Where We Belong
In 2015, Mohegan theatre-maker Madeline Sayet travels to England to pursue a PhD in Shakespeare.
Madeline finds a country that refuses to acknowledge its ongoing role in colonialism, just as the Brexit vote threatens to further disengage the UK from the wider world. In this intimate and exhilarating solo piece, Madeline echoes a journey to England braved by Native ancestors in the 1700s following treatise betrayals – and forces us to consider what it means to belong in an increasingly globalized world.
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
in association with the Folger Shakespeare Library presents
Where We Belong
By Madeline Sayet
Directed by Mei Ann Teo
CAST
Madeline Sayet
Creative Team
Director: Mei Ann Teo^
Production Designer: Hao Bai
Costume Designer: Asa Benally
Sound Designer and Composer: Erik Schilke
Dramaturg: Vera Starbard
Crew
Stage Manager: John Keith Hall*
Assistant Stage Manager/Wardrobe Supervisor: Andrew Cutler
Sound Engineer: Kaitlyn Sapp
Scenic Charge: Carolyn Hampton
Makeup Consultant: Dawn Newsome
Electrician: Kristen Roth
Video Production by ZANNI Productions
Director of Photography & Editor: Jon Burklund
Second Camera: Milan Misko
Third Camera: Nana Tsuda
Sound Mixer: Stephanie Beattie
CONTENT TRANSPARENCY: THIS PRODUCTION CONTAINS FLASHING LIGHTS, DEPICTIONS OF RACISM, AND DISCUSSIONS OF BORDERS, WAR, LOSS OF LANGUAGE, RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS, COLONIAL THEFT OF HUMAN REMAINS AND REPATRIATION.
An earlier version of WHERE WE BELONG was produced in London at Richmix and Shakespeare's Globe in 2019, as part of Border Crossings' Origins Festival, the UK's only large scale multidisciplinary festival of Indigenous arts and culture.
Special Thanks
Emika Abe, Colin K. Bills, Sonia Fernandez, Janet Alexander Griffin, Madeleine Hutchins, Autumn Mitchell, Tara Moses, Ronee Penoi, Emily Preis, Kenny Ramos, Delanna Studi, Dr. Gabrielle Tayac, Daniella Topol, Erin Tripp, Michael Walling, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, and Global Voices Theatre
Madeline Sayet
+ Bios
Madeline Sayet, Playwright & Performer (she/her) is a Mohegan theatre maker who believes the stories we pass down inform our collective possible futures. She has been honored as a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Hollywood & Entertainment, TED Fellow, MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, National Directing Fellow, Drama League Director-In-Residence, NCAIED Native American 40 Under 40, and a recipient of The White House Champion of Change Award from President Obama. She serves as the Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP), Co-Artistic Director of Red Eagle Soaring: Native Youth Theatre, and is known throughout the field for her work promoting indigenous voices and decolonizing systems. As a writer her plays include: Where We Belong, Up and Down the River, Antigone Or And Still She Must Rise Up, Daughters of Leda, and The Fish (In Development). Recent directing work includes: Tlingit Christmas Carol (Perseverance Theatre), Midsummer Night's Dream(South Dakota Shakespeare), Henry IV (Connecticut Repertory Theatre), Whale Song (Perseverance Theatre), As You Like It (Delaware Shakespeare), The Winter’s Tale (Amerinda/HERE Arts), Poppea (Krannert Center, Illinois), The Magic Flute (Glimmerglass), Macbeth (NYC Parks), Miss Lead (59e59). This fall she joins the faculty in the English Dept at Arizona State University with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. www.madelinesayet.com
Mei Ann Teo, Director (they/she) is a queer immigrant from Singapore making theatre & film at the intersection of artistic/civic/contemplative practice. As a director/devisor/dramaturg, they create across genres, including music theatre, intermedial participatory work, reimagining classics, and documentary theatre. Teo’s international work includes Belgium's Festival de Liege (Lyrics From Lockdown, “Truly polished, meaningful and entertaining” - The New York Times), Edinburgh International Fringe (MiddleFlight, “Stunning” - Scotsman), Beijing International Festival (Labyrinth - Top 8 in Beijing News). Dim Sum Warriors the Musical by Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo, composed by Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun for national China twenty-five city tour, Jillian Walker’s world premiere SKiNFoLK: An American Show at the Bushwick Starr (NYTimes Critics Pick,NYMag’s matrix “Highbrow and Brilliant”), Madeline Sayet’s Where We Belong at Shakespeare’s Globe. Teo is the Visiting Professor of Directing at Carnegie Mellon University and the Artistic Director of Musical Theatre Factory.
Jon Burkland, Director of Photography & Editor (they/he) is a New York based filmmaker, performance documentarian, and founder of ZANNI Productions. Since 2015, Jon has created over four hundred videos documenting the works and lives of theater, dance, and performance artists. Jon’s past collaborators include Arena Stage, American Repertory Theater, ARS Nova, Bushwick Starr, The Brick, The Exponential Festival, La Mama ETC, Lincoln Center, Ma-Yi Theatre Company, Musical Theatre Factory, New York Theater Workshop, Parsons Dance, The Public Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Soho Rep, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.
Hao Bai, Production Designer (she/her) is a multidisciplinary designer in lighting, sound, and video projection for live and virtual performances. Hao works with groundbreaking and innovative artists including Charlotte Braithwaite, Abigail DeVille, Mei Ann Teo, Ping Chong, The Talking Band, Mabou Mines, The Wooster Group, The Builders Association, The Hawtplates (Justin Hicks), Pioneers Go East Collective, Loco7, Nia Witherspoon, and New Stage Theatre, etc. Hao’s work has been seen internationally at Asia Culture Center (South Korea), WuZhen Festival (China), in the states at CAC (Cincinnati), Stanford, Jone Hall (Houston), and in New York at The Public Theatre, NYU Skirball, Bushwick Starr, La MaMa, JACK, Performance Space New York, New Stage Theatre, 59E59, A.R.T/New York Theatres, 14 Street Y, BAAD!, Stella Adler, The Performing Garage, The Gallery Players, The Tank, etc. Recent: Virtual: Final Boarding Call (Ma-Yi Theater+WP Theater); Nocturne in 1200s (Ping Chong). Lighting: Waterboy and the Mighty World (Bushwick Starr & The Public Theatre). Projection: Electronic City (NYIT Awards). Upcoming: Lighting: CHINOISERIE (Ping Chong). Projection: Chronicle X (The Shed); STORM (NYU). Sound: WALDEN (Theater Works Hartford); Little Shop of Horrors (St. Louis Rep). <a data-preserve-html-node="true" href="https://www.haobaidesign.com/"">haobaidesign.com/
Asa Benally, Costume Designer (he/him) is making his Woolly Mammoth debut. He hails from the Navajo and Cherokee Nations. Blues for an Alabama Sky (Keen Company, Drama Desk Nomination); Venus and Adonis (New Camerata Opera); Too Heavy For Your Pocket (George Street Playhouse); Skeleton Crew (Westport Country Playhouse); Father Comes Home… (Juilliard); Measure for Measure (The Public Theater Mobile Unit); Cymbeline (Yale Repertory Theater); The Brobot Johnson Experience (The Bushwick Starr); Tricks the Devil Taught Me (Minetta Lane Theatre); Coriolanus and The Seagull (Yale School of Drama); Whale Song (Perseverance Theater); The Crazy Shepherds of Rebellion, Roberto Zucco (Yale Cabaret); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Frog and Peach Theater Company); The Winter's Tale (HERE Arts Center); Peer Gynt (Amherst College); Training: M.F.A Yale School of Drama. B.F.A. Parsons School of Design. Online: www.asabenally.com, Instagram: @Asa_Benally_Design.
Erik Schilke, Sound Designer and Composer (he/him) is an ambient electronic composer and music producer. His debut album Synthesis was recently released on the German label Hymen Records. He has previously scored film projects for acclaimed directors including Fernando Lazzari and Madeline Sayet. Schilke is honored to be working on Where We Belong. Find his work online here and on Bandcamp.
John Keith Hall, Stage Manager (he/him) Previous Woolly credits: Shipwreck, The Peculiar Patriot, Gloria, Familiar, Hir, An Octoroon, and The Nether. His other DC credits include many productions at The Studio Theatre including: Bad Jews, Choir Boy, Water By The Spoonful, Tribes, Torch Song Trilogy, 4000 Miles, Sucker Punch, In The Red And Brown Water, The History Boys, Adding Machine: A Musical, and The Road To Mecca; Ain’t Misbehavin’, Soon, and West Side Story at Signature Theatre; The Producers, Mary Poppins, Sweeney Todd, Annie, The Crucible, On The Town, Elf The Musical, Matilda, Cabaret, and Singin’ In The Rain* at Olney Theatre Center. Regional credits include several seasons as a Resident Stage Manager at The Barter Theatre in Virginia where he supervised over 40 productions, Shadowland Stages in New York, and Virginia Musical Theatre in Virginia Beach. A graduate of Virginia’s Longwood University, John is a proud member of the Actors’ Equity Association.
Vera Starbard, Dramaturg (she/her) T’set Kwei yóo x̱at duwasáakw. Vera Starbard áyá ax̱ saayí. Dleit ḵáa x̱’éináx̱ Vera Marlene Bedard yóo x̱at duwasáakw. Teeyneidi naax̱ x̱at sitee. T’akdeintaan yádi. Wooshkeetaan dachx̱án. Dena’ina dachx̱án. Takjik’ ḵwáan áwé uháan. Shaan Seetxʼ x̱at ḵuwdiztee. Dgheyaytnux’ ḵux̱aa.óo. Vera Starbard, T’set Kwei, is a Tlingit and Dena’ina writer and editor. Her mother is of the Teeyeineidi clan and her father is T’akdeintaan. Vera is Playwright-in-Residence at Perseverance Theatre through the Andrew W. Mellon National Playwright Residency Program and Editor of First Alaskans Magazine. Vera is also a writer for the PBS Kids animated children’s program “Molly of Denali,” which won a Peabody Award in 2020. Vera currently lives with her husband Joe Bedard (Inupiaq/Yup’ik/Cree) on the Dena'ina land around Dgheyaytnu - colonially called Anchorage, Alaska. She says gunalchéesh – thank you – to Woolly Mammoth for the opportunity to dramaturg for a meaningful, important work performed on Piscataway land. www.verastarbard.com
A NOTE FROM MARIA
As I write this, news has broken about the discovery of a mass grave of 215 Indigenous children at Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. My heart grieves deeply for those children, their families, and the ongoing struggle of Indigenous people on this continent. That school closed in 1978.
Let us not pretend that systematic violence against and erasure of Native people is in the far away past. Please do get involved with modern-day movements to end the ongoing oppression of Native people; learn more about the native inhabitants of the land you occupy at Native-Land.ca; follow Indigenous-led collectives such as Illuminatives and NDN Collective who are doing eye-opening and crucial justice work on behalf of Native nations; support Native-American youth at Red Eagle Soaring, an organization serving urban Native American youth ages 10-19 with free programming, and where the multi-talented Madeline Sayet is the Co-Artistic Director.
So what is Woolly doing?
In September 2019, in consultation with the brilliant scholar Dr. Gabrielle Tayac, Woolly etched a land acknowledgment to the Nacotchtank and Piscataway peoples into the concrete foundation of our building. For me, this represents a commitment to not only honor our local Native community but also to present, produce, and support Indigenous artists at Woolly Mammoth. This is a small but important step towards making visible the people whose lands we occupy.
In WHERE WE BELONG, creator Madeline Sayet shares her journey with us across the sea, into the sky, and back home to Mohegan with raw honesty and insight about what it means to belong in a globalized world. Woolly has a long history of presenting bold and uncompromising solo work from artists like Reno, Tim Miller, Nilaja Sun, Liza Jessie Peterson, and the late great Robbie McCauley, to name only a few. WHERE WE BELONG is a glorious addition to this canon of courageous and utterly illuminating work.
With our esteemed partners at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the move to capture this story on film was prompted by the desire for as many people as possible to experience this work. I want to give a special thanks to Janet Alexander Griffin who championed this partnership on behalf of the Folger, even to the last day of her much deserved retirement.
We are greatly indebted to director Mei Ann Teo, who is as original and inventive a filmmaker as she is a theatre director. There were many constraints, not to mention COVID-19 parameters, that demanded ingenuity from the creative team, and I am in awe of what they have accomplished.
We can’t wait to have a live audience back in our theatre. AND we are thrilled to be able to share Madeline’s work with you RIGHT NOW, until you have the opportunity to meet her in person...more on that to come!
Hasta la próxima,
MARIA MANUELA GOYANES
Artistic Director,
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
A note from the playwright
LANGUAGE ORTHOGRAPHIES
Language reclamation is a long and complex process. For this reason, the evolution of the Mohegan language in this play reflects the multiple Mohegan language orthographies being used over the course of the Mohegan language reclamation project, and different orthographies present in scenes taking place in 2006, 2016 and 2021 include words, pronunciations, and spellings used at those times.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Within this play, there is a moment in which a sermon that was not written by Samson Occom until 1772 is intentionally used to demonstrate the effect of his speaking in 1766, so the audience gets a sense of the man rather than the evolution of his sermons.
Interview with Madeline Sayet
Sonia Fernandez (Woolly’s Director of New Work): I’d love to hear about your relationship to story-telling. As a multi-hyphenate theater artist you create story through multiple avenues—as a writer, a director, a performer, an educator.
Madeline Sayet: Traditional Mohegan storytelling was a core part of my upbringing. In our traditional storytelling, the story is always told for the community, and we aren’t drawing lines like: “writer,” “director,” “performer.” My mission as a human being is to tell stories that have the capacity to positively transform our society; so over the years my roles have shifted, based on what it is I can do to be useful to that process.
SF: Talk to us a bit about the development of the piece. How has it changed over time and how does it sit differently for you now than when you first wrote it and performed it in London?
MS: WHERE WE BELONG did not start as a play; it was more of a confessional. I wrote it to process the fact that, when I moved home from the UK in 2018, I felt untethered from the ground for the first time in my life. I was grappling with the question: does missing England, as a Mohegan person, make me a traitor? That first draft aimed to break down the constructs that surround us, it ended with me as a bird in the sky, never coming back down. One of the most important sections in the original was: “The sky doesn’t tell me I’m a traitor for studying Shakespeare, for leaving. It doesn’t tell me I’m wrong, for leaving home, for leaving England. It doesn’t need me to belong to the earth because it knows we’re all made up of the same stuff getting closer and closer together. The Sky doesn’t pressure me to settle down and grow roots instead it keeps calling me back. It's a place where I can disappear and be everywhere at the same time.”
I say this because the heart from which this play grew was not one thing over another, but the tension of having to exist between things and how that gets defined. Being able to ask the question: how are we allowed to love two things at the same time?
The initial piece was very specifically navigating my relationship with England. This current draft has been adjusted, slightly, for American accountability and engagement but also knowing people are ready to hear things now that they weren’t in 2018.
SF: Is this the first theater piece of yours that’s autobiographical? What was it like to be writing about your lived experience, as opposed to a fictional invention or adaptation?
MS: I have written autobiographical content in other mediums; but yes, this is my first play that is about me. At the point I wrote this, I was very drawn to the way traditional storytelling operates. What happens when a person simply shares directly in community with other people, the stories they need to hear that day? I believe deeply in Story Medicine, that every story that is told causes either harm or healing, and that that medicine is exchanged between the storyteller and story listeners who make up the story together, each time it’s told. If I had known this would become a “play” in the mainstream theater sense, I don’t know that I would have written it at all. The pressures of sharing something personal are infinitely daunting - because it’s your very self that is exposed, but there is also the fear of exposing others through your perspective.
SF: Something that I often think about relative to work from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) artists is the weight of representation. It's a theme you touch on in WHERE WE BELONG as well. How do you navigate that?
MS: I never do anything without thinking about how it will affect my people. I am accountable to the Mohegan Nation and not the “American” theater so it creates automatic tensions. I always try to do what’s least expected of me by Non-Natives to open more doors for other Native folks to share their true Story Medicine. It’s difficult because theaters automatically find what’s least expected to be “incorrect.” Think about it like trying to get out of the matrix. There is a system operating around you and you have to dodge and weave fast enough that the stereotypes can’t catch up with you because they will try and impose them on you at every turn; you have to combat them with the weight of knowing each opportunity is a chance to change everything by increasing accurate representation for your people, even just a little bit. But accurate to what? At the end of the day the strength of this show is that everything in it is personal to me. I’m not here to represent all Mohegans or all Native people. I’m just myself, trying to figure out where I belong. So it’s crazy that this piece has anything to do with representation, if you really think about it.
SF: Who are the artists or works that inspire you?
MS: My mother is a writer and I’m grateful she surrounded me with the works of Native writers from a young age. I am greatly inspired by poets, like Cheryl Savageau, and Joy Harjo. I was hosting a Q and A with Joy Harjo last week and she said something about poetry being a space in which we can hold contradiction, which I find is what the original version of the sky section was really grappling with and why the piece still becomes more poetic at its end. I am of course inspired by our traditional storytellers, and all the amazing Native playwrights I get to work with as a director and performer: Vera Starbard, Tara Moses, Cathay Tagnak Rexford, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Ty Defoe, Frank Katasse, Maulian Dana, William S Yellowrobe Jr., Rhiana Yazzie, Arigon Starr, Larissa Fasthorse, and so many many more.
SF: What kind of theater do you like to go to, what do you look for in a play?
MS: I love poetic texts with fluid organic worlds and transformational capacity. I like plays with strong muscular language that ask big questions, that move us all a little closer toward understanding ourselves and the world around us better, and enable is to build a better world with that knowledge. My favorite plays are those that can flip between laughter and tears in an instant because I believe that’s how our world works.
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Woolly Mammoth is “the hottest theater company in town” (Washington Post); priding itself on developing, producing, and making theatre that disrupts conventional processes and stimulates transformative experiences. For almost four decades, Woolly has held a unique position at the leading edge of the American theater, earning a reputation for staying “uniquely plugged in to the mad temper of the times” (New York Times). The co-leadership of María Manuela Goyanes (Artistic Director) and Emika Abe (Managing Director) is supported by a core company of artists that holds itself to a high standard of artistic excellence. Woolly is relentless in its desire to take risks, experiment, innovate, interrogate, and create a radically inclusive community. Located in Washington, DC, Woolly Mammoth stands upon occupied, unceded territory: the ancestral homeland of the Nacotchtank whose descendants belong to the Piscataway peoples.
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