Native Playwrights Roundtable Discussion

Community, Responsibility, and Language:
Native Playwrights Roundtable Discussion
Moderated by Tom Pearson

During the course of the Native Theater Festival, I had the opportunity to moderate a writers’ roundtable discussion on November 14th with the three playwrights showing work this year: Eric Gansworth, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, and Laura Shamas as well as two featured playwrights from last year’s festival, Diane Glancy and William S. Yellow Robe Jr. Two surprise guests also joined in the conversation, playwright Daniel David Moses and actor Gary Farmer. As we all started to settle in, eating our lunches and engaging in casual conversation, I began to focus us with questions about the work.

Diane Glancy: I’m going to start because I’m the oldest one here.

Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl: How do you know who’s the oldest?

Laura Shamas: I don’t know about that, Diane [laughter all around].

Diane: I got you beat by a long time [pause]. I just want to thank the Public Theater for this wonderful opportunity. This is the second year in a row I have been here, and it’s amazing what happens in a few days, not only the mileage that you get out of your own work, but with these very important issues that we do not get a chance to speak about. And, you see from this last panel, it got into some very integral stuff. You start off little and then you end up in this big world where we need to be, and we have not had the opportunity. So, for giving us a place for public discussions and a chance to develop our own work, I am very grateful, and I know the others are too. So, first of all, thank you. Now, what was your question?

Tom Pearson: Whom do you envision as your audience for your work when you are writing a new play? Is it something you think about early on? Who will be hearing this?

Diane: The first thing I think about when I have the little core idea of a play, a few little words gathering, is if I can be true to those little words. So, the main audience is the play or the idea of the play, the play itself.

Eric Farmer: I think the seed of the first draft is just for me to find out where that story is going, as Diane suggested, to find the through line, and so that I know, eventually, where it ends. Then, through a series of revisions, it becomes a broader question of audience and accessibility. I hope that first and foremost, people at home find it a reasonable representation of the lives we share, but also that it covers enough broader ground that it’s accessible to an audience not from home. So, it’s kind of a tightrope of trying to not be too didactic and informing, but giving all kinds of footnotes. It doesn’t really work in a narrative sense, as far as I’m concerned, and so trying to make that a natural part of the play can give a grounding for an unfamiliar audience, but also a satisfaction for an audience who would be familiar with its pre-existing components.

Victoria: You know, that’s a really hard question for me because it all depends on what the piece is that I’m working on. When I first stared writing, I really had it in my mind that I wanted to write plays about and for the community that I was in. And, you know, because we have this colonial mentality in Hawaii, we are always compared to what’s going on in the continent, so nothing that came from home was ever any good. Everything that came from away, people kind of got the red carpet rolled out for them. So, I really felt that was what I wanted to do when I started writing, and I think a lot of my early pieces… I have this thing… that our voices in the islands should be directly to each other and to the greater Pacific, to Oceania, because historically and culturally, we are so much more connected to Oceania than we are to a continent. I think that is my first and best audience that I love and that I’d like to be writing for; although, I have written some things that I, you know, really felt passionate about, like violence against women, which I think cuts across cultural and ethnic and economic lines. It just depends on the piece.

William S. Yellow Robe Jr: I don’t look at my community as an audience. When I write, I write for the story because I am a listener. I am not really a storyteller; although, I have relatives who are storytellers. I portray myself more than anything else as a listener. So, when I get back to the reservation, within my community, I have a chance to sit down and listen to the stories that they give me, but I have to be very selective as to what I can bring out. There is a tremendous amount of responsibility and respect with it, so I also have to take that same responsibility and respect and apply it to the play and to the community. But as far as having a specific audience, I never really try to address that question because at one time I had trained seven native playwrights. This was back in 1995. I realized in developing these plays, there was no venue for them because they were dealing with contemporary issues. The plays came from their communities, dealt with issues in their communities. At this time, you have to remember, when the TCG Theater Communications catalog came out, there were sections for contemporary plays, African-American plays, Asian plays, Latin plays, but you had no section for Native American plays. In fact, in going to the TCG conferences, it was amazing, because the Native community was never represented there. This is not seen as a legitimate theater experience, which is kind of ironic because in the state of Montana, in the western part of Montana, during the summer you have 23 semi-professional theater companies, Summer Stock Theater. But not one of them would do a play if it addressed the Indian community, the Native communities. We were just basically a novelty. When we started this process, even going back to John Kauffman and Red Earth Theater Company, even Spiderwoman, it’s interesting that historically, in America, this voice was a novelty. And then, all of a sudden, you have a re-birth of all of these Native writers coming out all over the place. But it’s fascinating because at that time it was limited to the late John Kaufman and Keith Conway. Then you had the Native American Theater Ensemble. Bruce Miller was produced out of that group, and then Spiderwoman took over. Then the question was: “How do you get an audience together?” But here’s the other aspect, too. In this country, if I were to ask ten years ago, “Could you point me to the Native American Theater Company? What is the building that houses the Native American Theater Company?” You couldn’t do it in this country. Whereas, if I said, “Where is the Public Theater?” everybody knows where the Public is. If I say, “Where is the Ensemble Studio Theater?” everybody knows where that is. But if we were in Chicago and I said, “Where is Red Path Theater Company?” no one could really point to that because there was none. But it’s amazing that somehow we’ve migrated from one architectural structure to another, and [Native theater] still exists. And, the question is: “Do we have an audience?” Well, we have communities. We have communities, and see that’s the other thing too. The success of the script is not measured by the box office, but it’s measured by the community response. As far as saying I am going to write this for Native audiences, it’s like an act of arrogance. So, you have to keep your ego in check, and to assume a title is always scary to me. People try to claim, as you say [indicating Daniel], the “culture police,” that is the reason why that is scary, because my sacredness is more sacred than yours. That’s scary. But here’s the other thing too, you have to understand it. You have to understand. And, you have to appreciate it. Because a lot of Native people here in America, to see an Indian audience, we never had that, an opportunity to have an audience. We never had the opportunity to have a theater. We never had an opportunity to write plays. I mean when I started it was like a novelty, and that question that you ask, I’ve been asked that so many years: “Do you have an audience?” No, I have a community. Thank you.

Laura: The first person I envision plays for are for actors. I envision that the actors are my first community, and I come from a family of actors, a family of Native actors. And I’ve written for the Native actors in my family too. After that, I hope that if that is a microcosm, if it’s successful with the actors I’m working with, we can reach out and have a larger audience. I definitely had an acting background before I started writing, and I’m very in tune with how the actors are going to respond.

Tom : To get a little more specific, two words that have been coming up frequently in the discussions are the words “responsibility” that you [William] mentioned as well as “community.” As Native writers, do you feel that you have a greater responsibility, not only to your specific communities, but also to the larger Native community, and possibly to non-Natives as well, many of which have been grossly mis-educated about the American Indian?

Victoria: What kind of responsibility?

Tom : Many types, including representation, but also how you position yourself in relation to the material you are dealing with.

William: Responsibility was the issue for me when I was raised. We would, basically, be loyal to our families, love our families, respect our families, and do everything for our families. We would never endanger our community. We would always love and respect our community regardless of how we were mistreated by that community. We had a saying back when our reservation was established. It comes from our Chief Redstone. He said, “This is where the bones of my relatives lie, and this is where I’ll be buried.” So, when people ask me about traveling all over the country and the world, I tell them that at least when I go home I will always be welcome because I’ve always been responsible to my community, responsible in, one, that I won’t mislead. I can’t come out and say that I am a spokesperson for my tribe or all of Native America because that’s an act of arrogance. You have to have a sense of humbleness. But humility is sometimes mistaken for censure. Do I see challenges? Yeah, because here in America we have a lost generation. We have the Indian Removal Act. Native people were sent to boarding schools. They were adopted out to Christian programs, relocation programs, and now they’ve just found themselves. It’s ironic. I go to places and meet people who say they were adopted, and they can’t find where their tribe is from. That’s our stolen generation. We have to be responsible to them too. We have a duality here. We’re not asking people to open up their Rolls to include these people. We’re just asking them to open up their Native hearts and include these people because they are part of ours. In these theater festivals it’s always amazing to me that we cover ground that’s been covered 20 years ago, but it’s interesting to hear the different interpretations. A lot of the issues that were brought up in today’s panel discussion go back to when the National Museum of the American Indian was first established. “Responsibility” and “respect,” but the other one that dropped out of that conversion is “community” because in order to have the responsibility and respect you must have a community. You must have that relationship with that community to practice those two.

Diane: Some of the problems with community is when you’ve been raised a distance from it, so that you are no longer a part of it. Where I feel a responsibility is for the voices of the past, those who have not had a chance to speak. I feel a responsibility to history because so much of it is missing, and I feel a responsibility to those voices. What I often do is just get in my car. I drove the entire Trail of Tears as I wrote about it, and when I did Stone Heart, I drove the Missouri and Columbia Rivers, following the Lewis and Clark expedition. I think the land somehow carries history and carries words. I read those journals [Lewis and Clark], I even have them on tape, oral tradition as I was driving along, looking for this woman’s voice, Sacajawea, who traveled with these men with a baby on her back. What was that like? Lewis and Clark never wrote down a word of hers. For my work, I just get into the car and listen to the voices of the land. I don’t do as much contemporary stuff as I do of the past, though I think I am getting more into it now. But I feel a real responsibility; I believe in an afterlife, and I may see some of these people again some day, and I don’t want them coming up to me and saying, “What did you think you were doing? You didn’t do enough of your research. You just kind of slopped over it.” I always feel a story in my throat, the lump that gets there sometimes when I think of all these voices that never got a chance to speak. And, it’s never fun. You know, cause it always has to do with loss. I said this morning that I wish I could be a funny person, but I’m not at all. We all have our own thumb print, and I like to go back into those hurt places, those places of erasure, those places that did not get a fair shake, those places where there are voices longing to have their story told.

Right now, I have a contemporary play called Salvage, and the main character, Wolf, a young man, has to go to prison in Montana. [The actor] said to me, “Some nights when I’m lying there on the stage, in the cell, I hear those old voices.” And he said, “I have asked the other two actors if they ever hear anything, and they don’t.” So, I always think there are “other-nesses.” To me, this other world, whatever it is… I’ve never been able to see it with my eyes or really hear it, but in a creative imagination, it is there. It is not separated by so very much. So, I feel a responsibility to the retrieval of those people who are longing, I believe, to be heard.

Eric: It’s sort of the opposite for me. I’m the ultra laziest researcher on earth [laughter all around]. I feel my responsibility is to take the span of years that’s been familiar to my family within its lifetime of telling stories, and certainly within my own lifetime, and try to render an experience that’s truthful to that timeline, as articulately as I can. So that when I’m gone, my generation is gone, maybe three generations from now, those kids can, if they are so inclined, pick up this work and say, “Oh that’s what it was like.” So I think my responsibility isn’t so much to the past but to rendering the present for the future.

Victoria: You know, that’s something I’ve thought a lot about. I did this really huge three-day street pageant that marked the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy about ten years ago, and at the end of the pageant there were 10,000 people there, and it was huge emotional and big moment for the Hawaiian community. And, there was a woman standing on the stairs giving the last speech of the queen, and there were so many people around, totally quiet, and I was standing there looking up at her and listening to her give the speech and I thought, “You know, as a writer you have to be very conscious about what is coming through you because you never know where those words are going to go, after you are gone,” and I just decided then that whatever I’m writing has to sit well with me spiritually. I have to feel like if this is one of the footprints I’m leaving behind, I have to be very okay with it. At the same time after that, I think, you know, I remember having this dream about being chased by gangs of Hawaiians [laughter] around a field, and I woke up and I realized that one of my big fears was that I would then be expected to be the voice of a collective, which I really don’t want to be. You know, I really want to, to have my own individual voice too within the bigger picture, and I don’t just want to have to reflect the collective all the time. And I think of that balance for me to be writing about who I am and where I come from and not always feeling like I have to carry this huge burden on my back. That is something that you constantly have to juggle as a writer. Or I do anyway, because I do want my community and my people to love what I write, but at the same time, I struggled so hard to find my own voice. I don’t want to give it up to anybody. About the responsibility to non-indigenous people, I had a friend once who said, “You know, you should explain that. You should tell that,” and I felt like, “You know what?” I don’t always have to be the village explainer. I don’t have to be the one responsible for explaining to non-indigenous people what’s going on all the time. We, as indigenous people, we have to go and learn all of these other languages in order to function in the western world, especially if you go into academia, so you know, come on guys, if you want to understand what we are about you need to put some effort into it too. Finding a balance between not always feeling like you have to dumb down your work for people who don’t really understand and finding a balance between making it accessible to a wider audience is another thing to juggle.

William: There is this belief that our work has to go “out there,” but if you look at the history of this continent, the world has come here. We now have relations with the entire world. The world is constantly coming to this continent and the Native communities. The idea that our work has to change to go out to an audience, I mean come on, Eugene O’Neil didn’t change his work, and it got out there. Neil Simon did the same thing. August Wilson didn’t change his work, and it got worldwide recognition. Native people have that same ability.

Tom: [To Laura Shamas]: You didn’t get a chance to weigh in.

Laura: You know I’ve been hungry [as she’s eating], but I’m also so eager to hear everyone. Do I have a responsibility to reach a non-Native audience with my work? Is that the question?

Tom: The question was more generally do you feel more of a responsibility and to whom?

Laura: My ancestry is multi-racial, so I try to think that my work could be understood if I write it true to the specifics. What I’ve found in writing is that if you are more true to the specifics, it is more universal, so that’s been my pattern with writing. I try to be as specific as I can and then hope that the specificity will make it clear to others. I don’t explain language in my work. But, I think that the question you are asking also goes to the question, “What is a theater artist then?” To me, that’s the second part of it. What is the definition of being a playwright?

Tom: I think there’s also potential to further ask questions of responsibility in terms of what’s the responsibility of the producer and what’s the responsibility of the audience?

Diane: I wanted to say that I also feel a responsibility to the play. That was kind of the way I started because it’s easy to just slap out some words, but to continue to work with them so that they can go on the stage, so that they look like a play. They have all these facets, so that there’s conflict and all of that. I feel a responsibility to the words all the way through so that it doesn’t stop short what it should be to be a full, heavy play.

Daniel David Moses: I remember this moment in one of my early rehearsals where the actress wasn’t happy with the way the lines were written. She actually went over my head to the Artistic Director. I remember saying, “I know she has issues, and I’m not her psychiatrist. She should get her healing elsewhere.” My responsibility is to get this. That scene has to go in a certain direction. I guess I have a set of aesthetic values that embody the worldview I come from. I’ve been in this long enough to know that this does connect with a sizeable portion of the audience that sees my work. Just because you are a Native, automatically your work is political, but I want to see who these human spirits are. I want to see how these people live their lives within whatever political pressures are on them. Where are those basic human impulses, those things that connect us?

Eric: [to Gary Farmer]: Gary, do you feel a different responsibility when you are working with something by a Native playwright versus a non-Native playwright?

Gary: Well, I was going to say, when I started acting in the 70's in the Canadian theater scene, for the first twenty years of my career, I was playing Native characters, but written by non-Native people. That was really challenging because I was the only Indian, and I had to try and get these people to look at it from our point of view. Of course, though it was always their research rather than my oral history. But I was there for the transition. I remember when Native people started writing plays, and I’ll never forget how heavy it all was, right? Because I think the first thing any writer does is spend years clearing conscience or clearing the network of bad things that have happened to them and their experiences in life. So at first, all the plays that came were bitter and sad and kind of one-note. It was hard to bring any light or love to the situation. So, as the years went by, that started to come in, but at first it was extremely bitter, and rightfully so. You had to do something with all that anger that you lived through and that maturity process of even re-learning who you were. In my lifetime as an actor, I learned about Haudenosaunee. I didn’t have that at birth; my family wasn’t traditional. To find that was a process, and I think it’s indeed a process for the playwrights and for the audiences. Not everything was known.

Victoria: You know that progression, that’s been in the Pacific as well, the first plays, the first Pacific Island plays, talking about the bigger Pacific. As people’s minds started to become de-colonized, and in some cases their countries too, and as Pacific Island literature matured, then we saw other motifs and themes coming into play. But I don’t know, what do you guys think? Do you think that the experience of colonization and oppression is still, you know, it seems like even though things change, because it’s part of our history it still comes, even into more contemporary plays.

Laura: Yes [overlapping]. Absolutely.

Eric: [overlapping] I think it’s inherently a part. Rather than being “Scene Three - the Scene of Oppression,” it’s a veil over the whole thing, or the larger body of work.

Tom: This is actually a perfect segue into something I wanted to pose to you. One of my favorite quotes is that “Colonization is a continuing process. It’s not just a historical event.” And we are constantly coming up against so many types of invisibility, whether geographic, whether temporal. It’s always a shock to people, “Oh this is a contemporary work,” and we have to get past that, past the recognition that Native peoples are contemporary peoples, before we can have the next conversation. I’m wondering, in an ideal world we’d make our art and people would understand the value and importance of it [laughter], but we also have to be the advocates for our work, and so there’s this whole business side of things where we have to educate the presenters, our supporters, our audiences, and ourselves. That’s a huge challenge, and I’m wondering what in your careers, what challenges have you faced or what have you done to confront those issues?

Laura: I’ve done it a lot, actually. Lots of people want to say to me, “Do you have the cultural authority to write what you’re writing?” I have had that said to me at various junctures, so I have done a lot of educating, anything from agents to directors to other actors. I explain who I am, and also, it’s not like I’ve had the longest career, but I have been writing plays for thirty years, and I made a point to push a Native play with regularity in the cycle of what I write. Chasing Honey is the latest one. I have a kind of self-mandate with it, that I am going to go out with another Native play that has roles for Native actors. One thing that gets asked of me is, “What do you hope to have with your play?” Well I want it to be produced. I’d like to get work for people. You know, and so that’s the thing I’ve been mystified by. Why wouldn’t I want to be produced in New York? Like there’s a limit to what should happen with it because of the subject.

Diane: Another thing I try and do, we’ve got a panel in Native playwriting in the upcoming AWP, Associative Writing Program, which is a big conference for teachers of creative writing at colleges. And I try to explain, try to explicate what Native theater is, the sense of loss, sense of irony, sense of humor, the importance of family, the importance of land, to make known, in the orbiculate, moving like a dream sometimes instead of that straight linear thought, and just explaining and trying to come up with a Native theory. I mean, we’ve been doing that again for years. What rationale can you use to tie it to the classrooms and to make it understood?

Daniel: One of my little touchstones was when I first went into playwriting classes. In studying the structure of playwriting, conflict is essential. And I was really uncomfortable with that, because, largely in the culture I grew up in, unless you’re, like, on a hockey team, you don’t really want conflict. I just thought conflict was about politics, so I was always uncomfortable trying to understand conflict as an essential of art, because I think art is about bringing things together. I think “contrast” is a better term. That’s heart. That’s not politics. So, I really wanted to purify the language.

Laura: Sort of have a different lexicon?

Daniel: Yeah, I mean, I have a few scenes that people would recognize as conflict, but I also do a lot of scenes where that direct conflict that people seem to value is not there. Things are sideways and indirect. And I think, “contrast,” I can live with that.

Laura: But how do you put Native storytelling on the western stage in which it does not and will never really fit? I think those sort of things are interesting.

Eric: Yeah, well I think that’s one of the choices you have to make. There are ways to navigate a mainstream career, but I probably have made some pretty stupid business decisions because I’ve had specific people within… well, I guess it could’ve benefited my career very well. They told me things to do to make a more commercial piece, and I’ve ultimately said, “That’s maybe your work, but it’s not mine.” And so thus, I’m still kind of a marginalized writer, but I’m a writer that’s happy with the work that I’ve done.