ANTIKONI Director Jeanette Harrison Discusses Beth Antikoni at Bag & Baggage

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“Take Out the Cavalry and You Both May Live": Jeanette Harrison on Directing Antíkoni

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Before we even get to the play itself, there's the title to reckon with. Antíkoni — not Antigone . Director Jeanette Harrison explains the difference right away: "If you were a Nez Perce speaker and there was no accent on the I, that is exactly how you would pronounce it. But it's pronounced anti-koni . The reason it's not Antigone is because in Nez Perce there's no G so we substitute, and it becomes Antíkoni ."

Beth Piatote, a Nez Perce scholar and professor at UC Berkeley, has taken one of the foundational works of the Western canon and re-homed it entirely, setting it in a museum of Indigenous belongings in a post-Nationalist takeover America, populated by Nez Perce family members navigating survival under an increasingly authoritarian regime. The result is something Harrison describes as genuinely layered and alive.

"Every time I see the play, something new resonates for me," she says. "And I think that's what's so beautiful about Beth's work, it's so complex and just really beautiful."

A Different Kind of Villain

At the heart of Antíkoni is a conflict that Piatote deliberately refuses to simplify. Kreon, the museum director who collaborates with the regime, is played by Edward Lyons Jr., and Harrison is careful about how she frames him.

"In Beth's adaptation, you no longer have a hero and a villain. Kreon and Antíkoni both have valid points of view about how to approach survival. The real villain in this story is colonialism."

Directing Lyons Jr. through that complexity was one of the production's central challenges. "It's such a difficult line to navigate," Harrison says. "If you fall off on either edge, you tip into something that's not real, something that's almost a caricature. Where I went with this is to really lean into the love that this family has for each other. Everything that Kreon is doing is because he loves his family. He loves his people. He wants them to survive and endure."

The play's most emotionally raw scene, she says, is when Kreon is forced to confront his niece and decide her fate. "He's desperately trying to reach her. He's like, 'This is a way of death, not just for you, but for our people.' Having to turn in his own niece is something that just has to break his heart."

Meanwhile, Antíkoni is not simply a rebel for rebellion's sake. "She's concerned for his eternal soul," Harrison explains. "She's telling her uncle: you are putting yourself in this position by accommodating them. Your eternal soul is going to die. We have this responsibility to our eternal laws, and we can't break those just because it's inconvenient for the time we're living in now."

A line spoken by the prophet Tairasias captures the play's central tension with striking economy: Take out the cavalry, and you both may live. You're still fighting the cavalry's war.

"It's so applicable to our everyday world," Harrison says, "because there's so much internal strife in our community about how we live, and we have a tendency to turn on each other instead of uniting around the real enemy."

Aunties as Chorus

One of Piatote's most celebrated inventions is her transformation of the Greek tragic chorus into a trio of Nez Perce aunties. Harrison is enthusiastic about what this shift unlocks.

"They are irreverent. They are exactly what you want your aunties to be. And they tell traditional Nez Perce stories. It is in those stories that we have the seeds and the road map for how to navigate the situation we're in."

She describes a scene that gets at the heart of this dynamic: a young character comes to an elder in crisis, needing answers. The elder tells her a story and then simply ends it. "She's like, 'What? See what? I have no idea what I'm supposed to get out of this story. I'm even more confused now than I was when I came to you.'"

Harrison sees the humor and the wisdom working together. "You can't spoon-feed the answer. The stories provide guidance, but you have to figure out the answers for yourselves. Which really is the role of aunties in our culture, they're the advisors."

She also notes that in many traditional Native storytelling traditions, stories don't follow a Western beginning-middle-end structure. "They're more episodic. As one of the aunties says, 'Our stories are for all time.'"

Building the World

Set designer Tyler Buswell faced a particular challenge at Bag & Baggage's intimate stage: how do you transform a Nez Perce family home into a colonial museum without a massive set change?

The solution, Harrison says, is elegant in its simplicity. "The play opens in a Nez Perce family home. It is warm, full of love, laughter and food. Then there's a scenic transformation where we go from that home into the museum, except the set doesn't change that much. The things that were part of this family's everyday life — a wooden spoon, a drum — are now suddenly on display. The textiles all come away. We lose the warmth. The lighting shifts. There's a Pepper's Ghost effect where you see a digitized version of some artifacts."

The staging makes the metaphor visceral. Their lives are on display in a museum. "You get this feeling that colonialism is just creeping in, eating away at the family life and the physical heart of the play."

Kellen Trenal: The Textile Artist Who Stole the Show

If one collaborator comes up repeatedly in Harrison's telling, it's Kellen Trenal, the Nez Perce textile artist and regalia maker who designed the production's costumes and properties. Harrison, who has worked on Broadway, gives Trenal high praise.

"I have not worked with a Costume Designer who did a better job of designing each character's costume with an eye to their arc in the play, and how each character transforms according to that arc, than Kellen managed to achieve."

Trenal is not a theater Costume Designer by training. They are a textile artist, actor, and regalia maker who came to this production through a staged reading Harrison directed at Gonzaga University in Spokane in early 2024. "He was taught by his great-grandmother and other elders. He is just so fast, within minutes of finishing a conversation with him, he has a whole new piece of art ready to hand off."

The weaving projects the aunties work on during the performance were all started by Trenal, who also taught the entire cast the traditional weaving practices they carry out onstage. "I would work with Kellen again in a heartbeat on any play, any show."

NAGPRA, Repatriation, and the Weight of the Story

The play's backdrop of a museum holding Indigenous belongings is not abstract. It is rooted in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) passed in 1990, which requires federally funded institutions to return Native American human remains and sacred objects to their rightful communities.

Thirty-six years later, only about 30% of those institutions have fully complied.

"Museums have slow-rolled their compliance," Harrison says. "And then there's a really special heartbreak: the Chinook Nation lost their federal recognition. If you're not federally recognized, you can't reclaim your belongings. You have ancestors you cannot claim."

The issue is personal for Piatote as well. As a professor at UC Berkeley, she was briefly on the university's committee working on NAGPRA compliance. "They don't want to return these remains," Harrison says plainly. "They want to be able to keep them and study them."

There are also spiritual dimensions. "For a lot of us, we have traditional beliefs where the spirit can't rest if the body is separated. And the colonial powers knew that. As part of their systemic attempts to eradicate Native people, they would chop off the head and send it on a cross-continental tour."

"Even today, when some of us cremate family members, our ashes stay together," Harrison continues. "In Western culture it's commonplace to scatter ashes in different places. For us, there's still that belief that if the body is separated, the spirit can't move on."

A pre-show lecture on Saturday, June 20th will be led by Ryan Younker, who will speak specifically about NAGPRA and how it intersects with the world of the play.

For All Audiences

Antíkoni is recommended for ages 11 and up. Harrison is thoughtful about what that age recommendation means in practice.

"The themes are really universal, but who you identify with may change depending on your stage of life. Right now, there is so much desire to speak truth to power, to stand up to authoritarianism, to figure out how we get through this moment so we can come back stronger. Your perspective on those issues may help influence whose struggle you particularly resonate with."

For non-native audiences, she hopes the experience offers something beyond education. "This story is literally a mashup of Western culture and Indigenous storytelling traditions, bringing them together in conversation with each other. It should feel very much like it is also for non-native audiences."

"I think where we really come to an appreciation of one another is when we fully see the specificity of one another."

"I hope that when they leave this show, they feel like they became part of this family."

What Comes Next

Antíkoni was never intended to be a one-off. Harrison and Nic Whitcomb at Bag & Baggage built the Native Performing Arts Network as an ongoing collaboration, with at least one native production per year and plans for a third show in 2027, details not yet announced. Future productions will travel beyond the Hillsboro stage, eventually reaching reservation communities around the state.

Harrison herself closes the show on Sunday and leaves Monday for a week-long residency at Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Ground Floor, where she's developing a new work with Vicky Ramirez and Tai Defoe about the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the world's longest-running participatory democracy and, as it happens, a documented influence on the U.S. Constitution.

This summer, Native Performing Arts Network is also hosting a sleepaway arts camp for Native youth at Portland State University. Applications are currently open.

As for Antíkoni , Harrison believes it belongs in a longer conversation. "I really do believe this play has the potential to be part of our canon for a very long time. The text is so rich and so layered. Just like Shakespeare, Piatote gives you so many clues about character based on the structure of her poetic verse. I feel like we barely scraped the surface."

Antíkoni , written by Beth Piatote and directed by Jeanette Harrison, plays through June 22 at Bag & Baggage Productions in Hillsboro. A pre-show lecture on NAGPRA by Ryan Yoner takes place Saturday evening before the performance.

Tickets are nearly sold out for all remaining performances, so get yours quickly.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/portland/article/Interview-Jeanette-Harrison-of-ANTIKONI-at-Bag-Baggage-20260616)._