Joan Marcus
Where We Belong
Madeline Sayet is a solitary storyteller who feels surrounded by multitudes in Where We Belong—a beautifully written, spoken, and staged 80-minute piece of theater that opens tonight at the Public Theater (to November 27). Designed with subtle stunning by Hao Bai and directed by Mei Ann Teo, Mohegan theater-maker Sayet tells a story of lines, borders, and boundaries, of cultural evolution and cultural erasure, the lands we are from and the lands we travel to, shifting identities, and shifting histories.
This funny, inquiring, and moving journey of discovery around her own Native American identity and cultural history occurs alongside a physical journey she takes to England to study for a Ph.D. in Shakespeare, and this at the time of Brexit, and what the means for a country like Britain—to turn inwards, to isolate, to become poisoned and poisonous to newcomers.