Toward the Production of New Native Theater || An Interview with Randy Reinholz
Randy Reinholz (Choctaw) is an internationally acclaimed director, producer, playwright, and actor for the stage and screen. He is also the producing artistic director of Native Voices at the Autry, the nation’s only Equity theater company dedicated to the development and production of new plays by Native Americans, a company he co-founded with Jean Bruce Scott, his wife and collaborator, who serves as the producing executive director. Native Voices is the resident theater company at La Jolla Playhouse for 2016–2018 and has been in residence at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California, since 1999. In March 2009, Native Voices produced Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light at the Autry, directed by Reinholz.
PRISCILLA: How did you decide to become a theater artist, specifically a director?
RANDY: I was reared in rural America. My father was a faith healer. When his mojo was good, we were welcomed. When it was bad, we had to move. And we had to move often, so I learned to adapt. This informed my perspective on life and shaped my values.
In the small towns where I was reared, there was no urgency to get an education. Most people just got a high school diploma and then got a job in our hometown.
I was a well-regarded high school athlete who went to William Jewel College in Liberty, Missouri, on a football scholarship. While there, I benefited greatly from a coach who told me that the effort I was putting out was not going to be enough. I wasn’t big enough or fast enough. I was an athlete, but I was not going to be able to make a career out of it. So, I threw myself into my academic work. It was also at this time that I was diagnosed with dyslexia. Then I met a theater professor who asked me what I was interested in, and I said literature and history. I liked stories. That’s what led to my involvement with theater. I studied with Dr. Kim Bradford Harris and Dr. Lois Anne Harris, and they changed my life, opened up new worlds and ideas for me. I am still in touch with them today. At one point, Pavarotti came to perform on our campus, and I was the stage manager for his show. Then the Royal Shakespeare Company [RSC] came to perform. They brought a five-person touring group in the winter of 1983 and, once again, I was stage manager. The play was called The Hollow Crown, and I distinctly remember a speech featured in it. It was an adaptation of Richard II, and while I didn’t fully understand the history or situation faced by Richard, I understood he was speaking from the results of his own decisions and he was destroyed. That moment of that play and speech was unspeakably beautiful. When I met the folks from RSC, I knew that was what I wanted to do—act—tell stories that were real and from the heart. When I think about that time in my life, I think about the RSC actors’ advice to me: “Try to meet someone in their fifties and try to imagine doing what they do.”
After I graduated from William Jewel College, I auditioned and was awarded a full scholarship to attend graduate school at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where I received my MFA in acting. At that time, acting was my passion. After Cornell, I got an internship in acting, and then I earned my Equity card at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California. I had a kind of charm and a boyish look, so at twenty-five I was cast to play eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds. Also, I was not very tall, so I was usually cast as the quirky best friend. I was closer to Johnny Depp than Rob Lowe. Then in 1989, I landed a contract role on Days of Our Lives on NBC. I was cast in a few commercials and guest starred on a couple of series. Then I landed a part in a low-budget movie called Dead Space with Bryan Cranston in 1991. It was really a charmed moment in my life. I have a great story: I was a poor country boy who earned a degree from Cornell University, and then I actually became an actor in Los Angeles. I also met Jean Bruce Scott, my wife, during that time. She had been on Days of Our Lives for three years. After that she was a series regular on St. Elsewhere, Magnum PI, and Airwolf and guest starred on other TV series in the mid-’80s.
By the time I was thirty, I decided I wanted to start teaching. My first fulltime appointment was at Duke University, and then I was hired in a tenure-track position at Illinois State University [ISU] in Normal, Illinois. My first semester there, I ended up directing a full production for their main stage. I wasn’t nervous because I hadn’t directed enough to worry about the short preparation time. The play was The Imaginary Invalid by Molière, and I was fortunate to cast a few natural clowns in the production. It all played over the top, and the show was well received for its commedia dell’arte style.
After that, the faculty at Illinois State asked me to bring them a Native play. They knew I was Native because I had filled out the Equity and Diversity Form and identified myself as a Native American. I didn’t think it would be too hard to find a Native play, but when I looked up Indian theater at the university library for ideas about what to direct, I only found one play, called Naked and on a Horse, and some plays from India. That was in the early 1990s, and the internet was still young. Now, I have directed seventy-five Native plays.
PRISCILLA: What details do you remember about collaborating with Drew Hayden Taylor and Native Earth Performing Arts?
RANDY: I connected with Drew Hayden Taylor, who ran Native Earth Performing Arts, while I was searching for a Native play for ISU. He was welcoming and warm, and he sent me some plays from Canada. I also connected with Bruce King and William S. Yellow Robe, and we did a reading series in 1994 as part of the first year of Native Voices. The Native playwrights were Drew, Bruce, Bill, Joseph Dandurand, and Marie Clements. It wouldn’t have happened without Drew’s generosity and encouragement. Drew is a gift of a person and a friend. We have produced four of his plays at Native Voices. He knew Tomson Highway, to this day the only First Nations star in theater with a major production in Toronto. Jean and I went to Toronto several times to see work, meet artists, and be part of the center of Native theater in the 1990s. We would go to parties after the shows there, and all the people I had read about who were involved in Canadian First Nations theater were there. Drew was a friend and made us feel comfortable and welcome. Native Earth was the most important Native theater company in North America. Four plays? Who produces four plays together? It must be time to do another. Drew is generous, funny and warm. I am forever in his debt.
PRISCILLA: What plays did you direct in the early years of Native Voices?
RANDY: We were in Normal, Illinois, for the first year, which was 1994. We presented fully staged readings of No Totem for My Story by Joseph A. Dandurand [Kwantlen]; The Independence of Eddie Rose by William S. Yellow Robe [Assiniboine-Sioux]; Evening at the Warbonnet by Bruce King [Haudenosaunee/Oneida]; The Baby Blues by Drew Hayden Taylor [Ojibwe]; and Now Look What You Made Me Do … by Marie Clements [Métis]. We enlisted faculty directors, student and faculty actors, and dramaturgs from across the country. The writers were generous and grateful for the opportunity. After that first festival, William S. Yellow Robe said to me, “You have to do this again and you have to keep calling it Native Voices.” And in 2019, Native Voices will celebrate its 25th anniversary.
In our second year, we presented fully staged readings of Sitting Bull’s Laundry by William Lang [Lenni Lenape]; Rose by Tomson Highway [Cree]; Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth by Drew Hayden Taylor [Ojibwe]; and Please Do Not Touch the Indians by Joseph A. Dandurand [Kwantlen]; and we had a full production of Now Look What You Made Me Do … by Marie Clements [Métis] as the centerpiece. This was 1995.
I directed the 1994 reading of the play and its 1995 production. It was thrilling to collaborate with Marie and to fully realize the power of this troubling story. Now Look What You Made Me Do … premiered at Illinois State University as a main stage production, and then we were invited to perform at the American College Theater Festival [ACTF] Regional Evening of Scenes in Columbus, Ohio, in 1996. Her poetry and storytelling are stunning. Marie’s words touched the audience to their very soul. Some, overcome by the story, left during the performance, while others cheered during and afterwards. I remember a young man, a student and a stunning actor, sitting in the audience motionless after the show. “There is too much of that going on” was his response as I patted him on the shoulder. I am still in contact with that student. It was a gift. Marie’s work is stunning, and she should be produced more often.
The theater reviewer for the Bloomington newspaper proclaimed the play unfit for a college campus. He objected to the graphic depiction of domestic violence, sex workers, and transgender characters. He declared that these “ugly” stories had no place in Normal, Illinois. Of course, he forgot to read the front page of his own paper, as that week the headlines reported the tragic story of a local woman who had been beaten to death by her boyfriend at a prominent hotel in town. Now Look What You Made Me Do … was relevant and important. It pushed the boundaries of “taste” and asked the establishment to see people they routinely ignored as they were being murdered. This critic was also hard on the students’ performances. The students understood the problem of his limitations. This review reaffirmed my determination to continue to produce these types of plays. The lesson I learned was that I wanted to be able to ask larger, more difficult questions onstage.
PRISCILLA: How did your move to the Autry Museum of the American West come about?
RANDY: Our first performance at the Autry was Urban Tattoo by Marie Clements [Métis] in 1999. It was produced in conjunction with the exhibit titled Powerful Images: Portrayals of Native America. If we sometimes felt as though we were fish out of water in Normal, Illinois, we had no idea what to expect when we arrived in Los Angeles to tour the Autry’s galleries. We met the programs manager in 1995 after touring the galleries, and actually politely declined to comment on them because they were so narrowly focused on the cowboy narrative at the time. But she wanted to know what we thought, so we sat for over two hours and talked about our observations and the lack of a Native American narrative. After Jean and I gave our feedback on the galleries, the Autry asked us to serve on the advisory board for the Powerful Images exhibit. Upon reviewing the plans for the Autry’s displays and the discourse around Native Americans for the exhibit, we pointed out that live, contemporary Native people were still missing from the story of the Powerful Images exhibition. Mounting a play with Native stories and characters played by contemporary Native people onstage was “evidence” that we were not extinct, that we are here, with issues and needs and much to contribute if we are invited into the conversation. The Autry took that step with us. They wanted to be more inclusive, to focus on diversity, and they met a whole new segment of Los Angelinos. The audiences were thrilled.
PRISCILLA: What similarities and differences do you see in the content that had been produced in earlier years and what Native American writers are addressing today?
RANDY: In general, when an oppressed group gets their voice back, they often communicate about oppression. Many of the early plays at Native Voices were Native American and First Nations stories addressing themes of abuse (sexual, alcohol, violence, and psychological oppression). Those themes tended to dominate the stories.
About ten years into our work, issues of abuse gave way to identity: “Who is really Native?” These issues are front and center in many gaming tribes, since there is “per cap” distribution of profits to tribal members from business ventures of the tribe. Those issues still resonate today in Indian country, though it is much more focused on tradition, language, and culture. Blood quantum continues to be important, and how it is defined and determined varies from tribe to tribe. Each tribe’s definition of necessary “blood quantum” for enrollment (which is the government’s form of documentation for Indian identity) is better known to both members and descendants investigating their ancestry and rights. The US government’s treatment of the indigenous people of this land is highly unusual. It is as if the government is both acknowledging the ethnic cleansing and denying all responsibility for the effects of it at the same time.
Over the past few years, cultural themes of family, untold histories, rule of law, aesthetics, and societal issues (like global warming, sustainability, water rights, and national sovereignty) are front and center. One might say the stories that Native writers are drawing from similar themes as other American and Canadian artists, but from contain an indigenous point of view. Those stories are not solely focused on bad characters from the dominant society or people historically of European descent; rather, on the elements necessary to tell the most compelling stories that foreground Native American, First Nations, Alaska Native, and Native Hawai’ian experiences. Even the plays using history are telling stories that continue to shape contemporary Native American experiences.
PRISCILLA: What is the role of theater and performance in communicating the reality of Native lives to contemporary Native Americans and to society?
RANDY: Native people have used story, oral traditions, songs, and dance to communicate their realities and history for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Then each tribe, language group, and even clans among the tribes have unique characteristics about how they use these different means of communication and so on. I have some knowledge in some areas, but I do not feel comfortable describing a “pan-Indian” use of these traditional means of passing on and reflecting knowledge. I can say that many of the 566 Native American tribes that were legally recognized as of January 1, 2016, by the Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA] of the United States, as well as the hundreds more fighting for recognition, are living cultures, each with distinct needs, cultural norms, and aims.
If the question is reframed and reduced in scale to focus on the typical kind of theater and performance we undertake at Native Voices at the Autry for developing and producing new works for the stage by Native American, First Nation, Alaska Native, and Hawai’ian Native playwrights, it is simpler to address. Most of the work we have taken on since 1994 has included scripts the playwrights intended to be shared with a broad audience, that could play anywhere on American stages. Even within these parameters, the role of theater is too big for a short response here. This generation of playwrights is attempting to fill in for the hundreds of years of oppression, suppression, misrepresentation, and media violence that have shaped American conversations and perspectives about what it means to be indigenous. Native Americans, First Nations, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawai’ians have lived through conflicts since the point of first contact. The historical trauma forever imprinted upon all indigenous peoples.
Some plays Native Voices develops and produce confront these violent images head-on; others present the human conditions of Native Americans, First Nations, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawai’ians in more subversive ways. Others depict current issues faced in Indian country and the major legal and social threats to indigenous peoples. Some writers want to present and shine a light on their specific tribal culture and tradition, simply giving the audience a view into their lives.
PRISCILLA: Why was it important for you to create an Equity theater company dedicated to producing plays by Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and First Nations peoples?
RANDY: We had to. It was vitally important to us that Native theater artists be taken seriously by the field. The only way for us to do that was to train actors, stage managers, and directors into a company of artists and to produce Native playwrights under an Actors’ Equity Association contract. As Jean and I started reading scripts, first for university and college productions, and then as we shared the scripts with professionals through readings and workshops, we saw the power of gathering artists to focus on plays by Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawai’ians, and First Nations peoples. We witnessed the power of these stories. Early on, we only had a few ways to encourage other professional companies to produce these plays. With the success of our early productions at the Autry, it was clear there needed to be a company that focused exclusively on producing this work.
Now the goal is to empower other Equity companies and regional theaters to expand their efforts to include Native voices in their seasons and to support emerging Native theater artists by producing their work at higher levels of production. Our perspective has always been that we want to position Native playwrights and theater artists nationally and get them more attention. We want to see Native theater artists working in union houses earning professional wages. We all have to work together to increase opportunities for Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawai’ian, and First Nations theater artists in a wider array of artistic arenas.
PRISCILLA: What details do you remember about seeing the early version of Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light at the Public? What struck you about the work then, and led you to direct and produce it?
RANDY: We saw the reading at the Public in 2007. The main image I remember was the kitchen table. It was a metaphor that Joy employed and reclaimed from political rhetoric. Joy framed the table as the place where her family saw, hid from, confronted, and recovered from the issues of her life. The table served as the location where Indian people confronted the historical traumas of this generation.
Onstage, Joy is raw, stunning, kind, and mesmerizing. She has such power, while being completely approachable. She is giving, inviting, and captivating. Yet she does not show off, hoping to get people to applaud for her. She shares from a private, often painful place, sharing a story that is American, and timeless, uniquely personal and informed by the details of growing up Creek in Oklahoma during the era of Patsy Cline. Joy’s world is filled with jazz and stomp dance.
Joy also brought together an amazing group of musicians for the reading at the Public in New York led by Larry Mitchell, who we were lucky enough to have continue as a collaborator on the project when we started to work on it in June 2008. Larry, an immensely gifted musician and producer, had just won a Grammy Award for producing, engineering, and performing on Totemic Flute Chants by artist Robert Mirabal of Taos Pueblo. As a director, working with a talent of Larry’s caliber is like having an extra brain in the room; he always knew just the right thing to do to lift or deepen certain moments in the play.
PRISCILLA: What was it like interacting with dramaturg Shirley Fishman?
RANDY: I loved working with Shirley Fishman. Shirley is a gift of a human being. She can so easily read a script and see the potential, see what is extraneous and know how to ask questions that lead to “what might be.” I have worked with Shirley several times since then. I am always bowled over by her compassion, focus, and depth. She is so clear and asks the playwright to pare away anything extraneous. She also asks a lot of “director questions” about how the moments work, what is intended, and what she sees onstage. Her questions lead to changes that deepen and enrich the work.
I think Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light was our first, really intense collaboration. She sat with me after the runs of the show for note sessions that were longer than the actual running time of the show. Sometimes I work with dramaturgs who don’t want to interfere, and that is crucial to protecting the authentic voice prized by Native Voices audiences, but Shirley has the ability to advocate on behalf of the writer and still push for theatrical moments onstage. She’s not shy.
Writers make their plays better by adding dialogue or cutting extraneous words or scenes to clarify action and intention. Directors realize the world of the play through action and its intersection between actors, design elements, and the audience. The story moves with action and rhythm. Shirley sees all of these perspectives in the same moment. It is a gift to work with her, and I hope more people get to experience her power.
PRISCILLA: Can you describe your experience with Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light?
RANDY: The Native Voices Equity production played for three weeks in Los Angeles at the Autry in 2009. In May 2010, we presented it at Joe’s Pub in New York. We remounted it for a benefit performance at La Jolla Playhouse during Native Voices 2010 Festival of New Plays. It was very different in each venue.
The design elements at the Autry were incredible, and that really lifted the show. It was the first full production. The audiences breathed with Joy as she performed. I remember the “giveaway” section as being moving, but it took too long. We decided to have volunteers from Native Voices help with the gifts so that Joy could make it to the peak of the giveaway section. The arc of Joy’s performance was captivating. The story has a cumulative effect, with a wonderful punch at the climax of the show. While the story is difficult, Joy’s desire to give it an uplifting ending and to empower the listener was always very clear.
The music was so exciting to hear fully produced: Joy blowing the sax and singing, peppering the performance with flute, drum, and rattle. Larry Mitchell was the quintessential “one-man” band, playing a wide array of guitar styles (I think he had four or five different guitars onstage) along with other instruments while he also drummed, recorded, and looped live sounds, and brought in a bunch of recorded cues that he triggered live onstage in unison with the sound designer’s effects and recordings.
When we moved to La Jolla, we had little scenery, a few props, and very few production elements. The same was true at Joe’s Pub in New York. In those two venues, we saw parts of the show that were not necessary, so trimming the script and streamlining the performance became a priority. Joy’s performance instincts helped this process, as anything she consistently forgot became something to question. Joy is a wonderful storyteller, a gift for any director. One of my favorite memories at Joe’s Pub at the Public was working with the young lighting designer, who was used to cueing quick changes in support of music acts. He had lots of set cues that worked for the small stage space. As Joy performed, I sat in the house texting lighting looks and sound-level notes to the booth. I really can’t remember why I didn’t sit in the booth; maybe because there wasn’t room. It was fun, and the crew at the Public was fantastic.
Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light went on to many more performances and productions. Joy has performed the show on her own, and with Larry. They have worked in small venues, community spaces, and grand auditoriums. Just last week, Joy sent a new draft of a new script. We are always looking for chances to support each other and spread the good work happening in Native theater.
I am so happy that Wings is now published so that other young Native women, really all kinds of women, can read and speak those words of empowerment, and maybe even see some other performers mount the show. I think of Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio and what it meant to my generation of performers. We saw a raw, exciting piece of theater that could be done anywhere. It was topical and muscular writing. The same can be said of Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. What Joy’s work possesses is also beyond compare. I love that the center of her work is so feminine. The power and strength are timeless. The need to hold a family together, even as it shifts and evolves, is such a core piece of the human experience. Joy is a voice for warrior women everywhere. There is also a sense of the eternal in Joy’s work. Glaciers move with such force, fueled by years of energy contained by climate and nature. A similar power, the compacting of ideas, lives, and love fuel the work of Joy Harjo.