Rainbow Dickerson, Sheila Tousey, Jeffrey King, David Kelly, and Joe Tapper in Manahatta..Photo: Joan Marcus

A long thrum of loss runs through the core of Manahatta, Mary Kathryn Nagle’s new play at the Public. One might say that the narrative of four hundred years of loss begins for the night–with an irony that in a sense kicks off the plot–with the now perfunctory land acknowledgment: the land on which this theater stands was the original homeland of the Lenape people: a homeland extorted away at the birth of American capitalism. Manahatta dramatizes that first loss–the “sale” of the island to Peter Minuit and the Dutch in 1626–and then follows a trail of dispossession and struggle down to 2008, where Jane Snake, a modern Lenape, plays a crucial part in that year’s global financial collapse. That loss, of course, bears certain resemblances to the famous “tulip mania,” a financial bubble that burst in the 1620s just as the housing bubble burst, and of course it spreads outward from the very Wall Street the Dutch established. 

The losses multiply across the play: Loss of a specific home to foreclosure and of homeland after homeland, over and over as treaties are broken; the Lenape would be pressed farther and farther west over the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, winding up in Oklahoma.  Loss of culture and of a language that’s ripped out at the roots in the Indian Schools of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Loss of family members and of faith. Loss of career and of billions of dollars from the national and global economies. Loss of life at the scale of war and of genocide. At its strongest, the play makes you see that moment when cultural difference warps into one culture exploiting another, and the consequences of those moments mounting over centuries. And yet there’s something dispassionate about Manahatta, too—much of the time, it feels more committed to its arguments than its characters, and to making its point with exposition and intellect than to telling a story rooted in people.

The piece takes place in two locations, Manhattan and Oklahoma, and two timeframes, the early 2000s and the early 1700s, with the boundaries blurring between them as one scene transitions into the next and as each actor takes on roles in both past and present. In Manhattan, 2002, Jane (Elizabeth Frances), MIT graduate and Stanford MBA, interviews for a job at Lehman Brothers. She’s come from Oklahoma, where her father, Charlie, is at this moment undergoing heart surgery, for this interview, and ultimately it’s that commitment, that willingness to knock down every considerable obstacle in her way, that gets her the job working for Joe (Joe Tapper), a Wall Street bro with a sliver of heart. (Nagle devotes a lot of words to the details of exactly what Jane is doing minute by minute, but that becomes the sum of what we know about Jane, even though the really important moment in her career is when she gets fired and bluffs her way into a better position.)

 Manhattan, 1700s: Le-le-wa’-you (Frances) wants to join her partner Se-ket-tu-may-qua (Enrico Nassi) in trading with the Dutch. Like Jane, she’s a brilliant young woman with a good head for mathematics who wants to make something of herself. Se-ket-tu-may-qua’s original trading partner, Jakob (Tapper), seems like a decent enough fellow, but when Peter Minuit (Jeffrey King) gets involved, a fair exchange between cultures quickly becomes first exploitative and then violent.

Oklahoma, 2002: As Jane sets off to her new life in Manhattan after her father’s death, her family struggles. Jane’s sister, Debra (Rainbow Dickerson), is trying to fulfill their father’s dream of a Lenape language school, even though Charlie was one of the few remaining native speakers who could teach there. Bobbie (Sheila Tousey). In an effort to keep the burden of Charlie’s medical debts from her daughters, Bobbie takes out a mortgage that she neither understands nor can afford–rather than asking Jane, who’s taking home more money as an annual bonus than the house is worth. Bobbie doesn’t have a credit score, nor even a deed on the house her grandparents built, and she trusts her local banker. Michael (David Kelly), who was also involved in her husband’s church, and Bobbie has helped to give Michael’s adopted son, Luke (Nassi), a connection to the culture of his birth.

The tragic downward spirals in all three stories begin, in a sense, with faulty paperwork: The Lenape sign what they believe to be a permanent trading agreement, but really they’re selling Manhattan, an island they never conceived of “owning.” Bobbie signs a mortgage without knowing how the payments will balloon, but without a deed (which she doesn’t have because her grandparents built the house and never had one drawn up), it’s her only option. And Jane, on behalf of Lehman Brothers, papers deal after deal with fatal risks built into them. 

Nagle and director Laurie Woolery want so badly to show us the stakes, and the ouroboros of history whereby the seed planted by the extortion of Manhattan from the Lenape ultimately loops back around four hundred years later to put a Lenape woman at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis, where predatory economic logic comes to its fruition.  But the story on which those stakes are hung is somehow both burdened with too much expositional detail and painted with too-broad strokes. And the parallels between past and present are both too tidy and too skewed–it doesn’t feel satisfying or even ironic to see the Indian Jane at the helm of the white man’s economy, it only makes all her ambition and success feel sour. 

It’s hard to get invested when so much of the plot engine turns on paperwork–loan applications and grant applications and deeds and foreclosure notices–and we don’t get much sense of who these people were outside of the few moments we see in the play, nor the communities in which their lives are embedded. The historical Lenape family, in particular, feels like little more than a sketch. And it also feels like a lot of narrative attention is paid to the white men pulling the financial strings–Joe and his boss, Dick (King), as well as Michael, in the present; Jakob and Minuit and the Dutch minister Jonas (Kelly) in the past–without really building them into characters. (Both Jakob and Joe show unconvincing signs of personal growth that seem out of character; the others remain even more undeveloped.)

The play’s three worlds share a space built out of simple materials: Marcel Martínez García’s set centers around a large wooden table, with some rocks and a large mirrored wall; Lux Haac’s costumes use furs and big white collars to delineate the characters of the past. So it needs to be the performances that build the two worlds, that both connect and differentiate among the characters of past and present. But Woolery’s direction leans in to Nagle’s tendency to explicate rather than complicate, and the overall acting style sometimes starts to feel like corporate training videos, where the message is the only important takeaway. Sheila Tousey, as Bobbie, stands out from the pack, building a character who’s using her plain-spokenness and matter-of-factness to hold herself together. “Every ounce of your being was spent just tryin’ to blend in,” she says of her childhood. And in Bobbie, we feel that loss.

 At its strongest the play recalls Brian Friel’s Translations, recently excellently revived in New York. The audience can see what the characters cannot–the cross purposes with which two sides are using language, and the way the oppressor’s tools will ultimately warp both the culture and the psyches of the oppressed. But where Friel turns that lens on the microcosm of one small community, Nagle aims for a bigger sweep, and winds up losing the details that bring the ideas to life.