The arts community has been engaged in recent years in a trenchantly political conversation about (as the Hamilton lyric puts it) “Who tells your story?”
That’s also a question playwright Gab Cody grapples with in her new work, Inside Passage, as she seeks to uncover a story from her own family history that takes her down a path fraught with representational peril.
The story she seeks to tell, you see, is of her efforts to locate a pair of Native American siblings, Eddie and Sharon, who had joined Cody’s family as foster children during her early childhood in Alaska. When Cody’s parents’ marriage fell apart and her mother decided to return to California, Eddie and Sharon were removed from her family and sent to live with relatives in the Tlingit community. Four decades later, Cody set out to find out what happened to them, documenting both her preparations and the search itself on film. Inside Passage, the first manifestation of the results of that documentation, is a hybrid of theater and film that seeks to capture both Cody’s emotional, psychological, and geographical journey as she reconnects with these long-lost temporary members of her family, and Eddie and Sharon’s harrowing struggles with poverty, abuse, and neglect as indigenous children in the foster system.
By Wendy Arons, Pittsburgh Tatler
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