Madeline Sayet’s career has been primarily as a stage director during the past decade. But she will be performing her one-woman show, “Where We Belong,” on a national tour starting April 15. It is scheduled to run through 2024, with stops at an array of esteemed theaters including the Goodman in Chicago, Seattle Rep, and off-Broadway’s Public Theater in New York City. (No Connecticut locales scheduled yet.)

Sayet, who is a member of the Mohegan tribe, wrote “Where We Belong” to deal with her feelings about Shakespeare and colonialism after she went to England to get her PhD in Shakespeare studies.

Doing a national tour of this magnitude is significant enough. But there is another newsworthy aspect: Each theater on the tour has to sign a “Community Accountability Rider” in which they agree to various stipulations, including promises to engage with the Native American tribes in their area and never to do redface (which is casting non-Native actors in Native roles).

Sayet, who grew up in Norwich and Uncasville, says that “Where We Belong” is essentially three plays at once. It’s about Sayet’s going to the UK to study in 2015, and how that mirrors the journey her ancestors took when they went to England in the 1700s on a diplomatic mission after treatise betrayals.

But “Where We Belong” is also about the relationship between Shakespeare’s language and colonialism, and about a wolf who becomes a bird. She says of the latter aspect, “Mohegan means Wolf People, and my Mohegan name means Blackbird. So it’s actually about being able to hold both those identities at once. How can you walk in both of those worlds knowing what it is to see things in different ways?”

Sayet says her biggest concern with bringing “Where We Belong” on tour was that it would displace other Native plays.

“I didn’t want it to be a situation where (the theaters) could tokenistically say, ‘Oh, we’ve got our Native play, and now we’re done,’” she says.

She was also worried that theaters would bring in “Where We Belong” but not do anything about the issues in the play and end up doing redface again next season.

So she created the Community Accountability Rider. With that, each theater that presents “Where We Belong” agrees to do another play by a Native writer. Every theater commits to holding an event alongside the show that supports Native language revitalization movements in their area. The venue promises to develop a relationship with the Native peoples whose land the theater is on. It will offer free tickets to all Native audiences. It will acknowledge past instances of doing redface and pledge to never do it again.

Other Native playwrights have created riders before; Tara Moses, for instance, requires theaters to have Native directors work on her plays. But Sayet’s is on a different scale in part because it’s a tour, not a performance at one venue.

While some people voiced concern that theaters wouldn’t sign on for the rider, Sayet figured that, if that were the case, those were probably not good places for the show anyway.

As far as she knows, no theater has refused to sign the rider. She adds, “The tour is managed by Broadway and Beyond Theatricals and so that would likely weed them out early the same way that whether or not the set can fit in the space would.”

With the participating theaters promising to engage with the Native community, Sayet says, the tour “became exciting to me because it ties back to all the other work I’d been doing in terms of promoting Native theater in all these other ways. Then suddenly I’m like, ‘OK, yeah, how can this also be a catalyst for whatever happens next at these theaters with other Native artists?’”

Figuring things out

Sayet wrote what became “Where We Belong” not to be a play but to try to work out some issues after she moved back from England to Connecticut.

“It was the first time as a Mohegan person, when I came back to Connecticut, that my feet didn’t root quite right to the earth anymore. I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s so weird.’ Normally, whenever I came back home, it felt so clearly like my home, I felt so connected. I (now) felt distanced in a way I had never felt distanced before,” she says.

“So I was trying to figure out what that meant. And as a Mohegan person, does missing England make me a traitor? (It brought up) all these things just in relation to the history of my people and colonialism and all this. I was trying to process what it means to be an indigenous person in a global society.”

Sayet, who has mostly written adaptations of classics, says she had never written anything as personal as “Where We Belong” before.

Terrifying prospect of a tour

In addition to her work as a director, Sayet is an assistant English professor at Arizona State University and executive director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program. During the pandemic, she did playwriting and a bit of performing as well.

Last year, Sayet starred in a digital version of “Where We Belong” recorded by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, which is based in Washington, D.C. (The production, like the tour, is directed by Mei Ann Teo.)

Maria Goyanes, artistic director of Woolly Mammoth, broached the concept of a tour during the making of that streaming adaptation.

The idea of performing again, on this scale and for this length of time, was daunting to Sayet at first.

“I thought, ‘I don’t know if I would survive that. I think it would kill me,’” she says with a laugh.

Because the material pulls from her personal experience, it’s very raw for her to act the piece.

When she had to film the adaptation, she did it without an audience, since theaters weren’t open yet.

“I was standing alone in the dark, basically having a mental breakdown by myself every time we did it. It was very different than the experience of theater, where there’s a group of people coming together and responding,” she says.

A live trial run of “Where We Belong” at Baltimore Center Stage in October 2021 convinced her that she could handle the tour.

“Once I do it a few times, it does become more like a play and less like me reliving my own trauma,” she says. “… I think it’s a very exciting idea now that I’ve come to terms with my extreme fear.”

When Sayet performed it at Baltimore Center Stage, she says that, in response to telling her story in the show, audience members would come up and tell her their stories, or would send her messages online. Consequently, it wasn’t as painful for her to relive personal experiences in the play because she and theatergoers were going on the journey together.

“I think the specificity of it being so personal actually made it more accessible in a lot of ways. People have continuously resonated with it, which is mind-boggling to me because it was this thing I wrote because I was trying to figure out how to make sense out of the world. It was also right after Brexit and Trump’s election, and I was trying to figure out why we draw lines between each other, and all these things were on my mind.”

And now she’s enthusiastically anticipating the start of the tour.

“Even for a performer, to do it as long as this is going on, is still a challenge, so I’m going to learn a lot from it,” she says.