Instead of being narrated by its original “historian” character — sometimes dressed as a park ranger — “The Lost Colony” is guided by Littleturtle, a Native American storyteller. Where the Indian characters that colonists confronted once spoke gibberish and pidgin English, they now sing authentic tribal songs and speak Algonquian.
Most profoundly, those Native American characters are finally being played by Native American actors, instead of White actors coated in reddish spray tan.
The changes are part of the Roanoke Island Historical Association’s ongoing three-year effort to refresh the 86-year-old play. Some updates are aimed at today’s video game sensibilities, such as quicker pacing and high-tech light projections. But others are an attempt to rebalance the story itself, giving value to more than one point of view.
In this era when teaching history has become politically charged, any tinkering with tradition is risky. Many of the new elements have stirred anger among generations of Outer Banks residents and vacationers who grew up with the old version, which won a special Tony award in 2013 and in which the beloved actor Andy Griffith got his start.
“Totally ruined this family classic,” one reviewer wrote on Tripadvisor, after the initial changes were implemented. “Be Woke somewhere else but not here.”
For opening night in 2021, the first time that all Native actors played Native characters, management hired sheriff’s deputies to guard cast members’ lodging in case of threats. Nothing materialized, but debate has raged since about whether the modernized production strays too far from Pulitzer-winning playwright Paul Green’s original vision.
No group has been more vocal than the play’s alumni, many of whom are organizing an online “‘conversation’ about the future of the Lost Colony production” and battling management for access to financial information, worried the changes are causing damage.
Georgann Eubanks, executive director of the Paul Green Foundation, said she thinks Green would see honor in the effort to bring his work up to date.
“I think the parts he wrote for the Native people, or at least the way they were portrayed there with the red face and the stereotypes that were present back then, he would probably want to be changing that by now,” Eubanks said.
A reckoning was overdue, Littleturtle, 77, said before going onstage for a recent evening’s performance. “Our ancestors were the ones that were here,” she said. Over the centuries, her people were killed, driven out, discriminated against and largely forgotten.