Colony Collapse and a Defense of the Maternal

Laura Shamas’s Chasing Honey

November 14, 8pm
Cast: Cara Gee, Sheila Tousey, James Fall, Chaske Spencer, Tamara Podemski, Cody Lightning, Gary Farmer, Ryan Victor Pierce

By Tom Pearson

The layers upon layers of analogy and metaphor in Laura Shamas’s play Chasing Honey, read at The Public Theater on November 14, 2008, could, in the hands of a less adept writer, become an overwhelmingly muddy mess. But Shamas is, thankfully, a writer of great delicacy and depth. Her characters speak with youthful slang and colloquial carelessness to the point that we are often surprised when the full, weighty impact of a scene falls upon our heads.

The play commenced with a dreamy sequence as the character of Kai, played by Sheila Tousey, appeared to her daughter, Sandy (actress Cara Gee), and we were immediately confronted with the complex breakdown of the mother/child relationship that becomes an overarching metaphor for the work. Tousey’s reading of Kai was a fluid dance between the wise spirit mother and the unraveling junkie determined to self-destruct. Gee, likewise, treated her reading of Sandy with equal parts youthful naiveté and the resulting wisdom of someone who is forced into responsibility too soon. Sandy’s father Andrew, actor James Fall, is a stabilizing force in her life, but only momentarily, before he is lost to a tour of duty with the Shadow Wolves in Afghanistan.

Another familial relationship in the play reunites actors Gary Farmer and Cody Lighting as Jimmy and his son Len, two migrant beekeepers who set out to solve the problem of Colony Collapse Disorder within their hives. Farmer and Lightning’s relationship as father and son was so warm and complex and immediately believable that it was evident that they share a great rapport with one another that is both fluid and readily available. In fact, the entire cast felt like a who’s who among Native performers, and the incredible synergy between them was palpable, lending the reading a great deal of energy and clarity.

The two main characters of the play, Sandy and Len, meet through a university Native American Studies club, which represents an alternate community for them and the other youth in the play which includes Mack, played by Chaske Spencer and Heather, played by Tamara Podemski. Within this group, Shamas gives us all the politics of identity and reclamation that face the individual characters, but also Indian youth at large. Within the group and in their efforts to save the bees, Sandy and Len try to tease out meaning from their family units-in-crisis, the complicated relationships and imminent loss of their fathers, and the absence of their mothers. At the same time, they find themselves being drawn together by their shared experiences of loss, which eventually allows them to find solace in each other.

The concept of Colony Collapse Disorder for the bees becomes synonymous with the disintegrating mental and physical stability of Sandy’s mother and the breakdown of her family unit. And while Len’s family unit parallels this, it also turns the metaphor back onto Mother Earth, illustrating the circular and interconnected relationship of the two and what this crisis reflects of larger environmental issues. Shamas shows us that when the pressure is on the maternal, the circle cannot hold: our mothers lose control and vanish; the queens abandon their hive and the bees die; Mother Earth revolts. And somehow the play, under the direction of Alanis King, never feels too heavy. It remains haunting and sad, especially because the issues of family and community are not repaired. Worse, Colony Collapse Disorder is still an issue in our own world when we leave the theater. Yet, we are left with a kernel of hope that with love and some attentive care we can relieve the pressure on the maternal and perhaps find some answers to help us repair the circle.

Chasing Honey also featured the talents of Ryan Victor Pierce on stage directions.

* * *

Chasing Honey was followed by a post-performance discussion featuring Native playwrights Eric Gansworth, Diane Glancy, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Laura Shamas, and William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.

In the discussion following the reading, each of the playwrights discussed their different approaches to playwriting. First, Laura Shamas discussed her mandate to write plays that provide opportunities for the greatest number of Native actors. Later she explicated her use of metaphor and defense of the maternal. Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl answered questions with regard to contemporary work. Diane Glancy spoke about her role as a playwright and educator and to the issue of student expectations from Native work. She discussed the disappointment students feel when they read Silko, Momaday, Welch, and Erdrich and find not a spiritual enlightenment that they seek, but the harsh realities of contemporary American Indian life in all its disappointment and effort to recreate meaning from nothing.

William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. furthered this line of thought by raising questions about audience and privilege. In an eloquent moment, he proclaimed: “We want men of peace, but every man of peace, we’ve assassinated,” and then he goes on to speak about how the days of sending a message to the “Great White Father in the East” are over. Still giddy from the presidential election results of a few weeks earlier, you could feel the electricity in the audience at this proclamation. Like my assessment of the play above, it seemed true here as well, that whatever rigorous debate and critical discourse occurred throughout the festival, an undercurrent of unified hope frequently bubbled to the surface.

Chasing Honey Post-Show Discussion
Contemporary Native Playwriting
November 14, 2008
Moderator: Mandy Hackett (Associate Artistic Director)
Panel: Eric Gansworth, Diane Glancy,
Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Laura Shamas, and
William S. Yellow Robe Jr.

Mandy Hackett: My name is Mandy Hackett, I’m the Associate Artistic Director here at The Public, and I’m going to moderate this evening’s discussion. What we’re going to do tonight is take a few minutes to talk with Laura, specifically about the play that we saw, and then we’re going to open the conversation up to have a broader, wider discussion about contemporary Native playwriting and contemporary Native theater with our incredible panel tonight; it’s really a privilege to be able to look down the row and see one more talented writer than the next. It’s really great. So on that note, I will introduce our panelists. This is Diane Glancy. Diane was featured in our festival last year, with her play Salvage, which is currently running in LA at the Autry, that Sheila Tousey, our consultant is – and who is featured in the reading today as one of the actors – is directing. And next to me is Eric Gansworth. Eric’s play, we’re going to read tomorrow night, Re-creation Story. And Laura Shamas, our playwright tonight. And Bill Yellow Robe was featured last year with his play, A Stray Dog. And next to Bill is Victoria Kneubuhl, whose play we read last night and is featured this year in the festival. I just can’t thank all of you enough for being here tonight. After we just talk with the writers a little bit, we’ll open it up to questions from everybody. Laura, I just want to start with you. It’s just such a wonderful, lovely, moving, stirring play, and one of the things I really liked the most about the play is that as soon as the story begins, we meet four young people who are so smart, and so informed, and so energetic, and enthusiastic, and engaged in the issues around them, and curious, and engaged in the issues that are shaping their lives. And there’s not a drop, or a smell, of apathy in them. And I think that’s so great, to just start right there with those four young people, and I can’t help but think about the ground swell we just experienced – a record number of young people coming out to vote and obviously that last election that we had, kind of the end of an era of apathy among young people. I just found that really moving, about how you’re starting your play. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you found your way into this story… what the inspiration was, or what the early ideas were for it.

Laura Shamas: The first thing I wanted to do was to have seven Native actors, and--

Mandy: And why was that?

Laura: I just wanted to put as many Native actors in a contemporary play as I could, and I’m always thinking about what it means to pass on ancestral memory, and what it means to young people today to kind of navigate fluid issues of identity. And so that was really what I was trying to show -- them as a community, and to show the different stresses on all aspects of the community. The play, to me, is also a defense of the maternal, and the stresses that we put on the female in our culture. And using the metaphor of the hive and what’s happening with Colony Collapse Disorder, and trying to expand that metaphor throughout the play, and show that in each colony without the maternal, that they’re breaking down. And I’m very upset about Colony Collapse Disorder.

Mandy: Well, you really captured the spirit of that in the play. I thought that was really great – and this great humor, and humanity. Vickie, I wonder if I can turn to you, I mean, when you hear “contemporary Native playwriting” for yourself in that sphere, that world, what does that mean to you? Where do you see yourself fitting in there?

Victoria Kneubeul: Gosh, that’s a really large question – especially because among the Native Hawaiian playwrights, I’m the oldest. So I guess I have dealt with some contemporary themes in some of my work, and you know, it’s piece by piece. I find myself, even when I’m examining a contemporary issue, like, you know, the proper treatment of human remains, which you know I did a few years ago with one of my plays, I still find myself trying to pull into the contemporary world what came before us. So I think as a playwright, that’s a pretty repetitive theme, or happenstance, in what I’m writing about.

Mandy: And when you’re thinking about what you want to write about, do you feel like you’re focusing kind of exclusively, or are really interested in writing about, the Native experience, or is it Native experience and the non-Native experience? How do you kind of wrestle those two?

Victoria: You know, it just depends on what the piece is I’m writing about. In a couple of plays, it’s just been something that I’ve felt so passionately I had to write about, like violence against women. In another instance, I was really really interested in a mother-daughter relationship between two historical non-Native women that I felt I really wanted to write about too. So I think every play is a different journey, you know, with different people in your canoe.

Mandy: Diane, do you want to talk a little bit about this? You’re a professor, you teach creative writing and Native American literature. And what are some of the things that you start off teaching, or are some of the ideas that you really want to stimulate your class with?

Diane Glancy: I taught Native American literature – I have for seventeen years – and I’ve always taught in a small liberal arts college in which most of the students are of European descent. And they come to Native American literature, and I think it’s for some sort of spiritualism or connection to the land, so we open the four classics, and they’re all about alcoholism, disenfranchisement, poverty, you know, just one problem after another. House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday, who won the Pulitzer in 1969, Leslie Silko, Ceremony, is number two, James Welch, Winter in the Blood, number three – I see some of you writing, I can repeat this later – and Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine. Each one looks at how you recreate meaning from nothing. And it goes about in four different ways. There’s been a lot of subsequent growths, but they sort of go back and repeat the same thing. But anyway, the Native American students are disappointed – I mean, almost immediately, “What’s wrong with these novels? This isn’t what we want to have as the reality of Native life.” And I think you have to face it head-on, and then discuss what happened: why can’t the Indians get their act together? That’s a question that comes up right away. I said, “Well, if you had to go along without your language, your driver’s license, your library – everything you knew, probably, you would be in the same fix.” We just don’t do well against the vacuum. We need that meaning, that scaffolding, or that spine, structure of meaning. So I think in a lot of Native American work like the… what do you call it? The Colony Collapse Disorder, the disappearance of the queen bee, the disappearance of the mother, the disappearance of a family, the disintegration, again, of meaning. And yet the wonderful attempt of the Native – didn’t you love the Native American Awareness Club, with its agenda, and its committees, four different committees? There was such wonderful humor in that, at the same time while it was breaking your heart, because I’ve been in organizations, too, where there were three of four people, and, you know, what is the point of all this? But nonetheless, you struggle on.

Mandy: Thank you. Bill, I guess my question for you is, you’ve seen your work performed in front of Native audiences and non-Native audiences, and I wonder if you can talk about the experience of seeing the work in front of different audiences.

William Yellow Robe, Jr.: It’s interesting because starting in Montana, it was more difficult to bring a play to the Native audience. And when we did a play for a non-Indian audience, it was complete shock. And it was a reminder that, one, these realities have difficulties in coexisting. And it was amazing to me that we still go over this, because the whole question of who do you write for as an audience, I think, that goes along with that same question – who do you write for? But it comes down to if you create art, you create art. And whoever can see the art is really not your responsibility; as an artist your job is to create the art. In other words, as my mother aged, she would do feasts. If we lost a family relative, she would cook for two hundred people by herself. And it wasn’t because she was playing martyr or playing victim, it was because it was her responsibility to feed people. So when people came to the house, the first thing she would say was, “Eat. Feed yourself. Eat. Partake of this.” And the thing with Native art, when we talk about the sacredness of that, that’s similar to that same aesthetic as that – we create art. As far as an audience – I’ve always been amazed, because at the time I was writing plays back in the 70’s and 80’s, it was considered a novelty, in that our voice wasn’t significant. In fact, when you mentioned Winter in the Blood, I was actually in a theatrical production of Winter in the Blood when it was made into a play. And I talked to N. Scott Momaday about his work not long ago. And it’s amazing because I think what happens is that you have two audiences: one that has the privilege, and the one that is just trying to gain the right to have privilege. And it’s a huge contrast. I was at the Minneapolis Playwrights Center, as the Jerome Fellowship, and I had a chance to meet with members of Penumbra, which included Marion McClinton, Beverly Smith-Dawson, and we would go over this, because the white playwrights in residence at the Minneapolis Playwrights Center were usually foreign to the community. They had no responsibility or relationship to the community at Minneapolis/St. Paul. But with Marion and those folks, they had an immediate response to the question of community. So when they saw audience, they saw their community. But you see, in my work, it’s always been amazing to me that I’ve never had a chance to have the luxury or the privilege to say I’m writing this for just one audience. I think that’s a luxury. That’s the reason why when people try to pigeonhole me and say, “Well, you’re writing for a Native audience,” but the reality is, Native people can’t afford the tickets. And if you look in the state of Montana, you could see seven major state theater companies, in Billings, Montana, Great Falls, Montana. And you have seven major reservations in Montana, but still no Native theater on any of the reservations.

Voice: Why do you think that is, Bill?

William: Why do I think that is? In the beginning, the Lord… no, I’m kidding. Maybe there’s not enough funding. No, I think it’s because of realities that we’re just becoming aware of. See, it’s amazing that I told this to Muriel Miguel this afternoon – when I was twenty-six, and a student at the University of Montana, I was horrified at – well, not horrified, but shocked – to hear the names of professional Native theater people like Hanay Geiogamah and Muriel Miguel, and Spiderwoman. I was just amazed because in Montana we didn’t have these things. In Montana, the art form belonged to white people. But you see I had this mission, and at the same time, we’ve always been given this honor and I kind of get tired of it because it’s pathetic; it’s like the first Native person to do this. I was working with the Salish and Kootenai one year, we did a play, on what is known as the Flathead Indian Reservation, but they’re called the Salish and Kootenai Confederation, we did a play in St. Ignatius, and I was told by the Native community, “This is the first time we’ve ever had this, and this is the first time we’ve ever had access to the theater.” But, see, times are changing. We’re at a pivotal time where there is a sense of change. I’m not cynical, to a certain extent, but I have to deal with realities as they exist – especially in this country, because this country has such contrast; we want men of peace, but every man of peace, we’ve assassinated -- Dr. King, Malcolm X, people who talked of peace. And now we have something very interesting and I mentioned this earlier. I grew up reading the treaties of our reservation, and they would say – Chief Redstone would say, “I signed your papers, now take it back to the Great White Father in the East.” Those days are done. So, that’s a symbol of change. But, can we really reconstruct all this change? Because people see Native people – in even our own communities, they hate their own people, but that’s due to colonization. And, see, we have to address that, too. We have to address that. So, what is the change? Change starts within the many various Native communities. It’s just not – the other example, too, in this country, we really need a national movement to bring about that change for the Native community, because we don’t have it. I’ll end.

Mandy: So, many people may not know that Eric is dabbling in the form of playwriting for the first time, pretty much, with the play that we’re going to hear tomorrow night. Mostly, would you say you’re most comfortable in the novelist form, fiction?

Eric Gansworth: No, I…

Mandy: No, you’re not comfortable anywhere? But do you want to talk a little bit about what is inspiring you to want to write for the theater, in this form as opposed to the other art forms that you’ve explored in the past?

Eric: I started as a painter, and moved into fiction and poetry around the same time, in high school, and I’ve really enjoyed working in both of those areas. And in the last few years, have been working in non-fiction as well. And part of the wrestling match for me is always trying to make it in some very significant way my own, rather than trying to follow what somebody else is doing. It’s actually the second play I’ve written – first, I tried to do a very traditional three-act play, and it just sucked. It was awful. It was a play, and so I re-wrote it as a novel, and it went out there in that way. When I got the call for work, actually, for this particular program, I had written this piece as a lecture, but I didn’t think it was a particularly good lecture, either, and it seemed to be very much about the delivery. It didn’t seem to exist as a piece formally on paper as an essay, a piece of novel literature. And it also was a terrible lecture, and I thought, well, I’m going to go back to the idea of theater, but to forget the idea of the three-act play and to take it where my work generally takes me, which are these kind of eccentric, more circular narratives, which editors at major houses hate. But fortunately I found university presses have been compassionate to my ideas, and thus I’ve remained in the non-profits. So I guess this is a long string.

Mandy: Well, we’re excited. Why don’t we open it up to questions? If people have questions for the writers, or Laura in particular. Any thoughts or questions? Yes. Randy.

Randy Reinholz: Laura, what was it like to have such wonderful actors reading your play?

Laura: Let me tell you! Phenomenal. I think we should applaud them again.

Mandy: Thoughts, questions for any of our amazing writers we have with us tonight?

Audience 1: Laura, how much research did you do?

Laura: A lot. I have a bee keeper expert – he’s a Cherokee bee keeper who my brother found, a friend of my brother’s, and he helped me with that part of it, and I read a lot of books, and interviewed scientists. Every aspect of the play I’ve tried to research some. Maybe just two years of research, which, I mean, those of you who have written a dissertation, that’s not that long!

Mandy: Yes.

Audience 2: I was really intrigued by the idea of the Shadow Wolves and that whole… the idea of using indigenous people as a border patrol. Is that a group that actually exists?

Laura: That’s real. That’s true. Almost everything in the play is true. That was created in 1972. After 9/11, it became a part of Homeland Security, and everything that’s in the play about them – the helicopters and the violence that’s going on there, it’s very controversial and horrible what’s happening with building a wall there, and dividing people. All of that is true. It is also true that we went the Shadow Wolves around the world. If you Google "Shadow Wolves," you’ll see that there are a lot of headlines about the Shadow Wolves going in for Bin Laden, too. That possibility is real. I could tell you more about the Shadow Wolves, but there’s a lot out there. But they’re real! There’s about seven different tribes right now that make up the Shadow Wolves.

Audience 3: Are they on the Canadian border?

Laura: No, but it’s true that they are trying to establish a Shadow Wolf pack up there.

Audience 4: A friend invited me tonight and I had absolutely no idea what I was coming to, and --

Laura: Are you still friends?

Audience 4: I found it extremely interesting, something that I knew nothing about, and so, eye-opening for me. But what happens to the story after tonight, and after it was right here? Is there anything in the future for it, or is it just for this audience? How does this work?

Laura: If you know anyone who has a theater, all of here would like you to talk to them about our work! Playwrights live in hope. I think I can speak collectively for us that way. But this could be the last time I ever see it. I’m not trying to be pessimistic, but could be. I’m going to rework some scenes, based on… where is Alanis? Oh my gosh, everybody, one of the greatest people in the world, fantastic, she should be sitting here. Anyway, Alanis gave me a lot of great feedback too, and so I’ve learned a lot this whole week with these brilliant actors and brilliant director, so I hope to do another revision of it based on some things, and, you know, hopefully a lot of cuts – that’s my favorite thing to do

Mandy: One of the goals of the festival, certainly, from our end at The Public, is to raise visibility and raise exposure, for, obviously, such an important dynamic coming from Native playwrights today. We’re hoping it will be the catalyst for something down the line for all the writers, and not only for the work itself, but for the whole discourse around where Native theater is today.

Audience 5: Would you elaborate a little bit on why you had the mothers in both families as failures? What does that mean?

Laura: Well, they weren’t failures to me. It’s a defense of the stresses that we put on women. That’s to me, what, really, the play is – a defense of the maternal, and the extraordinary stresses that Native mothers go through. And I’m also trying to show that I believe it’s the same metaphor with Colony Collapse Disorder, where the queen bees go crazy because of the stress on the hive, for all the reasons that were – you know, the myriad of reasons we don’t even know for sure why that is – but the compounding of all of the stressors are killing the queen bees. And I worry about our families, based on that, and so to me the mothers are not failures at all. They’re very strong and this is what we do to them. But I’m really trying to show that without them, we don’t work as well without them. We need them. Our world is dying without them, I think.

Diane: Now I think your metaphor even deepens to Mother Earth, the stress that’s put on that. I have a son who lives in Texas, and I go down and babysit with my grandchild, and he lives out in the country and they’re drilling for natural gas. And I can hear the cattle; they’re always disturbed, there’s always this crying out in the pasture. And I told my son, just listen to the cattle. So I think it’s the same, whether the bees or the people or whatever. We really need to pay attention to what we’re doing to the earth. There’s just a disturbance, you can pick it up in your feet, sometimes.

Mandy: Oskar, do you have a question?

Oskar Eustis: No, but, a comment. I just really want to say that I thought the play was gorgeous, and one of the things that feels really striking about it, and kind of… I’m sitting here meditating about how you pulled it off, the number of metaphorical and thematic levels that you had operating, and yet at the same time the overwhelming impression is of a very un-hyperbolic, naturalistic, sweetness of connection among people. You really do both of those things simultaneously. Really, that’s a huge thematic apparatus. I mean, from Bin Laden and the Shadow Wolves, bee collectors, that’s an enormous amount of metaphors, and yet that’s not what it felt like watching. What it felt like watching was very low-key interactive. That’s beautifully acute.

Laura: Thank you so much.

Oskar: One other comment on what happens next. Theater is so hard, and it’s so heartbreaking for playwrights, all the time, all the time. But the thing that makes it, I think, special as an art form, is that it involves both the private lonely process of writing, which poetry and novels, painting, other art forms do, which fundamentally are solo activities. But then, it has these layers of social interaction that are required in order to complete it. And directors, and actors, and ultimately audiences, and really what you try to do when you put together something like this is you’re just trying to increase the social interaction around the work. You’re just trying to say, the more people we can gather around – and it’s partly the theaters by producing, but it’s also the actors, it’s the directors – you create the possibility for a kind of synergy that lets other things happen. You can’t predict exactly what they are, but I think our experience is that you do it patiently and persistently enough, good things spring from that. That’s what the theater is supposed to do. So you being here is crucial to that.

Mandy: One last thought, or question from anybody?

Audience 6: This is actually going off of something that was mentioned a little while ago, but when you said that colonization has made so many people to hate their own people, do you mind elaborating just a little on what you mean by that?

William: In the 50’s, a lot of people were taught to hate the fact of being Native. When you went to boarding schools, there were stories I ran into, where there were students that were actually bathed in bleach to make their skins white. But even Malcolm X talks about that in his autobiography, the essay on conking his hair, where he was trained to hate everything about himself: the color of his skin, the way his hair was. But Native people went through the same process as well. And then the 60’s, it’s amazing, because you see the assimilation process going on, where Native people start to dress white, look white. Then in the 70’s, you have Native people wearing braids again. Ceremonies are coming back. They’re still quiet – kept in quiet – but they’re coming back, especially in this country. But you see, one of the other issues at hand that’s never been addressed in this country is race, and the blood quantum for Native people. And see, that whole issue of not being whole, it’s really an important issue for Native people. It’s not a punch line. But I actually have a book coming out in January that deals with four claims about the blood quantum. It’s an interesting process because part of colonization, after you’ve been introduced to racism, you’re taught that process of self-loathing and self-hatred. And it’s amazing because I grew up with cousins who were full-bloods, but hated the fact that they were Indian. I’ve met breeds who were – people who are of mixed blood – who didn’t pass as Native on the blood quantum, but were very active in their community. But because they didn’t have the look, they wouldn’t be considered Native. It’s a sharp contrast. But it’s interesting, too, because then when you throw in the other racial elements, we also have Native people who are part black. And right now the greatest experiment is in Connecticut where you have the Pequot tribe, who is part black and part Native, and the Mohegan tribe, which is part white and part Native, and to watch the state compete – make these two tribes compete against each other – because one’s mainly part black and the other one’s part white. But you see we get into these inter-tribal wars as far as when we introduce other races as well. Does that help?

Audience 6: Oh, yeah. Totally, yeah.

Mandy: Okay everybody, thanks so much to our writers.

LAURA SHAMAS (Chickasaw) Laura Shamas's plays have been produced by Golden Thread Productions, Victory Theater (L.A.), Philadelphia Theater Company, Denver Center Theater Company, Walnut Street Theater, Studio Arena, West Coast Ensemble and The Glines (NYC), among others. Her work has been read/developed/presented at many theaters, including Native Voices at the Autry (L.A., Festival of New Plays, ‘08); Native Earth Performing Arts (Toronto, "Weesageechak Learns to Dance XX," '07); "Playwrights Week at the Lark" (New York, ‘07); Soho Theatre (London, '06 & ‘07); Williamstown Theatre Festival (Guest Artist ‘06); The Old Globe; The Geva Theater; and The Utah Shakespearean Festival. Shamas has several published plays, including Re-Sourcing, Moliere In Love, Pistachio Stories, Up To Date, Lady-Like, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Portrait of a Nude, and The Other Shakespeare. She has been honored with a number of playwriting awards, including the 2008 Garrard Best Play Award from the Five Civilized Tribes Museum for her show Talking Leaves, a Fringe First Award for Outstanding New Drama (Edinburgh), a Drama-Logue Award, and a 2006-2007 Aurand Harris Fellowship from the Children's Theater Foundation of America.

ALANIS KING (Odawa Nation). Her playwriting credits include: Bye Bye Beneshe, Song of Hiawatha: An Anishnaabec Adaptation, Order of Good Cheer, Gegwah, Lovechild, Artshow, Heartdwellers, Manitoulin Incident, Tommy Prince Story, When Jesus Met Nanabush, Storyteller and Step by Step. King was Playwright in Residence at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre in Toronto from 2005 to 2007 and at Nightwood Theatre. She was a past Artistic Director of her home theatre company - Debajehmujig Theatre Group and Native Earth Performing Arts. She has also produced, toured, directed and developed numerous plays on many First Nation communities; a highlight was Lupi the Great White Wolf for the children's tour to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Originally published in The Native Theater Journal

Tom PearsonJanuary 26, 2009