A Word In Edgewise: For The Audience – Delight!

Comedy can be a trickster. So many ways humor can go awry: Cruel instead of comic, flat when you’d aimed for effervescent.  Adding comedy concerning other cultures into the mix sets the bar dauntingly high. Fortunately, Ty Defoe and Larissa Fasthorse, working closely with their creative team, have been equal to the task.

The germ of the project was in gathering stories and experiences of members of the local Native community, particularly involving the area around Minneapolis’s Franklin Avenue, together with Little Earth community members. In September, the group coalesced a cast of eight, seven Native individuals and one non, into this production, and titled, For the People.

The action takes place in a community space on Franklin Avenue, opening on a meeting of Native elders called by April Dakota, seeking approval and funding for a Native wellness center here on the Avenue.

April is young, enthusiastic, proud of her initial efforts. She’s decorated the space in bright cheerful colors, furnished with modular cubes and spheres–an initial eyebrow-raiser for some attendees. Eager to show her mindfulness in choosing appropriate gym workout material, April flourishes up one of the river rocks she’s substituted for steel weights, dismayed when an elder asks, “Did you ask their permission? Did they agree they might be brought here?”

One is plunged back into every meeting one has attended since grade school. The six Native elders interact no differently than any other group and are reminiscent of some of the same players–the wise-cracking acter-out, the endless-questioner, the one…yes, that one, too. Just being on the same team April learns, doesn’t mean you’ll get immediate praise or sanction for your grand idea. Another meeting is set up.

In the meanwhile, April shared with her good friend and confidante Esme, the sole non-Native character, whose dad is a local developer, and whom Esme wishes to bring into the project, promising great monetary rewards ahead. Money, expansion, turning Franklin Avenue into a high-class commercial project?

Things get as far as a wrecking ball literally bashing a hole in the wellness center wall, creating shambles followed by a torrential downpour that soaks the smashed decorative jars of April’s Native seeds which germinate into a profusion of sacred life throughout the rubble. “Stop!” But Money dictates the “improvement” must continue. Indigenous Ingenuity however, devises the cleverest legal maneuver I’ve witnessed since My Cousin Vinny’s brilliant dénouement.

For the People is a delight. Comedy triumphs. Jokes and snipes can be sharp, but not cruel or demeaning; a crack about Dances With Wolves about macho character Herb O’Geezhik, is actually an in-joke directed at the actor, Wes Studi, who featured in that film and many others. The jokers, the swaggerers, the wide-eyed optimists, the over-exuberant and those of serene patience–whatever their ethnicity–will always be at the meeting, whether twelve or sixty-two.

The actors’ bios list their Native descents or citizenships, making it clear that like any other diverse group, their members can’t be homogenized into a single rubric. Fragmentation gives dimension; units are not static, but have movement and liveliness that can’t be pinned like an insect to a card. People and particles danced to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; if you determine one’s location, you can’t know its velocity, nor vice-versa.