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Image in Reverse. Arthur Kopit's heart is doubtless in the right place, and Indians is a poor play. Kopit has tried to mesh together segments of a vaudeville-style Buffalo Bill Wild West show with segments of Hochhuth-Brechtian didactic polemicism. The idea is to spank the audience while making it laugh, but the whole thing refuses to cohere. As Kopit describes the despoliation and destruction of the Indian, he seems to subscribe to the proposition that might makes wrong—which is no truer than that might makes right. Granted that the Indian was treated with huge inequity, the Indian way of life was nonetheless an ossified form that could not have survived into the 20th century. If the Indian could have merged easily into U.S. society as it expanded westward, he probably would have lost even more of his identity than he has on the reservations. Since the Kopit script calls for only good redskins and prevailingly wicked white men, the play is almost an image in reverse of the corny melodramas of the past in which the only good Indians were dead ones.
The evening thrums to the beat of tom-toms, whirls through a savage sun dance, flickers and blazes with an entire symphony of lighting effects and ends with anthropological eeriness as a weird array of totemically masked figures stalk among the massacred Indians. These effects are attention getters that distract one from the incessant preachiness of the play. As Sitting Bull, a South Sea islander named Manu Tupou gives a powerful portrayal of wounded dignity and contained ferocity. Stacy Keach, 28, who is New York's most talked about young actor, plays Buffalo Bill with relish, flamboyance, charm, and a stage presence that radiates masculinity.