"Early on in “Tales of an Urban Indian,” a perfectly affable one-man show presented last year as part of the Public Theater’s first Native Theater Festival, Darrell Dennis confesses that this “is a story I need to tell, not because it’s extraordinary, but because it’s common, too common, and it’s not told enough.” I’m not so sure.

It’s true that you rarely see plays or movies about American Indians told from their point of view. (Mr. Dennis grew up on a reservation as part of the Shuswap nation in British Columbia before moving to Vancouver and becoming an actor.) Most portraits don’t get past cowboy and Indian stereotypes, which Mr. Dennis mocks. Even the more supposedly enlightened ones, like, say, “Dances With Wolves” (which for Mr. Dennis represents the height of “Native chic” in the 1990s) often end up making Indians, as Pauline Kael put it in her famously lacerating review, “like genial versions of us.”

“Tales of an Urban Indian,” which is being revived as part of the Public Lab series, doesn’t belittle or romanticize, but it still seems as formulaic as any Hollywood movie, a standard-issue coming-of-age tale about early romantic angst, surviving tragedy, and the thorny question of assimilation. Mr. Dennis adopts an ingratiating persona, cracking jokes at his own expense and turning church into a Fosse-like musical theater number. The pacing and tone often resemble those of a comedy club act. But that’s what makes Mr. Dennis a somewhat strange critic of cultural stereotyping. Whites here are distant and condescending. West Coasters are laid back and stoned. And when he anthropomorphizes the cockroaches in his apartment, they speak in a Mexican accent. It’s telling that when he sees God in an epiphany, it’s Jackie Mason."

Get the Story:
Take My Life, Please: The Indian Version (The New York Times 3/3)

Another Review:
'Urban Indian' explores beyond the reservation (AP 3/2)