Reviewed by Ysa Madrigal
Hollywood Fringe at Eastwood Performing Arts Center
Closed
This review is part of the Stage Raw/Unusual Suspects Youth Journalism Fellowship
“Mission trips are basically a free trip and hard labor; I think of prison in a very similar capacity,” recalls a 14-year-old queer Cherokee descendant with bustling ADHD, between the breaths of cartwheels.
In her solo production, playwright/performer Samantha Bowling portrays a younger Samantha on a mission trip to her ancestral lands in West Virginia with her “cool” church which sings Oasis’s “Wonderwall” instead of worship songs. Bowling opens the final Hollywood Fringe show with a prayer, land acknowledgement, and a brief sound bath.
Samantha is silly, spunky, crude, and endlessly curious. She tells her story in the first person, bouncing between the past and present, distinguished by lighting changes and diffused scents to paint the different settings. Samantha’s journey brings light to a different kind of salvation than expected: “revelations” about her history and identity as a young queer native girl.
On the trip Samantha meets her girl-crush Bailey, whose thick Louisiana accent, voiced by a recorded Bowling, hilariously calls for captions to be projected on a screen behind Samantha, Samantha describes her sexuality as “more akin to an administrator; expected to be distributed carefully or buried in the ground.” However, upon meeting Bailey and adopting her style, her “only mission was to make her giggle.”
The task at hand is to repair elderly LuAnn’s roof, who Samantha described as “the first brown person [Samantha] saw since [she] waved goodbye to [her] dad in Ohio.” Asking LuAnn for hand soap unexpectedly became a radicalizing experience for Samantha and Bailey. LuAnn only had “Comet” bleach to offer– highlighting her poverty which was “the scariest thing in the world” to Samantha. Samantha sang about her sorrowful revelation per Bowling’s original song, “Off the Grid,” accompanied by rain scents.
After leaving LuAnns house, Samantha reminisced about her grandma, triggering thoughts about her inherited sexual repression from the systematic assault of native women in her family. Then, very unexpectedly, Samantha invited an audience member, Caitlin, to play her grandma and reenact their first conversation about having “wicked thoughts.” As Caitlin learned her lines, Samantha walked up to the audience and pop-quizzed us about land knowledge, rewarding correct answers with lollipops.
After these silly interactions, Samantha returned to the mission during a rainy night. The audience, guided by screen-projected instructions, made the rain sounds with a series of motions like rubbing hands, snapping and stomping– filling the stage with all of our energy. Samantha sang about her imagination of pre-colonial society and the loneliness of the “industrial promised land of consumption” to the background sounds.
At the end of the mission trip, a sermon surprisingly spoke to Samantha, who was then reminded of where she fits in God’s preferences as a queer indigenous person. Realizing they were “preaching about freedom in the stolen lands of the Cherokee,” Samantha thought “I think we’re the bad guys. But which we is me?”
The show concluded with Bowling performing an original song “Welcome Home,” a reimagined version of John Denver’s “Take me Home (Country Roads)” with Cherokee elements while playing sound bowls. The lyrics included bittersweet lines such as “West Virginia’, doesn’t suit ya/ You’re Tsalagi just like me.” Samantha encouraged the audience to sing along with lyrics on the screen before she made her exit. The theater was filled with beautiful harmonies – unsurprisingly, seeing as most of them seemed to also be musical theater nerds – a heartwarming finale. The show was a relief to watch, pause and laugh, ]and love.
Hollywood Fringe at the Eastwood Performing Arts Center, 1089 N Oxford Ave, Hlywd.; Closed.
