UMaine Theater Performing Native American Play
Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756
ORONO — The University of Maine Department of English and School of Performing Arts have teamed up to bring nationally acclaimed Native American playwright William S. Yellow Robe Jr. to campus this fall to teach a playwriting class and direct one of his plays that explores myths about Native Americans.
Yellow Robe, also a poet, fiction writer and actor, is a member of the Assiniboine Tribe from the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana. He is a visiting Libra Diversity Professor at UMaine this fall as a result of collaboration between the chairs of the English department and the Division of Theatre and Dance of the School of Performing Arts.
Currently the Playwright in Residence at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I. and artistic director of No Borders Indigenous InterTribal Theatre Company, Yellow Robe has written 44 plays, including musicals, children’s theater, comedies and dramas.
At UMaine, a mostly Native American cast, including students and non-students of varying ages, will perform Yellow Robe’s play “Better ‘n Indins” at the Edgar Allen Cyrus Pavilion Theater beginning Nov. 11.
The play is a comic satire about non-Native misconceptions of “Indian” identity and the experience of being “Indin” in a non-Native dominant culture, according to Margo Lukens, associate professor and chair of the English department.
“It’s a picaresque play,” Lukens says, “that takes you on a tour of misconceptions about Indians. Some scenes are sad and some are hilarious. We’re going to be setting the entire theater as a kind of hokey trading post museum.”
The production also takes the theater division a step further with development of its community outreach efforts, Lukens says. The division produced another of Yellow Robe’s plays “A Stray Dog” Oct. 6 as a Readers Theater presentation, in which actors used minimal costume and sets and read their scripts on stage.
“This is the first time these actors are doing a full production with lights, sets and costumes,” she says. “This is the development of this group of actors. It will be a wonderful evening of entertainment — unlike any other.”
In addition to teaching a course on playwriting, Yellow Robe will train assistant directors, Lukens says, to carry on producing intertribal theater after Yellow Robe returns to Rhode Island, where he is also a guest lecturer and visiting professor at Brown University in Providence.
Yellow Robe is a member of Theater Communications Group, Inc., the Dramatists’ Guild of America, Inc. and was the first playwright to receive the Native Book Award for drama at the former Returning the Gift conference in Norman, Ok.
His plays have been produced at the Public Theater/NY Shakespeare Festival, Seattle Group Theater, American Conservatory Theater, the Mark Taper Forum and elsewhere.
“Better ‘n Indins” runs Nov. 11-13 and Nov.17-20 at 7:30 p.m. and at 2 p.m. on Nov. 14 and 21. Admission is $6; students with MaineCards are admitted free.