OKC festival debuts Native works

OKLAHOMA CITY – Family turmoil on Montana’s Blackfeet Reservation plays out on the Oklahoma City Civic Center Music Hall stage when the 3rd Annual Native American New Play Festival begins this weekend.

Diane Glancy’s drama titled Salvage is the featured production of the festival, presented by Oklahoma City Theatre Company. The play, about a struggling family caught up in a feud with another following a fatal car accident, will be shown June 1-10 in OKC Civic Center Music Hall’s versatile CitySpace Theatre.

The festival started as a way to set OKC Theatre Co. apart from other groups.

“This is something not offered anywhere else in the country but for the state of California,” said Rachel Irick, company artistic director. “It made sense for Oklahoma to be home for that kind of work where playwrights establish and emerge as leaders in this art form.”

The Autry National Center is home to the Native Voices at the Autry program, created to develop and produce new works for live theater by Native Americans as well as Alaska Native and First Nations playwrights. The Native American Play Festival wasn’t patterned after the Autry program, but the results are similar.

When Salvage opens Friday, June 1, audiences will see a contemporary piece of storytelling told by Native Americans and reflecting the lives they live today. Set in an auto salvage yard, a young man named Wolf has hit another car accidentally, and his father, Wolfert, is badly injured. When a passenger in the other vehicle dies, old clan rivalries reemerge to make them and Wolf’s wife, Memela, targets. Internal tensions among the characters surface as the pressure builds outside of the salvage yard, and themes of identity and dignity are realized in the actions and words.

Salvage premiered in 2008 at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles and its Native Voices at the Autry. The play has also been presented during the Origins Festival in London in 2009. The work is Glancy’s third piece for theater, and she has specific memories about creating it.

“I had actually been in Montana, working on my second play, Stone Heart. … I was driving, and the characters got in the backseat and rode with me for many miles. I finally realized another play was on its way,” Glancy said.

The play’s director Sarah d’Angelo said Salvage is uniquely Native American in its story mode as opposed to the European-American model.

“I see a hearkening to Native intellectual tradition, like the ideal of place – it plays an important role, almost as if it were another character,” said d’Angelo, Mohawk. “… It’s a very contemporary story, and the language is really quite beautiful. Diane is a novelist, poet and playwright. Her voice is something very unique.”

The play was chosen for full-staging treatment after it was read at last year’s festival. OKCTC accepts script submissions before a March deadline. Submissions are selected for staged readings at the festival based on solidity of the script. Two or three are then presented at the festival for the general public, which gets to add input. From those scripts, festival organizers choose one to produce the following year’s festival.

They are chosen on their strength and also for their application to the festival’s parameters. Works for a large cast or requiring an elaborate, complicated set are not considered for production at this time because of OKCTC’s available resources. For this reason, there are no winners and losers.

In time, the theater company hopes to present at least two new play productions each festival week, Irick said. The most important point is to continue collaboration between the company and local Native American writers, directors, actors and artists.

Salvage will be performed throughout the festival week. Other events include a discussion panel with the playwrights, authors luncheon and staged readings of three more new plays, one of which will be produced in 2013.

Glancy said she plans to attend the June 8 showing of her play. The author will also be in OKC for the screening of The Dome of Heaven, a 2011 feature film starring Oklahoma actor Wes Studi, Cherokee, during the deadCENTER Film Festival. Glancy wrote the screenplay and directed. The film will be shown at 11:15 a.m. June 9 at Harkins Theatre, 150 E. Reno Ave., Oklahoma City.


IF YOU GO

The 3rd Annual Native American New Play Festival will be June 1-10 at Oklahoma City Civic Center Music Hall’s CitySpace Theatre, 201 N. Walker Ave., Oklahoma City.


Festival schedule:

Salvage show times:

8 p.m. May 31 (preview performance)

8 p.m. June 1-2, 7-9

2 p.m. June 3



Other festival activities:

Saturday, June 9

2 p.m.: Free staged reading of Chalk in the Rain by Bret Jones

8 p.m.: Final performance of Salvage

Sunday, June 10

11:30 a.m.: Meet and Greet with playwrights and authors over light luncheon

1 p.m.: Free staged reading of Broken Heart Land by Vicki Lynn Mooney

3 p.m.: Coffee and snack break

3:30 p.m.: Free staged reading of Waaxe’s Law by Kathryn Nagle

5 p.m.: Q&A panel discussion with the playwrights

Tickets to see Salvage are $10-$20. To purchase, call the Oklahoma City Theatre Co. box office at (405) 297-2264 or go to www.okctheatrecompany.org. To RSVP for the June 10 luncheon, call (405) 812-7737 by June 5.

For more about the deadCENTER Film Festival, go to www.deadcenterfilm.org.



Actors Jeremy Tanequodle, left, and Tiffany Tuggle play the characters Wolf and Memela in Salvage, the mainstage production of the annual Native American New Play Festival, June 1-10, in Oklahoma City.

OKLAHOMA CITY THEATRE COMPANY | COURTESY PHOTO