The performers, who trace their roots to a dozen Indigenous nations within the borders of the United States, Canada and the Philippines, created the piece using the “story weaving” method. Spiderwoman Theater developed the technique in the 1970s, when the group was a fixture of the downtown theater scene. Over the years, the company has used it to intertwine narratives about everything from family violence to cultural appropriation with pop songs and bawdy jokes and dreamlike images.
“It’s important to tell these stories, but they have to be done in a certain way where people don’t feel like they’re being hit over the head,” Ms. Miguel said. “You can tell a painful story and then tell an awful disgusting joke and give a raspberry. You can take things and turn them around.”
On a recent Monday, Ms. Miguel took a break from her rehearsal schedule to ride around her neighborhood, telling stories about her own childhood. She sat in the back of a 2012 Toyota Matrix, a red leather hat trimmed with wolf fur resting on the seat beside her, while her wife, Deborah Ratelle, handled the driving. Ms. Miguel has short, silvery hair and a cascading, shoulder-shaking laugh. She wore turquoise rings on most of her fingers and had on mismatched earrings — one turquoise, the other made of oyster shell. “I don’t like sameness,” she said.
Heading down Court Street, she pointed at Cobble Hill Cinema, a longtime movie theater that used to be called the Lido. “That was one of the places that my father used to stand outside in his outfit to ballyhoo all these movies,” she recalled. Her father, a Kuna from Panama, would supplement the money he earned as a dockworker by donning the war-bonnet of a Plains Indian chief and beckoning people into the theater to see the latest John Wayne picture. He had lots of jobs like that: playing a generic Indian at Thanksgiving pageants, performing at ceremonies commemorating the supposed sale of Manhattan to the Dutch.
In the summer, he would take Ms. Miguel’s older sisters to Golden City, a long-since-forgotten amusement park in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, where they would dance and sing and sit around in teepees. Gloria, who plays the role of The Elder in “Misdemeanor Dream,” dreaded these outings. “People would come and look and say, “Oh, look at the Indians, they’re eating spaghetti,’” she recalled. It turned her off from doing any theatrical work that involved her heritage until, as a divorced mother of two in her late 40s, she joined her sisters in establishing Spiderwoman Theater. “We got to tell our stories our own way,” she said.