I met with my actors for what I’m calling “Guerilla (Coyote) Theater.” The plan is to tell the traditional Karuk story “How Birds Got Their Feathers” in a guerilla theater/agit-prop format. Depending on how it goes, I would like to use this format as a way to protest for our Native people in California. Goodness knows we have enough to fight for, and if this would help us to simultaneously halt assaults against our lands and traditions, and at the same time educate our own people and outsiders about who we are, then it is a form worth pursuing.
We made some important progress. I brought up my concern that, unless we connected this directly with our audience, it would only read as the theater students being pretentious. So I posed the question, “What is it that has Stony Brook students worked up?” The answer is Andrew Cuomo’s budget cuts. He’s cutting funding from the lower-income people who need it most, and allowing higher taxes for rich people like him to expire. We cast the play with Chris Petty as Coyote, Becky Goldberg as Wren, and Nancee Moes as Kachakâach. We also set a date: May 17th.
Next, I need to draw up a script (which I would like to be more of a commedia-style outline than an actual script), figure out where we are going to do it, and set up a Facebook group to start advertising for it. I’m working with an artist here, Jose Ojeda, to create masks for my actors, and I need to find some kind of a projector to throw Cuomo’s image up on the wall.
