Part Cherokee, Seminole and Muskogee Creek on her father’s side, Carolyn Dunn is among a growing cadre of Native American playwrights. Her play The Frybread Queen opens Saturday in the Autry Museum’s Native Voices series.
Carolyn Dunn
Dunn received her doctorate in American Studies (focusing on American Indian literature and theater) from the University of Southern California, and an M.A. in American Indian literature and folklore from UCLA. She’s a visiting lecturer at San Francisco State University, where she teaches American Indian Oral Literature. She also serves as the managing director of the American Indian Resource Center at UC Santa Cruz, not far from her redwood forest home where she makes her own frybread. (Think pizza.)
Dunn has been at the Autry before. She directed Arigon Starr’s one-woman play The Red Road in 2005 and has long enjoyed the respect of Native Voices founders Jean Bruce Scott and Randy Reinholz. The married team founded Native Voices 12 years ago. Reinholz directs the School of Theatre, Television and Film at San Diego State University and is part Choctaw, one of about 500 Indian nations in the United States.
“My plays tend to be very serious and very historical,” admits Dunn. “They aren’t historical in the sense of what the average person might think in terms of Native history. I deal with a lot of Oklahoma statehood issues in the early 20th century, for example. So, Jean Bruce Scott challenged me to write something contemporary.”
Shyla Marlin, Elizabeth Frances and Jane Lind
The result, Dunn says, is an extension of her latest novel, not yet published, about a Native American family. “The novel ends with the death of one of these family members. I wondered what would happen after her death, so I thought the funeral would be the next logical place to go because there would still be a lot of tension in the family. So, I decided to write a play for four very strong Native actresses.”
A former actress, Dunn laments the dearth of quality female roles for Native American women and seeks to change that through The Frybread Queen. She began developing the play four years ago. “It came pretty quickly because I knew the characters so well and it’s a very character-driven story.”
The Autry accepted her outline. Dunn describes her life as crazy, with a large, rambunctious family and a lot going on. When she had written half the play, producing executive director Scott made her an offer. “She said I could finish it but they would lock me in a hotel room without any kids or husband to distract me! And that’s pretty much what they’ve done, a week at a time, over the last three years.”
Dunn credits Robert Caisley for directing this production and serving as dramaturg over the past three years. “We’ve had a couple of staged readings where we’ve fine-tuned the work, most recently at Montana Repertory. He’s been through all of these various versions.”
The result, she notes, is the appropriate loss of a lot of the backstory and instead a focus on “the story that was being told at this moment in time. I think we’ve clarified a lot of the information. A lot has been made clear by my getting rid of stuff and by streamlining the timeline a bit.”
Kimberly Guerrero, Elizabeth Frances and Jane Lind
“We are as much about process as we are about product,” says Scott. “So to have a voice for Native people to talk about themselves and their issues – casinos, who’s Indian and who’s not, who participates in the revenue and so on, that becomes really big in Indian country.”
In the 1990s, Scott and Reinholz saw a lot of plays having to do with abuse and the taking of land and resources. Reinholz notes, “It’s so interesting how much of American history we don’t know. Being Native American was illegal for a long time. You couldn’t speak the language or take part in rituals. We’ve moved beyond that, thankfully, and much of this history shows up in plays.”
He recounts a visit to the Sundance Film Festival where Native American history seemed all but forgotten. “People were talking about the licensing of the word ‘sundance’ and I was saying that we [Native Americans] have been ‘sundancing’ well before there were movies. So the idea of who owns what–Cherokee brand clothes, things such as that–shows up in the art because it’s what’s being discussed today.”
Reinholz and Scott agree Native American playwrights are paying more attention these days to contemporary life and less to history. “Sometimes it’s the darker side, sometimes it’s the happier side. There was a beautiful movie at Sundance called Grab. It showed how in New Mexico Catholic culture and Native American culture combined and became a new culture. It was beautiful,” Reinholz says.
At its core, the movie was about giving away. “That’s a big part of Native American life,” says Reinholz. “We have a show that was here two years ago called Wings of Night Sky; Wings of Morning Light. It’s touring around the country and we might get a run Off-Broadway next season at the Public Theater. The show ends with a give-away. So when Native Americans come, they know to take things out of the basket. When we did it New York, where people weren’t familiar with the idea, they said, ‘Oh how nice that there are Native American things in the basket, but what do I do?’ I’d tell them to take something and they didn’t realize it was impolite not to.”
Shyla Marlin, Elizabeth Frances and Jane Lind
The Frybread Queen features three generations of Native women. Reinholz believes it affords the audience “a lot of perspective. It has a wonderful fight that’s certainly not resolved, but you hear both sides talked about. Urban, rural, traditional, contemporary, Internet knowledge versus traditional knowledge, and they’re fighting for the soul of this young girl, the future of the people.”
It’s a story, he finds, that resonates with all audiences. “We deal with the heart of the human being. Native writers seem to be much less afraid to embrace and expose that. That’s been the exciting thing for us. We have really fearless writers who tackle the difficult subjects and who also say, now wait a minute, we’re also contemporary people living in this world who are also Native and that’s the story we want to tell.”
Dunn is a bit frustrated over who tells the story of The Frybread Queen. “Only because we’ve had so many wonderful actresses take part in the readings. Each brings something different to the table. And as the play has grown, finding a different mix of actors has helped stuff come out of the script we didn’t expect.”
Of the four current cast members, only Jane Lind, who portrays Jessie, the grandmother, has appeared throughout the play’s development process. Dunn wishes it could be the type of show in which she could have “all of the former frybread queens participate. When I wrote it, I had four actors in mind. Each of them has worked on it, but not all of them were available for this production.”
The development process was critically important to Dunn. “I’m the kind of writer that takes landscape into consideration – it’s always a character, if you will, in my plays, my fiction, my poetry. There are a lot of landscape elements: a storm is brewing outside. There is a lot of wind. There is a lot of elemental stuff going on. The concern from the very beginning with the producers, because the sound is so important, was how are we going to make this work? Well, we did.”
Elizabeth Frances and Jane Lind
Four years after writing the play’s opening line, Dunn has found Native Voices to be a very nurturing place for a playwright. “I certainly appreciate all of the work they’ve put in to helping me develop this play.”
It can also be frustrating — “in the sense there’s so much great work out there and deciding on which play they’re going to develop first is not an easy task. But that, I think, has been the only frustration. And it’s been well worth the wait.”
**All production photos by Tony Dontscheff
The Frybread Queen, presented by the Native Voices at the Autry, Randy Reinholz and Jean Bruce Scott, executive producers; opens March 12; plays Thur.-Fri., 8 pm; Sat., 2 and 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through March 27. Tickets: $10-$20. The Autry National Center’s Wells Fargo Theater in Griffith Park, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles; 323.667.2000, ext. 354 or nativevoicesattheautry.org.
