Award-winning playwright, UMaine lecturer remembered
University of Maine lecturer and Libra Professor William Yellow Robe passed away July 19 in Bangor after a long illness. He was 61.
Yellow Robe, a member of the Assiniboine Nation from Fort Peck, Montana, joined the UMaine community first as a Visiting Libra Professor in fall 2004. He was an award-winning playwright with a national and international reputation, as well as a poet, actor and director. Yellow Robe taught in the English Department, held another Libra Professorship from January 2011 through December 2013, and was engaged in the community, on and off campus.
Since 2004 a number of Yellow Robe’s plays were performed and read at UMaine and at other University of Maine System campuses, including “Better-n-Indins,” “The Independence of Eddie Rose,” “Rez Politics,” “A Stray Dog,” “NAPS: Native American Paranormal Society” and “Wood Bones.” His work with students and community members in Maine developed a number of Wabanaki playwrights and actors.
UMaine alumnae Donna Loring and Maulian Dana, both Penobscot Nation citizens, have written plays with Yellow Robe’s guidance. The year after Yellow Robe’s first Libra Professorship at UMaine, his play “Better-n-Indins” was produced at Perishable Theatre in Providence, Rhode Island, with Yellow Robe in the cast, along with young Penobscot actor, Nick Bear.
Bob Jaffe, who directed the production, said that Yellow Robe’s work was transformative. “Not only was his writing deeply meaningful and insightful, but, more importantly, Bill used his writing to bring a community of people together. Those that became part of his world will always be connected — only one of his lasting legacies,” said Jaffe, board chair of New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, where he and Yellow Robe are Life Members.
Yellow Robe published three collections of his one-act and full-length plays: “Where the Pavement Ends: New Native Drama,” “Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers and Other Untold Stories” and “Restless Spirits: Plays.” His work has been widely anthologized in the U.S., Canada, and Europe; his play “Sneaky” was translated into Italian and published in an Italian anthology of Native American playwrights.
Hanay Geiogamah, Kiowa playwright and former director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center where “Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers” was published, knew Yellow Robe since the 1970s in the East Village, when they both participated in the development of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, the first all-Native repertory theater company in the country.
“The American Indian theater movement has lost its fiercest warrior and defender with the passing of Bill Yellow Robe, Jr.,” Geiogamah said. “He was a leader and a hero for Indian Theater and its artists. His courage, his commitment, his determination and originality have encouraged and inspired so many — and for so long a time. I thank the Creator for having known Bill and worked with him and learned from him.”
As a teacher and mentor, Yellow Robe touched the lives of many young Native artists, including Madeline Sayet (Mohegan), who is now executive director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program. Sayet credits Yellow Robe with bringing her, as a very young actor/director, “into the Native theater community, when the white world had told me I shouldn’t exist. He had a way of believing in you that made you believe in yourself. When I was frustrated with the American theatre’s definition of the role of director, he told me to find out the word in my own Mohegan language and use our own ways of thinking to empower our work.” In Mohegan, Sayet’s work is called “Kutayun Uyasunaquock,” which means “Our Heart She Leads Us There.”
Since 1987, Yellow Robe’s plays have been performed around the country in venues such as The Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival Theater; Penumbra Theatre Company, St. Paul, Minnesota; Trinity Repertory Company, Providence, Rhode Island; Lawrence Arts Center, Lawrence, Kansas; the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Mashantucket, Connecticut; Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex, New York; and Brown University and Yale University.
Yellow Robe’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, including a Jerome Fellowship, the first Princess Grace Fellowship for playwriting, a TCG, Inc./Pew Charitable Trust National Playwright in Residence and a Rauschenberg residency. In 2010, “Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers” was performed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, where Yellow Robe received the Native American Achievers Award. Last year, Yellow Robe received an honorary doctorate from the University of Montana. In the month before his death, Yellow Robe was given a Dramatists’ Guild award and the Helen Merrill Award from the New York Community Trust.
Oskar Eustis, artistic director of The Public Theater in New York City, mourns the passing of Yellow Robe, as he was “a unique and powerful playwright.”
“His loss leaves a hole in the American theater,” Eustis said. “He was fearless and deep; his plays are lacerating, truthful, funny, and human. He was also a wonderful friend and colleague, an inspired teacher, a warm and loving man. We will miss him terribly, but his work and example will enrich us for generations.”
A Bangor Daily News story and an obituary are online.