By Sue Bergstrom for Valdez City News –
The World’s Boarding School history is brutal. But in this acclaimed play, Natives run the school and Whites are being assimilated. Quoted from the Assimilation Kickstarter campaign.
Friday night’s performance of Assimilation was not a typical night at the theater. The play is performed in the round. In Valdez, it was staged in the combined ballrooms in the Valdez Convention and Civic Center. Rows of chairs were set in concentric circles around an open area, a small open area. There was no stage. Everyone was on the same level. The center area was small, to the point that players were often only inches away from people in the inner row. The effect was that the audience became personally involved in the story.
The personal involvement began as people lined up to purchase their tickets. Jack Dalton stood before the doors, greeting people, thanking them for coming, shaking hands, hugging people he knew. Once everyone was in and seated, he strode into the circle to greet his audience. He held up a plastic bag and explained that it contained artemisia tilesii, a type of wormwood with many uses in Alaska Native healing. He said that it would be passed from hand to hand around the healing circle after the performance to help people open up and know what to say.
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After the playwright had left the circle to sit in back and run the sound, young men in shabby kuspuks that looked as if they had been made out of pillow ticking appeared. One sat closely in front of the inner row on an overturned five gallon bucket. Two others placed more buckets in the central area. Music played. A small woman carrying a stick strode into the circle and began speaking softly. For the next two plus hours the story unfolded. Two small women, three young men, two sticks, three buckets a drum and an isolation area consisting of cardboard and a milk crate showed not only the brutality and unfairness of the native boarding schools but relationships between individual people, wisdom, insight and how different people react differently to the same stimulus as well as a glimpse of Yup’ik culture.
Afterwards, most people stayed. The cast joined the circle and Dalton passed the packet of artemesia. In addition to saying thank you for the performance, some shared experiences they felt related to what they’d just experienced. A Native American woman spoke of having more than one family member in the boarding school system. People also mentioned Japanese citizens who had been in the internment camps and the experience of European immigrants who were treated much the same in American schools. Some people cried. One woman sang, voice cracking then strong. Many people said they were not saying what they had planned to say. At Jack Dalton’s request, the packet passed around the circle again. It was after eleven o’clock when the last participants left the Civic Center ballrooms, stopping to hug cast members on their way out.
