COMMENTARY : A Double-Edged Drama : As Native Americans applaud the rise of theater about their cultures, some worry that too much focus is on past tragedies and not on portraying a modern identity.

‘Black Elk Speaks” at the Mark Taper Forum is the biggest production about Native Americans to appear in Los Angeles in decades. The play, on tour from the Denver Center Theatre, gives Native Americans and non-Native Americans alike an occasion to rub elbows and build community. It also has prompted discussions of the history and future of such drama here, in the city with the largest urban Native American population in the country.

“Black Elk Speaks” works as a kind of “Schindler’s List” for Native Americans, reminding the public of the holocaust and wholesale land theft that brought once mighty tribal nations to their knees. It ends in 1931 with a stirring reunion between Black Elk, the Lakota holy man, and a wayward grandson, an act of tribal unity that extends to the audience as well.

Many Native Americans in the arts have expressed a twofold reaction to this play: Praise that Los Angeles finally has a large, powerful production honoring their history, along with a wish that local aboriginal dramatists seize this opportunity to produce new works, especially ones set in the present day. Not to take anything away from “Black Elk Speaks,” but to let this event come and go without a follow-through of some kind could inadvertently leave Black Elk’s people stranded at a low point in their history. Popular culture has a long-standing fascination with images of tribal defeat, which can sometimes leave contemporary descendants feeling a little stranded in their own time, as if they have less visibility and presence than their ancestors. It is critical that we never forget the genocide that happened in North America, and it is equally critical that we honor those who have survived and now live among us.

I have had some firsthand experience with this situation. In the 1970s, when “Black Elk Speaks” first appeared, my brother and I were child actors in a similar play called “Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee,” put on in Fairbanks, Alaska, about the gruesome massacre of mostly women and children in 1890. We loved being onstage, bringing characters and a whole community to life, but this, ironically, meant getting slaughtered night after night. It was an odd introduction to the performing arts, playing people with no apparent future.

To promote the creation of new and different images, the Taper will follow “Black Elk Speaks” with a Native American New Play Reading Series at the Taper, Too on Feb. 22-24. These works should bring some refreshing images to L.A., if only in staged readings.

Several local Native Americans have tried in the past to establish a theatrical presence in L.A., and this is a good occasion to recount their efforts. The first production may have been “The Robin Woman, Shanewis,” an opera staged at the Hollywood Bowl in 1926. It was based on the life of its star, Tsianina Blackstone, a Creek singer from Oklahoma who had moved to Burbank. The heroine, a prodigy plucked off the reservation to study voice at a “seaside bungalow in Southern California,” finds herself in a doomed love triangle and flees back to the woods. While written and scored by non-Native Americans, “Shanewis” was remarkable in that it presented a contemporary Native American having adventures in the city.

Shanewis’ struggle--to make it in Los Angeles--is also that of many of the 100,000 or more Native Americans who live here, an estimate used by service providers like the Southern California Indian Center. A majority of Native Americans now live in cities, with many of the L.A. residents having come here during the urban relocation programs of the 1950s-70s. The lure of Hollywood also drew many others. From time to time actors have put on small plays to create alternatives to the often sparse roles available to them in Hollywood.

In 1983, a group of actors founded the Native American Lab at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre. Modeled on the black, Asian and Latino labs and headed by Kiowa playwright and director Hanay Geiogamah, it lasted for three years and remains the most substantial effort to date to form a Native American theater here. In 1984 the company produced two comedies about Coyote, the bawdy trickster, which toured Southern California and the next year went to the American Folk Theatre Festival in New York.

From 1985-86 the company staged several dramas including “Sundancers” (a young man’s journey of self-discovery), “49” (young people resisting police at a powwow), and “Grandma” and “Grandpa” (elders making sense of the changes in modern life). The company ran out of steam in 1986, but Geiogamah, who wrote the latter three plays, now teaches theater at UCLA and directs the American Indian Dance Theatre, which will perform at the Thousand Oaks Civic Auditorium on Friday. He also produces movies for TNT.

Several short runs and one-night stands have taken place in recent years, and doubtless this list is incomplete. In 1990 the Spiderwoman Theatre from New York performed “Winnetou’s Snake Oil Show From Wigwam City” at Highways in Santa Monica, a satire of Wild West shows and New Age shamaism. Cherokee actor Wes Studi, star of the feature film “Geronimo, an American Legend,” performed his one-man play “Coyote Chews His Own Tale” at the West Coast Ensemble in 1990 and at the Court Theatre in 1992. Navajo actor Harrison Lowe, seen in last year’s “Geronimo” on television on TNT, put on a storytelling play, “Mystic Voices,” in 1989-90 at several venues. Shirley Checchoo, a Cree playwright and actress from Canada, brought her powerful “Path With No Moccasins” to the Met Theatre in 1992. And Stuart Bird, a cast member of the current “Black Elk Speaks,” originated the title role of “Pigeon Egghead” at the Lex Theatre in 1990, a play also about historical injustices done to Native Americans.

Several local Native Americans know “Black Elk Speaks” intimately from a 1984 production in Tulsa, Okla. Bob Hicks, a Creek-Seminole, directed that version with non-Native American David Carradine in the title role and the late Will Sampson, the Native American in the film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” as Red Cloud. Studi, who now lives in Santa Fe, was an actor, as was Lowe, who praises the new version for adding “humor so that common people can enjoy the show and still be interested in what took place back then.”

The challenge for future Native American theater is to brave the relatively unexplored waters of contemporary indigenous life, especially in cities, where people least expect to find it. Greg Sarris, from the Kashaya Pomo and Coast Miwok tribes in Northern California, and now a screenwriter and English professor at UCLA, says that “most people know Indians have been defeated and cheated. The bigger question is how they have survived. Who are they today?”

Sarris, Lowe and others hope that “Black Elk Speaks” will encourage Native Americans to write and produce new works, and thus honor Black Elk’s vision of a future for his people. Sarris imagines a deliciously complex play about a daughter who has been in town returning to the reservation with children by fathers of other races: It would explore “why she left and why she came back. It would be filled with the funky humor and pathos that often characterize our survival in the present day.”

Geiogamah fantasizes about doing a big musical comedy “with singing and dancing!” This would certainly present Native Americans in a lively and unconventional light. He adds that “it would be healthy for us to acknowledge (past injustices), then get over it and get on with it, with . . . producing beautiful live theater. There’s definitely a need for theater in our community.”

Hicks, aware of resident Native American companies in New York, Toronto and elsewhere, stresses “we need to take control of (our representation) and make things happen.”