STAGE REVIEW : ‘Voices’ Is Valid but Modest Effort

It’s so rare to find a theater group composed of American Indians that the modest standards evident in the inaugural production of the American Native Theatre Company are particularly disappointing.

The L.A.-based troupe’s “Mystic Voices,” which performed over the weekend in the rich setting of the Southwest Museum, is a family-oriented program in the tradition of Story Theater. But the company, which hopes to tour grade schools and other institutional facilities, needs to develop much more showmanship and theatrical imagination before it can bring alive what actor-producer Harrison Lowe called “the diversity among the more than 300 native American nations.”

The five performers, under the staging of Bob Hicks, basically limited their debut to vignettes of centuries-old myths and animal tales from the Lakota, Papago, Zuni, Cherokee and Ojibwa Indians. It’s disheartening to compare the oral tradition of these nations to Uncle Remus and Joel Chandler Harris, let alone Disney, but after an hour of quaint dramatizations of raccoons, catfish, rabbits, owls and bears, you were left with little sense of vibrant Indian lore.

The actors, particularly Sheri Foster and Brian Wescott, enjoy a strong grasp of Story Theater techniques, and costumes and props were culturally flavorful. But diction was often muffled except when the players used a mike. The sensation was that of a classroom show--charming but certainly inadequate for prices that ranged from $13-$18 ($10-$15 for museum members).

Here’s an opportunity for a company to counter the Indian image prevalent in movies. How often do you hear of an American Indian theater company? But this approach is not nourishing. The Indian treasures on display in the Southwest Museum re-enforced the promise of this group. Now, can the company take the American Indian out of the museum?