August 22, 2008

Three plays about two worlds

Two Worlds Festival Fetes Playwrights"Fancy Dancer, a dark comedy by Canadian playwright Dawn Dumont, will be staged at 4 p.m. The play taps into Native trickster stories and the public's obsession with TV, but it also tackles a terrifying reality--the disappearance of more than 500 Native women in Canada during the past 15 years.

"Asdzani Shash: The Woman Who Turned Into A Bear," a contemporary retelling of a Navajo legend by Albuquerque native Rhiana Yazzie, will be on stage at 8 p.m. The play is set in a convalescent home near the Navajo reservation, but it is never far from the world of storytelling and myth.

"Little Big Horn," a two-act comedy by San Diego's Alan Kilpatrick, was presented Friday. It began in 1876 at the Battle of the Little Big Horn and moved to an American Embassy in the present- day Middle East to tell the story of Marine Cpl. Norman Hayes, born Sioux but raised by the Jewish couple who adopted him.
Comment:  For more on the subject, see Native Plays and Other Stage Shows.

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