He's a hefty, handsome guy who'd have
been an ornament to the cast photograph; besides, as playwright, he was
a principal in the enterprise. But senior Alex Sherker (pronounced sher-CARE)
wasn't among the happy young actors and crew pictured in their post-applause
glow after the opening night of his play, Coyote Gets Sober, last
February 7 at the Hampden Theater. He was tied up talking with two
increasingly agitated young women about what they saw as his "negative
stereotyping" of Native Americans.
"Well, thank you for being offended
for me," Sherker says that his reaction to the girls' objections was
beginning to be. Born in New York City in 1973, of mixed Cherokee and Abenaki
extraction, Sherker doesn't "look Indian" except to the extent
that he chooses: black braid, cowboy hat, necklace of copper-wrapped bits
of bone. "You almost look as Indian as some of the guys on the rez,"
says "apple-girl" suspiciously in one scene of Sherker's play.
"Shit, you could even pass for white, you don't need to be out here,"
says "cop" in another.
The
character called "friend" in Coyote sketched in the stage
directions as "left college to find himself, visiting coyote, light skinned
mix"is a fair abstraction of the author. But Sherker, who entered UMass
in 1992 and expects to finish his B.F.A. this year, also sees himself in the
title character, the destructive and self-destructive trickster who "lives
on the rez, drinks, snags, fights, deals, etc."
In fact, there's no one in the play with
whom Sherker doesn't identify. There's nothing in it that he hasn't experienced
or observed: either in his own struggles with drugs and drinkhe's now back
to practicing his Cherokee tradition, in which those substances are proscribed,
he saysor in the time he spent on a reservation in Quebec during one of
his time-outs from UMass.
Certainly, the Coyote characters
are not idealizations. "Apple girl: as hot a mama as skins can get,
but denies being Indian herself." "Baby's mom: a heavy user,
only seventeen but well on her way to being a rez floozy." "Baby:
comatose, drooling, and hooked up to an oxygen tank in a stroller (baby's
part is actually played by a rag doll)." But Sherker sees them not
as stereotypes but as archetypes. Asked what he thinks would be the response
to these characters by people who actually harbor the stereotypes of drunken,
shiftless Indians that the young women insisted he is reinforcing, Sherker
says, "I think that because the play sets those bad aspects in context,
they could identify with them.
"I
mean, these problems aren't confined to Indians. It's human beings saying,
`What the hell have we got, what good have we gotwhy should I stay alive,
why should I stay sober?' I think those people could maybe see that they're
just as miserable as we are."
Alex Sherker's gifts as a writer have
received ample recognition. His Coyote won the campus'? James Baldwin
Memorial Playwrighting Award. He's twice won creative writing awards established
by the class of 1940. He's a published poet. However, his major is in art:
he sees himself primarily as a sculptor, and a minimalist sculptor at that.
His departmental hero is sculptor Dale Schlappi. He also praises painter
Jerry Kearns, creator of a course that connects UMass art students with
the Manhattan art scene which this NYC homeboy wants to be in the best
possible position to conquer, should he so choose.
He sees a connection between the writing
and the sculpture: the writing is stripped down and abstract, too, in its
way. Nobody in Coyote has a proper name. The set is minimal. And
the intentions are universal: the coyote tales in Native tradition teach
of the rapscallion forces of deception and destruction that bedevil all
human experience. One of the striking visual features of Coyote Gets
Sober is the sharp-snouted mask worn by the title character until the
penultimate scene. In the final scene, coyote is not wearing the mask.
Friend is.
Junior Jesus MacLean in the title role and sophomore Heather Lord as "mom" in Coyote Gets Sober.
"That's what we're taught," says Sherker. "That's why you've got to be careful around coyote medicine. Coyote always dies at the end, but he always comes back. You take on coyote, you'll die, and he'll come back."
-PW
