Tribal nature and ‘Palestine, New Mexico’

Tribal thinking and tribal identity factor heavily in Richard Montoya’s new play “Palestine, New Mexico,” running through Jan. 24 at the Mark Taper Forum.

There’s the close-knit tribe otherwise known as the U.S. military. An American Indian tribe that must deal with the loss of one of its sons, Pfc. Ray Birdsong, killed in Afghanistan under mysterious circumstances. The tribal intrigues of the Taliban forces sowing mayhem throughout Central Asia.

There’s even an allusion to the lost tribes of Israel -- and to the diaspora that brought Jews from Europe to the American Southwest -- in Montoya’s comedic drama, in which strands of Chicano, Jewish and Native American history are knotted together in one thick, complex braid.

So when director Lisa Peterson convened the play’s cast on the first day of rehearsals several weeks ago, she gamely asked each member to say “what tribe you think you might come from.”

Well, actor Russell Means, an Ogala Sioux and longtime Indian rights activist, told Peterson, that’s a word that we don’t use, actually.

“It’s demeaning, and every time the white world talks about American Indians they use all the demeaning words they can to describe us, like we’re nothing,” Means said in an interview this week with Peterson, Montoya and two other Indian cast members, Geraldine Keams and Brandon Oakes.

Yet as the rehearsal process and the production unfolded, the performers agreed, the word “tribe” took on many deep and respectful shadings, of “family,” “community” and the comradely bonds forged among a group of artists drawn together for a brief moment onstage. Not only the play’s characters but the production team and cast became a tribe, of sorts.

“It feels like we are all here together in this screwed-up world that we’re trying to make right,” said Means, who had never done live theater before. “Like Lisa pointed out to us, everyone’s lost in the play. And they’re trying to find their way. And we’re a tribe. A tribe of people.”

The pitfalls of cultural misunderstanding and the risks, as well as potential rewards, of venturing outside one’s comfort zone into alien terrain, form the play’s thematic heart. “Palestine, New Mexico” is named for the fictional town where the earnest U.S. Army Capt. Catherine Siler (Kirsten Potter) comes looking for answers about Birdsong, who was one of her soldiers, and ends up getting pulled into a series of personal and romantic intrigues, a feud between neighboring rival reservations and a peyote-induced dream redolent of Carlos Castaneda as interpreted by Federico Fellini, with an assist from Looney Tunes.

The cast includes Montoya and his artistic brothers-in-arms Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza of Culture Clash, the L.A.-based Latino-vaudevillian-agitprop ensemble marking its 25th anniversary season.

Writing several dramatic parts for American Indian actors, and setting his play on a reservation, presented some major challenges in terms of researching his subject and depicting it with sensitivity, Montoya acknowledged. That included the use of the concept of tribe.

“I think we always meant it as ‘family,’ ” Montoya said. “It’s a loaded word, like ‘Hispanic’ is a loaded word. The Nixon administration came up with that term, precisely to get us away from our Indian-ness. They said, ‘Remind these Latino people they’re Spanish, they’re not Indian.’ ”

Peterson, who also directed Culture Clash’s “Water & Power” at the Taper in 2006, said that plays such as “Palestine, New Mexico” intrepidly go against certain “expectations in art, and especially in the theater, that people should write within their parameters.”

“I think there is a movement in the theater right now, especially led by, for lack of a better word, writers of color, writers who are defined by their ethnicities, and also writers who are identified by their gender, to break out of that, to say, ‘No, I can go where my imagination and my interests take me,’ ” she added. “But it is risky.”

Perhaps especially when depicting one of the most misrepresented and cruelly stereotyped of all U.S. ethnic groups.

“One of the traps would have been, OK, we’re depicting this rez and it must be positive,” Montoya said. “Because we get that in the Latino, mostly movie and television world, ‘We must project positive images.’ And I think we do feel like, yes, there’s something important about that. But when I look at how complicated a rez or a tribe can be with traditional folks versus this casino movement versus there’s some abject poverty. . . . There was one rez in New Mexico where there were 16 heroin overdoses.”

The play’s liberal mixing of ideas, cultural topographies and comedic and dramatic styles has divided reviewers. Times critic Charles McNulty called it “an odd mash-up of a work.” Variety’s Bob Verini wrote of “the show’s ungainly amalgam of outrageous imagery and serious subtext.” But, Verini added, “at only 80 minutes, it never wears out its welcome, and its very earnestness conveys a brotherhood message not inappropriate to this holiday season.”

Means said that finding humor in the most dire circumstances is highly characteristic of both Indians and Chicanos, whom he grew up with in San Leandro, Calif. (“I was a Low Rider without a ride.”)

“The worst things can be happening but we can joke about it,” Means said. “Like I’ll never forget inside Wounded Knee back in ‘72,” he continued, referring to the 71-day siege in Wounded Knee, S.D., in the winter of 1972-73, during which two American Indian Movement members were killed and a U.S. marshal was paralyzed. “We had all those news people there . . . and they were forced to leave, but when they [left they] told us, ‘You guys keep your humor and your wit.’ And they were right.”

Keams, a Navajo professional storyteller who plays the wise, wise-cracking medicine woman Maria 15 (pronounced “quince”), said she believes that her role, although specifically Indian, belongs to a universal sorority of archetypal matriarchs.

“There’s a Maria 15 in every family,” Keams said. “She’s very down to earth, very practical. And then when she wants to kick butt she’ll kick butt. She’s like the Earth Mother.”

To Oakes, the play accurately reflects two aspects of the culture he knew from being raised as a Mohawk: the casual presence of firearms, which are wielded en masse at Capt. Siler when she traipses onto the rez in the play’s opening minutes; and the disproportionate participation of Indians in the U.S. military, bearing arms on behalf of the nation that subjugated them.

“When I was like 7 to 9 there was a war on my reservation between the New York State Police and my neighbor, the head of the Mohawk warriors,” Oakes said. “Guns to me are just like a tool that’s to show part of your emotion and how you feel, like I feel strong enough to pull out a gun and hold it in my hand.”

As far as Indians’ relation to the U.S. military, Oakes said, his grandfather had served with pride during World War II, but never encouraged his grandson to enlist. The warrior ideal, Oakes indicated, is still a powerful symbol to many young Indian men.

“There was a moment in my life where I was about to become a Marine,” he said. “I just thought it’d be a great workout! That’s how I looked at it back then. And I was afraid of the haircut too. So I went to art school instead.”

Means, following his own brushes with violence as a younger man, today has an emphatically negative view of taking up weapons, a vestige of what he called the “patriarchal world” of “caveman thinking.”

Keams agreed.

“If we look at the world today, and we look at the chaos and the turmoil and the wars and the violence that come from tribal kind of thinking,” she said. “So tribe, to me, in that way, can be full of misunderstanding. And we’ve got to get past that. And we’re not living in those worlds anymore. We have to move on to a new place.”

reed.johnson@latimes.com