The Day That Cries Forever

Dales Seeds - Playwright

by Karol Crosbie

On Good Friday, Mar. 27, 1964, a mammoth earthquake and resulting tsunami swallowed the tiny village of Chenega, Alaska. The island community of about 120 indigenous people was so remote that it wasn’t until the postal service tried to deliver mail that authorities noticed the village and a quarter of its population had disappeared, say survivors.

But the story of Chenega lives. Dale Seeds,Wooster professor of theatre, is using recently published transcripts from interviews with survivors to write a drama, which will be performed on the Wooster campus in 2008.

A performance of the Tuma Theatre at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Seeds, who has studied indigenous Alaskan performance since 1994, is currently on leave interviewing Chenega survivors. He says his biggest challenge with the project is to keep the power of the story where it belongs—in the hands of the survivors. “I can’t make it my story. I have been given permission to give one staged reading. I’m willing to abandon the project if the people of Chenega say I’ve gone too far.”

The source for the play is a collection of survivors’ memories by John Smelcer, a member of the Ahtna Athabaskan tribe, who has agreed to work with Seeds on a dramatic adaptation. The Day That Cries Forever tells the story of Larry, who was 14 and at boarding school when he learned that he had lost both his parents to the quake; Timmy, who remembered that the ground felt like Jell-O; Steve, who was five years old and who thought his father and sister had been swept away because God was angry with him for throwing rocks at birds; Margaret, who was 35 when the tidal wave swept her out to sea and who clung to a piece of debris until she was rescued.

Out of respect for the people of Chenega, Seeds will produce a staged reading rather than a play. The difference between the two forms, he explains, is “the difference between telling the story and being the story.” He will project video images of the island—footage he is taking this summer—in the background, to help give a sense of place.

In addition to the Chenega story, Seeds’ work with indigenous Alaskan drama has included transcribing performances of the Tuma Theatre at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Historically, native performances—fluid collections of dance, improvised storytelling, drumming, and singing—were rarely scripted. And partially for this reason, as the oral tradition of the elders disappears, Western theatre models have edged out indigenous styles.

“Writing down the plays is one way to begin understanding a process that can help indigenous people threatened with assimilation keep their own voice,” says Seeds.

Traditional native Alaskans have neither a word nor a concept for “theatre,” Seeds explains. “In Western culture,music, song, stories, art, and dance are often separate expressions, but in Yup’ik culture, they are interwoven. These activities are part of the web of indigenous culture.”

Seeds said he will never forget the first time he watched an Alaskan native performance. “As a westerner and an outsider, the first thing you want to do is to figure it out. You can’t do that. You must feel it. It’s a visceral experience. You feel the drum, you sense the tension in the movement of the dance, you watch actors transform into animals and back again.

“I’ve seen young people whose performances astound you, and when you talk with them afterwards, they can’t really explain what has happened. They understand transformation—the idea that a person can become a salmon, or a bear. I asked one actor who did a fox dance how he prepared for the performance. He said, ‘I hunt and trap fox. I know what they do.’

“In western theatre, we begin with a mental process.We think about the character, the script, and the text. Indigenous people begin theatre in the body.”