Here are a few works for the stage by our favorite author. Some excerpts of these plays can be found at the National New Play Network website.
NANCY
Nancy is a loosely based bio on first lady Nancy Reagan, a descendant of Pocahontas. The story details how internalized racism over skin color, misogyny, and economic mobility create classism and racism inside tribal communities and shows how the most oppressed can become complicit in white supremacy.
Nancy Reagan is a descendant of Pocahontas, so, this play is about her and the relationship of a Navajo mother and daughter, Esmeralda and Jacqueline. While Nancy tries to control the future through astrology and New Age-ism, Esmeralda fights nuclear waste storage on her homelands and while her daughter develops a debilitating anxiety disorder. The story details how internalized racism, skin color, misogyny, and economic mobility create classism and racism inside tribal communities revealing how some become gladly complicit with white supremacy when it benefits their own desires.
Upcoming workshops will take place in April 2021 through The Playwrights’ Center’s Ruth Easton Series. Development funds for this play have also been awarded by Native Earth Performing Arts through their Weesagechak Festival.
QUEEN CLEOPATRE AND PRINCESS POCAHONTAS
This play is the fantastic story of Cleopatre, Pocahontas’ older more influential sister who was erased from history by the men who wrote it. Cleopatre takes an epic journey from her homeland in Tsenecommacah (Jamestown) to England to Massachusetts where she finds herself amongst Pilgrims and Praying Indians before she makes her way home at last. Told with a comedic touch, the play asks how can you maintain your humanity in the cruelest of times when your home and world is being destroyed. Basically, just think about the 2016 election.
This play is a co-commission between The Oregon Shakespeare Festival and The Public Theater through OSF’s American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle.
ADY
A collision of colonialism, DNA, Navajo culture, sexuality, dancing, writing, the island of Guadeloupe, France, and the art of Man Ray, Picasso, and other early 20th century artists inspire this play about a real life surrealist muse. ADY a multi character play, is performed by two women:
A young Navajo woman, Adrienne, finds a 1937 photograph of a Black Caribbean dancer, Ady, that is her mirror image. This opens the door to a moment before WWII when the surrealist movement was blooming in France. Characters like Pablo Picasso and his lover, Dora Marr, surrealist photographers Man Ray and Lee Miller guide Adrienne through her mother’s suicide back home on the reservation. As it tells the story of a surrealist muse, the play shows how easy it is to be lost to history, especially if you were a little brown woman.
Look for updates on a forthcoming production and development at AlterTheater!