If you know the name of the playwright Paul Green, 40 years after his death, it could be because you know The Lost Colony.
The legendary play has had a remarkable run. Since 1937, it has been staged every summer on Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina, with only two interruptions—three years during World War II, and once again in 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown.
On May 28, performances of The Lost Colony resume at the outdoor Waterside Theatre in Manteo, North Carolina, with limited audience seating and a scaled-down cast—about 55 roles, down from around 100.
This season, the play is at a turning point. Ticket sales have been on the decline since the 90s, and before the pandemic, total sales averaged between 32,000-35,000 tickets a year. To remain viable, the production needs to sell about 60,000 tickets a season, according to the Roanoke Island Historical Association, the production arm of the play.
That’s one of the reasons changes are on the horizon.
A new artistic director, and a team of Native American theater professionals and community advisors, have been tasked with jettisoning the show’s cultural insensitivities and remaking the show for modern audiences.
“We want to be respectful of all the cultures involved,” Jeff Whiting, a New York-based director and choreographer brought on as artistic director, told the INDY.
This season, he says, there will be expanded use of the Algonquian language spoken by the Native people of Roanoke Island, and the costumes and ritual dances have been redesigned with authenticity in mind. And then there’s the most important change: for the first time, all of the Indigenous roles—about 15—will be performed by people of Native American heritage.
Most of those cast are Lumbee Indians from the Pembroke area, which is the center of the tribe; in addition, Lumbee Tribe cultural enrichment coordinator Kaya Littleturtle and Lumbee Tribal chairman Harvey Godwin, Jr. were both brought on as artistic advisors to the production.
According to historian Malinda Maynor Lowery, author of 2018’s The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, the Native people of Roanoke Island “are probably among the ancestors” of the Lumbee.
Kayla Oxedine, 30, is one of the new generation of Lost Colony performers. Oxendine, who is Lumbee and from Pembroke, plays a crucial role in the new Lost Colony—that of the Historian or Storyteller, a recurring presence in the play and provider of historical context. She envisions the role as an “an elderly Indigenous woman combined with a Native American spirit guide” and her costume will be traditional with a pinecone patchwork.
“That’s something very specific and held very near and dear to my tribe,” Oxendine says. “If you take the bottom of a pinecone and you see that pattern, that is what you actually see in the patchwork. It’s usually right around the heart-center.”
Malinda Maynor Lowery remembers taking her then-11-year-old daughter to see a 2018 performance of The Lost Colony.
“My daughter is Lumbee like I am,” Lowery says, “and she grew up in a nest of Lumbee culture. She’s very accustomed to being around a lot of non-Indians. She’s adapted to a lot of different communities. I was trying to see it through her eyes. There was one scene—the first scene where Manteo appears on stage. She whispered to me: ‘Are those our ancestors?’”
“I saw how fascinated she was by the play’s ability to take us back in time,” Lowery continues, “The transporting power of theater is my biggest takeaway, the magical power of history.”
The Lost Colony, a cornerstone of Outer Banks tourism, has long been a cultural lightning rod.
Scholar Jedediah Purdy argues that the colonists have been romanticized, including in their depiction in the play. Tens of thousands of tourists, he wrote in a 2015 New Yorker magazine piece, “have watched this rendition of the lost colony’s failure as the first step in building an American empire of liberty and opportunity.” The play, as Purdy characterizes it, is a “progressive-nationalist musical drama.”
“However the colonists envisioned themselves,” Purdy wrote, “they were pawns in an Atlantic-wide contest for bullion and shipping lanes.”
Laurence Avery, editor of A Southern Life: Letters of Paul Green, 1916–1981, says that Green—despite his largely progressive legacy—had some blind spots in his depictions of Indigenous people, especially the way they spoke.
“At the time he wrote the play, that’s what the audiences would have expected them to sound like—like Indians in the movies,” says Avery, who also knew Green personally. “He wasn’t conscious that he was thinking in terms of cliches when he wrote The Lost Colony.”
Green may have not gotten it right in The Lost Colony, but he is recognized as being ahead of his time in other ways. His New York Times obituary on May 6, 1981, declared him “one of the first American white playwrights to write works for black actors and to tackle such modern themes as lynching and prejudice.” His play In Abraham’s Bosom, about a Black man’s attempt to establish a school for Black children, earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1927, and Laurence Avery says Green was “one of the leaders in the fight to integrate schools” in North Carolina.
According to Avery, in the decades after the play’s premiere, Green became increasingly concerned about justice and representation for Native people. By that time though, Avery says, Green didn’t have much to do with the play.
Green first came up with the idea for a play about the lost colony in 1921, while a student at UNC-Chapel Hill. In a fit of artistic enthusiasm, he took a trip down to the coast to see the site of the settlement.
As he wrote in an essay, years later, he entered the “little grove of pines and live oaks on the edge of Croatan Sound and stood beside the small squat stone erected in 1896 to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the new world.”
Back in Chapel Hill, Green drafted a one-act play focused on Virginia Dare, but was dissatisfied, writing that “my inspiration had petered out.”
Years passed, Green returned to the idea. The finished work, a Depression-era joint effort of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project and the Roanoke Island Historical Association, commemorated the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the colonists in the New World.
The original performance was an assemblage of locals and professional actors and singers coming together in what Paul Green called a symphonic drama.
That summer of 1937, more than 50,000 people, including President Franklin Roosevelt, attended the performances. Three million people have filled audience seats since.
This summer, Jeff Whiting—who comes from the world of Broadway musicals—says that although The Lost Colony has singing and dancing, it’s not exactly a musical and is “really intended to be a play and to follow the history of these people.”
Still, a certain amount of razzle-dazzle is essential.
“Thanks to Netflix and HBO our attention span has shortened,” says Whiting. “My mission as I’ve been devising this production is to provide visual spectacle that you might expect at a venue as huge as this one.”
Even so, all eyes will be focused, this season, on the portrayal of Indigenous people.
Board chair Kevin Bradley of the Roanoke Island Historical Association has led the cultural changes to the new production. The association, he says, has been considering changes to the play for years, but the COVID lockdown spurred the board to put those changes into action.
So did a petition titled “Stop Performing Racist, Redface Performances of ‘The Lost Colony’ in Manteo, NC” which began circulating via Change.org last summer. The petition called for the play to “halt production permanently” because of its use of non-Native people to play Native roles.
The petition’s creator, Adam Griffin, a Los Angeles-based casting producer and graduate of Eastern Carolina University, estimates that about 100 of the 679 signees are former Lost Colony cast members. The petition is no longer active, he says, as the play’s producers have “fulfilled what we asked of them.”
Whether or not the petition was the impetus for the changes, it did seem to accelerate them.
“My perspective was: ‘Hey, I want to talk to this guy,’” Kevin Bradley says. “Much of what he said was true. And we needed to own that.”
Though Griffin still wishes that the play would fold permanently, he says that he hopes that “the Native American people they’ve hired will be listened to.”
In reflecting on The Lost Colony, the historian Malinda Maynor Lowery acknowledges Paul Green’s contributions to the fight for social justice but laments his inconsistencies and the “static” Native characters that he wrote.
“Native people in the play don’t really have personalities,” she says.
“Paul Green may have played a large role in advancing a system of equality,” she says. “But his efforts were not equally distributed. As a historian, I try to avoid judging individuals in the past. Everybody must do better when they know better. Should Paul Green have known better? Probably he did know better. He didn’t do better.”
The story of the lost colony itself has been an alluring subject in part because of its mystery. What happened to the colonists? Maybe they were killed. Maybe they died of starvation or diseases. Maybe they dispersed. Maybe they were assimilated and welcomed into the Indigenous communities. Maybe we’ll never know. Historians are still researching and debating, as they have for centuries, and archeologists are still digging.
Meanwhile, The Lost Colony goes on.
Kayla Oxendine, the actress playing the role of the Historian, is excited for performances to begin.
“We’re making history right now—it’s a progression in history,” Oxendine says. “I feel honored to be part of it.”
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