Review: 'Hoop Jumper' offers look at allotment era in Oklahoma

“Hoop Jumper,” by Tulsa native Vicki Lynn Mooney, premiered Thursday in the basement CitySpace Theatre at Civic Center Music Hall.

The play, which won Oklahoma City Theatre Company’s Native American Play Festival, was rough in some spots, riveting in others.

Russ Tall Chief was measured and quietly resonant as Weli, a mixed-blood Cherokee barber, given the nickname Hoop Jumper by his tribe, for trying to please his white wife.

Tall Chief was just hesitant enough in an opening scene, in which their two daughters are put on the Dawes allotment rolls, by a grudging, grouchy white commissioner. More trouble comes when two old pals, played with the right roguishness by Roy Lumpkin and Deron Twohatchet, try to draw Weli back to booze, and the outlaw life.

Mariah Webb as Florence got across the young wife’s loving and materialistic sides, exacerbated by her father urging her to get more allotments — by having more children!