Ashland, Oregon's 24th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration

Ashland, Oregon’s 24^th annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was cleanly divided into two events: the official, city sponsored event, and the Occupy teach-in afterwards.

The first event was hosted by the Historic Ashland Armory. It was a potpourri of art and speeches geared around King and his legacy. There were three kinds of things that happened. The first consisted of specific references to the historic Civil Rights Movement, the second of work that people are doing in Southern Oregon today that continue that legacy, and the third was DeLanna Studi’s recitation of an old Tecumseh speech. The benefit of the references to the Civil Rights Movement was to give young and emerging artists a venue to perform: from Crater High School’s Flag Team and Teen Theater that began with an allegory of segregation to Ben Badden’s rap about MLK, this event was a great showcase for some of the best young artists the Rogue Valley has to offer. The continuing of King’s legacy was represented Mary Farrell, founder of the Maslow Project that helps homeless kids living in the Rogue Valley, and the Ashland Food Project, which organizes long-term food donations for the Valley’s hungry. DeLanna Studi, a Cherokee actor with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, read a speech by Tecumseh. I feel it’s important for Native folks to get their voices heard, especially in events with a focus on racial justice.

I’m not sure how you can talk about one of the most prominent social activists of modern times and not address the waves of activism that are currently sweeping the globe, from Arab Spring to the Tea Party to Occupy. But Ashland’s MLK event said nary a word about any of these things. From where I was sitting, I wouldn’t have even known Occupy was in the area until I got to the plaza to hear King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and saw a few signs and an “Occupy” banner. In admittedly critical terms, it highlights the way that activism can be incorporated into the establishment and historicized, even while this establishment struggles with living activism. Occupy’s event didn’t retain as many people as the City’s. In fact, it seems that many of the folks at their teach-in were in one way or another associated with Occupy. It’s something that I noticed at Occupy Medford’s teach-in on January 11^th – the only people they were teaching were people who already agreed with them. Democracy can’t exist if the only people you talk about our common issues with are those who feel the same way you do. But the fault doesn’t simply lie with the Occupiers of the Rogue Valley. The general citizenry of the Valley seem to have time for activism that can be historicized and is safe, but not for living activism that threatens to change the status quo.

I might even say the same about Occupy Ashland. According to the conversations I had with Ashland’s Occupiers, which are now archived at Lenk.TV, attendance at their General Assemblies surpasses that of either Oakland or New York. So the democracy that I’m not seeing in their direct actions may exist in their GAs. The actions they are putting their hopes in, though, seem in keeping with Ashland’s relative conservatism that became apparent to me at the Martin Luther King event: they are working within the current system to create change in terms of homelessness and City banking practices in the Valley.

Spotlight on the USO

This Thursday, Camelot Theatre premiered its new show, Spotlight on the USO. Camelot’s Spotlights are a recent innovation that, to paraphrase Artistic Director Livia Genise, feature “a little story and a lot of music.” This particular show is a deviation from previous Spotlights in that it doesn’t present the biography of an individual artist through music, but rather that of an artistic organization – the USO.

But I’ll come to all that later, because really the show Thursday night was a captivating 40s and 50s jazz concert by the Southern Oregon Jazz Orchestra. They played two sets of songs that I suppose were played for the service people overseas during the 40s and 50s, but that story was only secondary to what they were doing. They did branch out from their usual fare twice, both in the second set after intermission – once to give an example of the country music that started to appear in USO tours in the second half of last century with “Route 66”, and their final number was a medley of songs from the branches of the armed forces during which narrator Shirley Patton invited veterans of each branch to stand and be recognized during their song.

The meat and bones of the concert, though, were 40s and 50s jazz standards, and were they ever a hit! They had the audience singing along with “Minnie the Moocher” and others, and nearly every soloist got a rousing applause when they sat back down. Dianne Strong, a singer, was the featured soloist of the evening. An alto, she has a powerful focal and stage presence while she stays within her range. And when she takes short-note forays above her comfortable range, she’s riveting! But she certainly should not try to hold those higher notes – her attempt in “I’ve Got You under My Skin” was acoustically uncomfortable. While I’m pointing out weaknesses, the trumpet and saxophone sections could probably use a tune-up for “American Patrol,” but besides those two mistakes the concert was certainly a good night out.

Now let’s move on to the story part of the “little bit of story and a lot of music” equation. Peter Wyckliffe wrote the script, and Shirley Patton said it. Wyckliffe has certainly done his homework and has written a feast of information. This feast, however, lacks consistency: it ranges from history lesson with facts and figures to penetrating insights into what the USO was all about. The USO was and is meant to help the troops stay connected to home, and Wyckliffe illustrates that beautifully with a verbal illustration of the phones and letters and how they were and are often the only way the troops have to connect back to their families and loved ones.

The result of the inconsistent nature of Wyckliffe’s script is that it sinks or swims with the actor saying it, and it did both with narrator Shirley Patton. She got off to a slow start, and it definitely came off as a fairly dry history lesson. After she got into her groove, she came across as more grandmotherly and inviting. But she was always reading the script, and that was always a distraction. I suggest that a script is not necessary: the role of the narrator in this particular Spotlight was that of an MC. Some kind of structural outline that the performer can do from memory is what this part called for, but a word-for-word script is a death-trap. It makes the storytelling seem artificial, and Patton’s mixing up the U.S. Navy and Air Force songs when asking veterans from the different branches to stand at the end didn’t help.

While I’m on about inconsistencies, I have to take issue with the use of projections and backlighting. Designers Bart Grady and Brian O’Connor had three different things going on: pictures of the USO from the 40s and 50s up through the 80s and 90s, cool blue and purple washes, and a warm orange wash. The pictures were my favorite – they set the location for the story that Wyckliffe and Patton were telling. The cool washes gave an atmosphere of a smoky jazz bar and fit in a more general way for the orchestra, but not for the story. Orange is jarring color, but I probably would have forgotten about it if it had remained there the whole time. But the seemingly arbitrary shifts between images, cool washes and orange were, frankly, distracting.

That said, these weak points fall outside the crux of the show: the Southern Oregon Jazz Orchestra and their 40s and 50s jazz standards. If that’s your kind of music (and even if it’s not) it’s worth a listen. But if you’re going for the story of the USO, that part of the show has a few wrinkles it needs to iron out before I can walk away satisfied.

Spotlight on the USO is playing at Camelot Theatre, 101 Talent Ave., Talent, Oregon 97540 from January 12-22. Their box office can be reached at 541-535-5250. Tickets are $22, plus $2 for reserved seating.

Inter-arts Collaboration at SBU: The Cabaret Collective and Shared Support Services

CORRECTION: As per Becky's comment, I'd like to retract my statement about the Cabaret Collective not contributing to inter-arts collaboration, and insinuating that it might in fact do the opposite. She brought up many interesting facts that I didn't know, and that I encourage you all to read. ~W.L., 12-12-2011

The Cabaret Collective is an event that began about a year ago at Stony Brook University as a forum to facilitate inter-arts collaboration. The Staller Center houses the Theater, Art, and Music Departments, which, until this semester, have been autonomous from each other. This autonomy lead to a departmental insularity that John Lutterbie, then head of the Graduate Theater Department, and now head of both Art and Theater, found troubling. Under his guidance, Chris Petty of Theater reached out to his colleagues in Theater, Art and Music to form the Cabaret Collective, a periodic variety show exhibiting work from the three departments with the motive to spark dialogue and collaboration between us. The December 9^th Collective was successful, but not in terms of facilitating collaboration between the arts.

This Collective showed that the Music, Theater and Engineering students (there was a comedy troupe from the Engineering Department) are tending away from self-gratification and towards performativity. It’s my opinion that art of any kind needs to be for the audience – it needs to talk to and with them, not at them. College departments are beautiful in the artistic freedom that they provide, but one of the dangers of this freedom is that the art that comes out of them can be self-involved. This Collective showed that we can experiment and still engage audiences. A good example was Levy Lorenzo’s Stick of Joy. Levy is a percussionist, but his instrument for this piece was a joy stick plugged into a laptop plugged into the speakers. He used the joy stick to manipulate audio to create a musical piece. Levy’s a-rhythmic style can be disorienting, and the lack of an identifiable instrument could have compounded that disorientation. Instead it did the opposite. The newness of juxtaposing a technology that I remember as reaching its heyday in the 90s with his style of music was intriguing, and the way Levy performed the piece by throwing his whole body into its creation drew and held the audience’s focus.

Where the Cabaret Collective doesn’t seem to be succeeding is in its intended purpose – inter-arts collaboration. The sole representatives of such a thing were Timothy and Mallory Vallier’s Kinetic Petals (a dance/composition piece using a Kinect), and Belsazar, a poetry performance by Becky Goldberg of Theater and Lukas Kürten of Physics. But I’m not sure if these instances of inter-arts collaboration can be credited to the Cabaret Collective. Timothy and Mallory are husband and wife, and Lukas is becoming a fixture of the Theater Department outside of the Collective. The rest of the pieces were specifically music or specifically theater. Our friends from Engineering, Monroe Comedy, are included in that with their sketch comedy act. But I’m not sure we can expect much more – two evenings a semester aren’t enough to facilitate inter-disciplinary work on any meaningful scale. What will do this is interaction across disciplines on a daily basis.

This interaction has been happening on the graduate level through the Staller Departments, as well as English and Philosophy, encouraging students to come take classes with them. But another form of inter-departmental interaction has been happening, one that is more controversial, and one that . What is happening at Stony Brook University is called “shared support services.” This means, to quote Alyssa Melillo of the Stony Brook Press, “the administrative staffs of two or three academic departments are merged into one central entity where staff members can specialize in a certain department, but be available and prepared to handle responsibilities outside their specialization.” You can read her full article here: http://sbpress.com/2011/11/shared-services-from-scratch/.

While faculty and student resistance from the Humanities Building is stalling the process, for the present, shared services have been incorporated between Theater and Art with hardly a cry of protest. There are two reasons for this, I think.

The first has to do with personalities. Last year, Art didn’t have a permanent chair, and there was an atmosphere of distrust towards Nick Mangano of Theater. John Lutterbie, who now heads both departments, seems to be fairly popular professor whose heart is in the right place – he has a sincere inclination towards inter-arts collaboration.

The second is that the Theater graduate students seem unable to organize themselves towards a common political goal. This is the result, I believe, of divergent personalities and a general business with graduate level course work and the creation of art. I cannot speak to the graduate student culture in the Art Department, nor to undergraduate culture.

It’s my opinion that positivity towards Professor Lutterbie and a strong focus on individual projects draw our focus away from the larger issues that, among other things, means continued disciplinary insularity between the arts. These issues include:

·         “Shared support services” mean merging of administrative staffs, not departments of disciplines.

·         The goals for shared support services are not to facilitate the interdisciplinary goals of Lutterbie and many others in the Staller Center. They are to adjust to an $82 million budget cut. For more, please read President Stanley’s statement: http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/50forward/message3.html

·         There is a widespread concern that shared support services will inhibit faculty and administration to provide quality attention to the students. This concern has been expressed by our colleagues in the Music Department (http://sbpress.com/2011/11/shared-support-in-progress/), in the Humanities, and by the GSO calling for transparency on the part of the Administration (http://www.sbgso.org/files/u1/resolutions/RESOLUTION%20ON%20SSCs.pdf). These concerns are being met by the University Senate, who has called a moratorium on shared support services pending further investigation into their viability. 

The Cabaret Collective is an interesting experiment, and certainly a fun event, but fails to address the real impediments to inter-arts collaboration. In fact, by focusing our energies into the Collective, and our hopes in Lutterbie and shared support services, we may in face be distracting ourselves from more effective ways to facilitate inter-disciplinary work and contributing to continued insularity between departments.

All Night All Day, or How I Debuted on Broadway

This weekend, a group of local theater artists created a 24-hour variety show on Broadway. By Broadway, I don’t mean in one of the big Broadway theaters. I mean on Broadway the street. Occupy Broadway, in solidarity with the NYC GA, opened the event on the red steps on Times Square, and then moved north to 50^th and Broadway – Paramount Plaza, a private-public park that they renamed “People’s Performance Plaza.” They describe themselves in their manifesto:

“We join in solidarity with fellow occupiers from Tahrir Square to Davis, California by challenging this restriction on access to the public commons [described earlier as private owners of public spaces reneging on their obligations to keep the spaces constantly open to public use] and by extension to democracy itself. Our creative resistance is using public space to create an exciting mix with public performances, art, and music in vacant, lifeless corporate, bonus plazas. Through such art, New York artists re-imagine their city as a work of art, rather than a shopping mall. With capitalism gone amuck, foreclosures increasing, and bank crises consuming whole communities, we are demonstrating another, more joyful way of living.”

And joyful it was. When I arrived, at around 1 in the afternoon, they were in kind of a lull, and the performance space was occupied by a discussion about the financial issues that have created the Movement.

But, the organizers found a way to pick back up the performative energy by bringing back “dramatic karaoke” from the wee hours of the morning (the event occurred from 6PM Friday to 6PM Saturday). Dramatic karaoke is when somebody recites, as if they were a dramatic monologue, song lyrics. I volunteered, and did the Beach Boys “Don’t Worry Baby.” Unfortunately, I can only do one thing at a time, so I didn’t record my Broadway debut. But here’s OWS photographer Eric doing “Sympathy for the Devil”!

Dramatic karaoke was one of the staples of the event, as well as readings of the First Amendment every hour on the hour.

There was also real singing, monologues, storytelling, short scenes, and dance. It was a variety show of the first degree. But probably one of the most telling things I heard there was the story of Big Bank: The Musical. Not the story of what happens in the musical, although that’s certainly fun, but the story of how the musical came to be and where it’s at now, which is looking for funding. The problem with doing even a light-hearted musical about a Big Bad Bank that takes sick pleasure in foreclosing on people is that “producers like banks.” Later that evening I was speaking to a young man named Raymond who told me that he feels that we are taught a shallow, unfulfilling lifestyle by corporate America in which we value material things above human affection. If what Adam Rapp of Big Bank says about producers is correct, then the musicals and plays happening in doors on Broadway are a part of the problem that Raymond sees. The street performance of Occupy Broadway offers an interesting alternative to that: it’s Off-Off-Broadway on Broadway. 

Borders and Colonial Structures in Rogue Reading's "Coyote"

Rogue Readings is a group of graduate students at Stony Brook University who put up readings of new plays that have come to our department for the John Gassner New Play Competition, but have not been selected for that particular event. On Wednesday, November 30, Rogue Readings put up Kevin Kautzman’s Coyote.

I remember being one of the first in our department to read Kautzman’s play a year ago. I remember being thrilled until about the middle or end of the second act. As far as story-telling goes, Kautzman keeps you on the edge of your seat as the plot thickens, and you learn (spoiler alert) that the young good-looking Arizona Minuteman is actually a coyote using the old racist Minuteman to help him get immigrants across the border. And the suspense and the intrigue came across splendidly in the reading – Steve Marsh was riveting as the disgusting Vince, and Gareth Burghes gave us all the sweet-faced innocence of a man who has something to hide.

My problem is that Kautzman has Luke’s (Burghes) Mexican girlfriend Anna (Andrea Penaherrara) tell “Fire Race,” a Karuk myth. I wrote, in my initial comments on the play, that for all the play’s strengths, the use of this story outside of its cultural context – I wrote “permission of the community” at the time – is probably enough to sink it if Indian audiences get wind of it. Cultural appropriation, while certainly a topic of debate in Indian communities, can get the appropriator a lot of bad press and alienate a lot of Indian audiences. For good examples that have made headlines, take a look at the ongoing acrimony over Indian imagery used as team mascots, or the lawsuit by the Navajo Tribe against Urban Outfitters. Needless to say, I was miffed when I found out that Rogue Readings had decided to go ahead and do it anyways. But, to their credit, when I brought up my concerns a second time, Erin Treat and Stephanie Walter of the Rogue Readings board invited me to be on the talk-back panel after the reading.

As the play concerned immigration across the US-Mexican border, the other panelists focused on today’s immigration controversy. Gallya Lahav, from Political Science, talked a bit about it from a raw political standpoint; Margarita Espada, a Puerto Rican artist and activist, talked about immigration to Long Island; and Erin Treat, who hails from Tucson, talked about her community’s discussion of the issue. They spoke far more eloquently and knowledgably about immigration than I can, so I’d like to continue with my discussion of cultural appropriation in Kautzman’s Coyote.

My statement was similar to the one I’ve written above, except that I also took Bill Bright and Tony Platt as positive examples. Bright came to the River, and worked with individuals to record and analyze our language. His work is crucial to the continued restoration of our language. Tony Platt actually went to the Yurok tribal office and asked permission. It wasn’t given or withheld, so he proceeded to engage individual Yuroks as he wrote his book, which seems to be well received by the community. The through line for Bright and Platt’s success is that they actively and humbly worked with the community to produce their works, which in turn benefit our community. The Urban Outfitters scandal is a bad example in that they went behind the Navajo people’s collective back, and as such have gotten a lot of bad press as exploiters of an indigenous community.

The panel’s response bears discussion. I was able to touch some upon some of the specific points that they brought up at the talk-back, but having spent some time thinking about it, I would like to continue by looking at the overarching colonial structures that have shaped this whole event. But first, here are the three counter-arguments and something of my response at the time:

• “Fire Race” belongs to the same mythological archetype as the Greek story of Prometheus. Really, there are only maybe about seven myths, and all are cross-cultural.
• Stories have a historical fluidity across cultural boundaries.
• Indians don’t believe in property.

My response at the time was to say that archetypes may all be well and good, but that thought process doesn’t account for the tenacity with which indigenous people often hold onto the things that remain ours. By telling one of our stories, or using our images, out of their cultural context, the story becomes less ours and has less potency as a symbol of our ethnic identity. The second point seems legitimate, but I believe that it still ignores the current political climate. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I was not able to address the third point, which is wrong on two levels – first, every people has a different culture; and, second, yes we Karuks most certainly do.

Stepping back, I believe I can argue that all three of these arguments and in fact the event as a whole, shed interesting light on current colonial treatment of borders. This is almost poetic, since a border is the central issue and conflict in Kautzman’s play.

In order for colonialism to exist, borders must be transgressed. When this play first crossed my desk, I lay down a boundary based on what seem to be generally held principles of propriety in my community, to wit, that this is our story and you need permission to use it. I spoke as a Karuk, and as a member of the Karuk community. Rogue Readings ignored this stated boundary when they chose to do this play. The Rogue Readings board consists of non-Karuks or any other indigenous person who can claim that this is one of their people’s stories. The structure seems to be one in which a group of outsiders ignore the boundaries set by an indigenous person on the behalf of his people’s cultural integrity.

When I stated my misgivings a second time, Rogue Readings invited me to speak on the panel. This belies three things that indicate ongoing changes in colonial structures, as well as ongoing stasis. The first, and most obvious, is that the Karuk voice was given a place at the table. The second is that I could not have done any of this if I was not a grad student at Stony Brook University. My very being here is a sign that the racial borders around academia are vanishing. In fact, one of Stony Brook’s greatest strengths, in my eyes, is its diverse demographic landscape. The flip side of that strength is that, in order to get ahead in the world, I have to accept a degree of assimilation. It’s like Julian Lang says: “It’s hard to be Indian because you have to live in two worlds.” The third is that we Indians really have to push to even have our voices heard – it would have been nice not to have had to repeat myself.

The third stage of this journey is the talk-back after the reading itself. All three of the arguments employed against Karuk intellectual sovereignty (archetypes, geographic fluidity of stories, and lack of ownership amongst “Indians”) tend towards one conclusion – the borders don’t exist. Now Kautzman definitely seems to be against borders by the way he demonizes the minuteman and creates sympathetic characters out of the coyotes, so it’s consistent for him to deny cultural boundaries as well. My problem is that, in order for indigenous sovereignty to happen, borders around what is ours must exist. To look at this in terms of an “us-them” binary would be incomplete, and therefore dangerous. The aspects of assimilation caused by me being a student in a Euro-American education system, and by my accepting the structures of the predominately white Rogue Readings board to voice my protest mellow this binary and soften the border. Outside of this assimilation, however, the overarching structure has been one of an indigenous person setting a boundary that makes sense in terms of modern decolonial politics, and a group of outsiders using a variety of tactics (the act of ignoring, the act of assimilating, academic arguments, and colonial historiography) to weaken this boundary.

"Dead Man's Cell Phone" at SBU

Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone is not my favorite play – I find it unremarkable and overrated. So I went in to Stony Brook University’s production (directed by Deb Mayo) with some trepidation – I wanted to like it, since some of my friends are acting in it, but my experience with this particular script has been less than satisfactory. That said, both of the seemingly mutually exclusive things I looked forward to happened – I sincerely enjoyed this performance of Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and at the same time I was able to put my finger on why exactly the script doesn’t resonate with me.

This play is about, to my current understanding, the alienating effect that constant cell phone use has on our society. By being constantly in touch with those who are not physically present, we disembody ourselves – an effect metaphored by death in this pay – and we yearn for the love of those in our actual proximity. This sustained loneliness results in social awkwardness. The accumulative impact of this morbidity and awkwardness is a sense of dark humor in Sarah Ruhl’s play. This humor comes across beautifully in SBU’s production. Nancee Moes, playing Jean, carries the play by embodying the full spectrum of morbid awkwardness, from falling in love with a dead man (Diogo Martins) and adopting his cell phone to keep him alive, to falling in love with his less charismatic brother Dwight (Eric Michael Klouda) in his dark and lonely stationary store. Klouda brought his character’s awkwardness alive by playing a clear objective in throwing himself at Jean. The situation in which he plays this action makes his character read as pathetically passionate, which works in favor of the play. Victoria DiCarlo was brilliant Mrs. Gottlieb – she plays her character’s need for constant attention to great comic effect, stealing the show in the scenes that feature her.

This cast did a fantastic job of bringing the best out of what I take to be a severely flawed script. This is my second time seeing Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and I wasn’t able to put together an account of what this play’s driving at until about halfway through this production. After the initial laughs at the awkwardness of Moes’ and DiCarlo’s characters, the play becomes a snoozer until the very end of the first act, when Dwight asks Jean if she loved his brother. “Oh!” the realization hits me, “That’s why she took his cell phone! I get it.” Unfortunately, my previous experience seeing the play was so unremarkable that I forgot that Sarah Ruhl makes it very explicit at the very end of the play that that’s what’s going on. Since this is the second time I’ve found a good chunk of the play a snoozer (and, to this cast’s credit, this time it was only a chunk) I have to wonder how many others have the same problem. As if that’s not enough, Ruhl falls into the self-indulgent trap that lies smack in the way of most playwrights, and ended the play a scene after it was finished. Honestly, we don’t need the epilogue telling us how things turned out for Mrs. Gottlieb. She’s fun, but the play’s not about her.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone is taking a break for Thanksgiving, but will return in Staller Center Theatre 1 on December 1^st through December 4^th at 8PM on Thursday through Saturday, and at 2PM on Sunday. It’s worth a look or two (some parts are double cast) for the sake of this brilliant cast. However, it’s a poor choice for the Stony Brook Theatre Department. There are so many plays out there that need to be done in college theatre because they’re still too experimental for the main stream. To do the same play as everybody else and their dog, especially one as flawed as Dead Man’s Cell Phone, is a disservice to the capabilities of the Theatre Department, and to the craft at large.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Closing

Ranae Hedman

I tried things a little differently last night. Just before I left, I was listening to Jetty Rae on YouTube and got all inspired to be a musician. So I started playing on my box drum that I’m borrowing from my mom. I packed it with me to the theater, and when house opened, I was the

house music!

Ranae Hedman, Waylon Lenk

The show went fantastically again, and the talk back was once again longer than the show itself. People’s concerns about it maybe moving too fast in parts, script-wise, were apparent to me last night – it did feel like a race across the continent, as opposed to the 20 days one story says it actually took Pihnêefich. Afterwards, during the talk-back, we were able to focus in on where the play needs to be developed. I need to further develop Chris’ characters – the child, the Messiah, and Makataimeshkiakiak – and I need to explore the possibilities of setting it in a class room. After all, the Schoolteacher is the glue that holds Coyote Hunts the Sun together. And, to Ranae’s credit, she makes the role happen. I asked if maybe I should change her stories into the kind that exist in most text-books. Reidy Estevez, one of my students, showed me quite clearly that the answer is “no.” The Schoolteacher’s and Pihnêefich’s tellings of “Coyote and the Sun” form the bookends to the play and the journey – without her telling the colonial histories, there is little or no excuse for her to tell the pikvah.

Chris Petty

Waylon Lenk, Ranae Hedman

So what’s next for Coyote Hunts the Sun? Well, rewrites. I need to explore and develop the characters and their worlds. There are two stories that it seems I need to tell that don’t quite fit into Coyote Hunts the Sun. One is the Ghost Dance story – as I’ve mentioned earlier, I have a pretty strong bias against that particular ceremony, and what that tells me is that I need to learn more about it so that I’m not walking around carrying bad thoughts about those that did it. The second is the cannibal story that I try to tell during the Messiah scene. It was the first scene that I wrote for this play, but I’m realizing more and more that it isn’t part of Coyote Hunts the Sun, but is obviously a story that I feel compelled to tell. I need to tell it separately and get it out of the work at hand.

Ranae Hedman

It was a fun process, and now I have the post show blues. But while this phase of the project is over, we certainly haven’t seen the last of Coyote Hunts the Sun!

Waylon Lenk


 



Waylon Lenk



Ranae Hedman

Waylon Lenk, Chris Petty, Ranae Hedman, Darci Faye