Native American play festival offers eclectic works

Like an important but unseen operating system, trauma courses through many of the pieces in the inaugural National Native American Ten Minute Play Festival, founded by playwright and director Rhiana Yazzie, who also founded New Native Theater.

In Jaren Navenma's "Tawa's Rising," the opening playlet in the festival that concludes its run Sunday at Bedlam Theatre in Lowertown, St. Paul,

the hurt is historic and deeply buried. But it can be gleaned in the weary voice and fear of a Hopi father who wakes his daughter at dawn to talk with her against the backdrop of sunrise on the Arizona mesa. The father, played with stoicism by director Brian Joyce, frets for the well-being of his daugther (played by Isabella LaBlanc) and about her losing connection to her history.

In another piece, "One Feather," the trauma is right at the surface as ornery writer-actor C.W. Bearshield takes us into his alienated childhood in his darkly comic autobiographical piece.

Sometimes the trauma is eruptive, as in "Sell Fish," Joseph A. Dandurand's piece about tensions boiling over in a relationship between a pregnant woman (played by Delinda "Oogie" Pushetonequa) and her fisherman partner (Bearshield).

At other times, the trauma that informs the festival works can't be read in the vocalizations of the characters, whether dramatic or comic. The wounds are carried in the bodies of the performers. In fact, the most emotionally raw piece in the festival is not a playlet, but a solo dance by Andrea Fairbanks.

In Fairbanks' "All in Fun," a woman at a party drinks and takes drugs, lapsing between a contemporary soundtrack with music by the likes of Rihanna and LMFAO ("Party Rock Anthem") and her own ancestral songs. Her dancing also veers between the fancy dance of her heritage (Leech Lake Ojibwe) and a nightclub abandon. Eventually, as she gets drunker, she can no longer keep up with the rhythm of her heritage. In fact, she does not hear the music at all. Unmoored from the sources that sustain her identity, and under the influence of drugs, she becomes vulnerable, and ends up being assaulted.

Fairbanks plays it simply, without much affect, lying on her back and yelling "Get off of me." Our imaginations fill in the rest.

At this stage, the festival is all about development of artistic talent, of audiences and space in the culture for these stories to be heard. The pieces may all be developed into full, evening-lenght works. Although actors such as Bearshield and Ajuawak Kapashesit (pictured above, photo by John Ratzloff) have clear stage charisma, the performers have uneven talent.

The directors engaged by New Native Theater, under whose aegis the festival is produced, include Richard Hitchler, of SteppingStone Theatre, actor-writer James A. Williams and theater founder Yazzie.

Yazzie wrote one piece in the festival — "Indians and Other Friends," in which author and activist Vine Deloria finishes his book, "Custer Died for Your Sins" while he is introduced to a civil rights activist.

Yazzie also directed three pieces — William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.'s "Making Indixns," a skewering of screenwriters who create a stereotypical Native American character for Hollywood; Leah Lemm's "O See Dee," about a postpartum struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder; and Jenn Hall's "The Walking Red," a comic riff on "The Walking Dead" in which enrolled tribal members are most at risk.

Playwright Yellow Robe, one of the best-known Native American playwrights, flew into the Twin Cities for the festival. He was smiling after the show, recalling that in 1987, when he won a Jerome Foundation fellowship and came to work at the Playwrights Center, he could barely find the actors to read his work. It has been an ungoing struggle, he said. But now, with this festival and this theater, the landscape is about to change.

"This festival is going to do some good things," Yellow Robe said.