By ARIADNE WILL
Sentinel Staff Writer
In dialogue with the medium it uses, Perseverance Theatre’s “Spirit of the Valley” offers a play that is both farcical and pithy. The production uses Zoom to deliver the drama live, to audiences everywhere.
Actors are each in their own Zoom box and are projected onto different painted sets, where they interact with the two-dimensional background and other characters. The result is slick for a virtual production, which contrasts with other virtual theater that leave actors in their isolated Zoom boxes.
The play is written and directed by Juneau-based director, producer, and playwright Frank Henry Kaash Katasse, who has been with the regional Perseverance Theatre since 2008. His play builds from Tlingit lore – Katasse himself is of the Tsaagweidí clan.
The plot centers on Tlingit twins Kaash and Shaa, who are on vacation with their family in a cabin located in a dense forest near a river. But the story changes when the cabin is picked up and transported, and Kaash and Shaa find themselves deposited in that same forest – only now the forest has browned, the river has turned to mud, and the twins are separated from each other, their cabin, and their parents.
The twins begin searching for each other as they make their way up the riverbed and toward the play’s namesake, the Spirit of the Valley. The mission is to retrieve their cabin and their parents, but the quest soon turns into a teachable moment.
“Spirit” appears to be commenting on disposability consciousness. That is, the notion that our trash does not disappear when we throw it away. The twins run into several animals on their journey, many of whom scold them for their failure to pick up and pack out the trash from their cabin.
“We always pack our trash out,” the twins say when confronted. “That wasn’t us.”
But the animals say that it doesn’t matter who it was. Eagle asks if the twins have ever let a straw or plastic bag loose “just once.”
“All those justs add up to something unjust,” he says.
Shayna Jackson, Jake Waid and Jill Kaasteen Meserve perform a scene from Perseverance Theater’s production of “Spirit of the Valley” online. (Photo provided to the Sentinel)
The unfairness here strikes viewers – this is a play based around the legends of the original stewards of this land, and yet the descendants of those stewards are the ones being chastised by the animals of the forest.
This is the other lesson of the play: stewardship.
“This is haa aaní – our land,” Eagle tells the siblings. The audience chews on this, but the siblings are still in shock from falling into this inverted “Wizard of Oz” reality, and are clearly scared.
Plus, they have witnessed a lot since beginning their journey: a rapping raven, a bear with gas issues, and an eagle whose child won’t stop interrupting his monologue.
The 90-minute play premieres at 7:30 p.m. tonight. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit ptalaska.org/sotv
