The transition between night and day seems to be of great importance in this play. Can you explain what you wanted that choice to emphasize and (perhaps) how that does or doesn’t relate to the title, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, you’ve chosen for your play?
The day relates to the temporal world—to that above the surface. The night is mystery, that which is beyond the grid of logic. It’s the transition, or the in-between state of twilight, the grey before dawn when we get the kind of insight we can drag into the being-ness of our lives. Mystery wears clothes. What is sacred is touchable. Most of the play happens at night. It is only when the Spirit Helper sings the Spirit Helper song, when the mother’s spirit has departed after coming to visit her daughter Redbird that the possibility of sunrise occurs. The song follows a traditional song pattern. The order of the colors is ceremonial as we begin to see the emergence of sunrise. This makes a path for Redbird to enter back into the possibility of wholeness. And when Spirit Helper brings Redbird back to the kitchen table, after the car wreck, Redbird emerges in the light, and in the Mvskoke creation story being told by her grandmother: “The light made an opening in the darkness ....” “Wings” refer to flight, which can be escape, transcendence, the ability to see and know, or to perceive beyond earth gravity. And the need to balance is at the root of most Native ceremonies. The story of an individual is within the context of a larger family story. The balancing of an individual changes the family dynamic. For clarity and health, there must be a balance in the family, individual body and soul, or community system. The left and right, the earth and sky, dark and light, must be in coherent loops for vibration to make a clear resonance.
Let’s talk about the kitchen table. I am reminded of your collection of poetry, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky; the final poem of that collection is “Perhaps the World Ends Here” with the opening line, “The world begins at the kitchen table.” After re-reading that poem in light of your play, I began to think of how much Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light really embodies that poem. Can you address this connection and whether or not that was a conscious choice?
I had decided to write a one-woman show a few years before I actually got to it. The notion came often to me often during music performances or readings because when I perform I weave stories around the songs and poems. I began to envision a show with a definite trajectory, with drama and coherency between all the elements. I worked on it most of the summer of 2007 then gave up in frustration because I just couldn’t find it, though I had piles of material to work from. I didn’t have the central vehicle to unite the pieces. I was informed about the new Native Initiative at the Public Theater and told to contact the Menominee actor and director Sheila Tousey, because they were looking for plays. That was around late August/early September of 2007. I remember promising Sheila on the phone: “Yes, I can have a play written for a play reading by December,” then hanging up wondering what I had gotten myself into, as I had never written a stage play. It’s different from screenwriting, short stories or other storytelling forms. It was Betsy Richards, a program officer at the Ford Foundation, whose portfolio funded the Native Initiative, who reminded me that she always loved the kitchen table poem, and why not use the kitchen table as the central device. Once I had that, all the pieces I had wrestled with all summer came together.
I was really drawn to the space of the kitchen table—how you used it as a dinner table, a hiding place, a bar, the father’s dead body, can you speak to the different manifestations of the kitchen table in the show?
The kitchen table used to be the heart of the house. I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case any more for many in this country. As I discovered the story, I discovered the agility of the kitchen table metaphor.
Did you feel a different energy come out of the kitchen table once it jumped from the page on to the stage?
The page and stage are similar in that they are dreaming spaces. Each has their own set of natural laws of aesthetics, form, and manners of movement. The page is flat and intimate. The action is internal. The stage is a large physical space, in a place with audience. The kitchen table on stage keeps a coherency, but the space around it changes every performance. The stage, and live performance overall, is one of the most immediate, creative spaces. It’s live, so alive it can appear to be living and breathing on its own, when you are in the thick of it. The only control you have is over what you are carrying in your center, your memory and everything that has brought you to that moment. The page, however, has a more controllable environment. Every performance I interact with the table, the idea of the table, and how the story moves around it. It’s never the same. It’s always a different energy. Maybe it’s the same way with reading. You, the reader, or audience are never quite the same.
There are some very strong images associated with voice and silence: “Watch out, we tried, but couldn’t tell our mother. Our tongues were stuck with taffy in our mouths.” Can you elaborate more on how you view sound and silence working in the play?
Silence is a space of creative possibility, even as it can be a space of shutting down. Every phenomenon in this realm has oppositional potential. The play begins with the silencing of Redbird by her stepfather, or “The Keeper” who takes her music, her voice away from her. The Keeper is invested in the invented story of America. He believes in the hierarchical value system laid down in the European Christian beginnings of the takeover of indigenous lands. In that scale of measure, an Indian woman and her children are not worth as much as a white male. They are seen as property. I am reminded of one of the essays in June Jordan’s brilliant book of essays, Civil Wars. As she was divorcing, she discovered that there were more laws in the American system, for taking care of property rights, that is the couch, than the rights of her son. Indigenous people in this country have been disappeared in the story of America. For us to speak means we carry breath. Each of us, Native and non-Native, must deal with how this creates itself in us, as these lands are indigenous. The root story is indigenous. In a sense, we have become the anti-story of those who would disappear us from the American story, and are therefore dangerous to them. That story is implied as the foundation of the play. Redbird’s story was silenced by history and in her home. She was broken open in the car crash, so the story could emerge.
I know time and time again you’ve been asked about the relationship between music and poetry in your work and I absolutely love the power music holds in your play. I’m thinking of the Trail of Tears song where two women sing a song to hold each other up and how the mother character gives Redbird a song to save her. What role did you envision music having within the play?
I never considered writing the play without music. The stories and music emerged together. I don’t always know exactly what or why I’m doing. The interweaving of stories, poetry, and music emerged organically as I traveled about to read. About fourteen years ago at a performance in Portland, Oregon, a young Crow man waited until all the audience had left to approach me. I could see that he was one of the “old” young people, and that he’d been raised by grandparents. He said my performance reminded him of the way he was taught, with story, poetry, and song woven together.
I appreciated the leaps in time your play took from reflecting on the main character’s (Redbird’s) beginnings, both historically and ancestrally, to focusing on the present and even future. I was fascinated by the grandfather who was capable of “bending time” and got the sense that this is what we, as artists, do, bend time? Do you consider yourself a bender of time, artistically?
I loved those stories of my actual great-(times seven) grandfather Monahwee who could bend time. I’ve used the bending time family gift for deadlines, and for traveling, in a small way. And have seen time as an actual being, shifting and moving. I have not been trained in the way Monahwee was, back in those times. (And people are still being trained in similar manners.) But yes, artistically, especially in poetry, I am aware of bending time. When I write I am always aware of eternal time as it comes up against present, linear time. I intently work to make an opening in consciousness with both strategies of time ... even in story and music, but especially in poetry.
Spirit Helper reminds Redbird when her mother once again leaves her: “There are some things that take an eternity to understand.” I believe we are present in eternity and present here, though present in each in a very different fashion. The mind of eternity cannot fit solidly in any word or story. But when we see the tail or breath of it, we know it, without question.
I enjoyed the participatory aspect of your play, the way Redbird often speaks to and even directly addresses the audience, such as when she begins by saying “Your good thoughts will help see us through.” I felt it somehow gave the audience agency in what they were experiencing. Does being able to address your audience directly offer a different satisfaction from poetry where you don’t always see your reader?
Being on stage as a character gives me a much different satisfaction. I am often speaking poetry, mixed with storytelling and music. Poetry is more compact, fills a quieter space. On stage, in character, I am aware of mystery from a different angle. When I read someone else’s poetry, I hear the lone voice of the poet, which is almost never alone. I hear the voices behind the voice, which are sometimes ghosts, birds, lovers, ex-lovers, or the sound of shattering or putting back together.
I’m curious as to how it felt to work with so many mediums, acting, singing, and the music; are there any similarities between constructing a poem and a play? Or song?
There is a similarity with all of them, and that is, you start with the unseen and bring something into being. A poem is much more solo. It’s your soul’s ears listening to the sound of the collective soul. Your ears may be directed to a certain event, country, time, object, person, or emotional stream. Music often begins that way for me also—and the voice and the horn carry the melody, which is like the poetic line. The rest usually forms around it, though I have next often started with rhythm. I am a rhythm freak. Always tapping out, listening, responding to the various rhythms. I am a dancer at heart, and few people know this about me. I find images or sounds by moving them, and moving with them. Images may also be at the heart of a song. A play is more like writing a symphony and telling a story, at the same time, especially a play with music.
How did acting and the actual embodiment of words that, in terms of poetry, we only get to experience during readings affect your overall perspective on the craft of writing?
My first visceral step into poetry was watching a television show in the early seventies in which a tribal person in ceremony became the poem/ritual song that he was singing. You have to be exact so that what you embody is what you imagine. And in your exactness you have to leave a place for mystery, so that the unknowable has a way to enter. Acting is an extension of words. It is words made manifest by the body.
Are there any plays that have or playwrights who have influenced you?
... All of the children’s plays we performed throughout elementary school. I was always in school plays though I was socially very shy. I was often picked because the teachers would say, “your voice carries.” Of course there’s Shakespeare. Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, about a young working class English girl who falls in love with a black sailor. It was very controversial when it premiered in the late fifties. I was on the crew for the play at Indian school and it was there I got pulled into performing in one of the first all Native drama and dance troupes. Monica Charles, a Klallum playwright was a postgraduate student at the Institute of American Indian Arts, when I was a high school student. I had a lead in her play Mowitch. We toured the Pacific Northwest with our performances, which included dance. Rolland Meinholtz, a Cherokee, was our beloved teacher. He taught us to be professionals. We performed one of his plays, Black Butterflies. I also think of Cherrie Moraga, August Wilson, Tennessee Williams, Ionesco, Euripides, and Lorraine Hansberry.
Finally, I recall a line “Spirit Helper told me, we have to return to the beginning of the story if we are to find all the pieces.” I’m curious, what do you consider the beginning of your story and journey as an artist?
I consider the very beginning of it as unknowable. It started before “I” did. It started with my mother’s longings to sing, her poetry-speech. It started with my father’s ache to know, give voice to mystery when he saw so much racism and violence. And then before that, and before that ... However, in “real” time ....it was the same way. As a child, the world felt anew with every unheard song made hearable, every unspoken poem made speakable. But, back to the linear here and now, before I was five I felt most myself while dancing, singing and making art. I knew it then.
Do you plan on writing more plays in the future?
My next play, which is bothering me like crazy right now, will also include music. The characters and music keep bothering me. The play is waking me up at night. I will be on it after I finish three other writing deadlines.
One line “There is power in this song,” really stands out in my mind; I believe it is because there is definitely power in Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. Thank you so much for sharing this gift with us.
And mvto, thank you, Tanaya.