, recognizing Indigenous peoples is more than honoring the virtuosic and spectacular parts of the many cultures on this continent” (504), and anyway, “Is inclusion in a broken and besieged institution the best goal to work toward?” (503).

What then, is the goal? Hughes pushes the conversation in two directions. One is to pursue justice for Indigenous peoples through further large-scale destabilization. Hughes questions the United States’ “presumed right to own and occupy this land and to extract and expend its natural resources” (504) and suggests that “Affirming treaty rights would mean…giving back the Black Hills, which includes Mount Rushmore” (505). She has a strong argument that is also destabilizing in a way that risks far more than my personal discomfort. A path of restitution is simply put, likely to involve violence of some kind. Historic precedent suggests that violence is really the only method humans have ever used to resolve matters of nationhood, sovereignty and land ownership. The successful defense of one’s claims to sovereignty is only upheld by violent actions that force others to submit to those claims, resign their opposition, or have their ability to oppose them silenced. The other direction Hughes points her reader towards is the use of art as a means of revolution. This is societal change by accumulation, the stacking up of millions of personal internal anagnorises, where peoples’ recognition of themselves as agents of good towards others results in a more just and inclusive world.  Hughes’ inspiration comes from Indigenous performance artists Peter Morin and Jimmie Kilpatrick, whose participatory karaoke performances she experienced first-hand. Curious, I googled and watched the Donlop Art Gallery’s video of Morin and Kilpatrick’s album launch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm46gGMuMZY), but confess that I’m not sure I felt the “urgent and immediate call to understand ourselves as love songs that will end colonization” that Hughes describes (540). As much as the idea of being a love song to others resonates with me deeply - I so want the experience of art, be it Morin’s performances or Clements’s play, to birth a world where singing new (and old) songs together brings about the non-violent end of colonialism and creates a new community - I fear human nature will be less patient with the kind of journey where we vulnerably participate in singing a new song that we are just beginning to learn. Culturally and individually, we are more likely to resort to the cathartic experience of immediate violent action. Sigh. For all of the robust engagement I might do in good faith, the slow and laborious pace of artistic consciousness-raising and the violence of restitutional justice are somewhat disheartening options that perpetuate Hughes’ sentiment for the present moment. Kinda lousy, indeed.