Native Writers’ Theater Launch!
“Seen many Native American Plays lately? Neither have we. But we know that can change.” – Matt Kizer, Founder/Artistic Director, Native Writers’ Theater
New theatre company Native Writers’ Theater debuts as part of PlayGround’s 3rd annual Innovators Showcase with “An Evening of New Native Plays”, November 23, 24 and 26 at 7pm PT, with an in-person watch-party at Potrero Stage and simulcast online. Following the Friday, November 26 screening (“Native American Heritage Day”), there will be a live panel discussion. The program is co-presented by a community of more than a dozen local and national theatres as well as Indigeneous leaders, committed to uplifting Native voices: American Conservatory Theater, Aurora Theatre, Eric Avery, Celebration Theatre, Central Works, Rachel Chavkin, City Lights Theatre Company, Crowded Fire Theater Company, Custom Made Theatre Company, DOMA, Larissa Fasthorse, David Goldman, Iama Theatre Company, Los Medanos College, Lower Depth Theatre, Marin Shakespeare Company, Mohawk Coterie, Mountain Play Association, New Conservatory Theatre Center, North American Indigenous Center of New York, Planet Earth Arts, PlayGround, San Francisco Playhouse, San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, Shotgun Players, TheatreFirst, TheatreWorks, and Z Space. For more information and tickets, visit https://playground-sf.org/incubator.
“An Evening of New Native Plays” will take place over three nights and feature three short new works written by local Native American playwrights, directed by Los Medanos College theater director and professor Nick Garcia. UC Berkeley professor and Beadwork author Beth Piatote’s Indian Reality Show is a satirical comedy set between takes of an Indian Reality Show. Matt Kizer’s two-person Starlings centers on an Urban Indian having a crisis after hours at a museum. The program also includes an excerpt from the richly-layered, eclectically-styled play Braided, an “intergalactic, pan-dimensional, haunted, Noh-inspired, fall-down-the-proverbial wormhole in Native American liberation and Japanese resilience,” co-written by Shannon Davis, Steven Flores, Anne Yumi Kobori, Ramon Real, Freddy Gutierrez and Addie Kaori-Walters. Due to COVID precautions, all three pieces will be filmed by director Nick Garcia, for presentation at Potrero Stage and simulcast online. A live post-show panel discussion will follow the November 26th (“Native American Heritage Day”) performance.
Shannon R. Davis (Braided), she/hers, originally from Wisconsin, Shannon is a San Francisco Bay Area-based, Indigenous Director/Performer. She is an innagural member of CalShakes Artistic Circle, a company member of In The Margin Theatre, an NEA grant recipient for an original work, and a founding member of the Bay Area Anti-Racist Accountability Workgroup. She holds a dual MFA in Directing & Acting from UW-Madison. Shannon has worked with the following companies: American Conservatory Theatre, New Native Theatre Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The American Repertory Theatre, American Indian Community House, CalShakes, Theatre of Yugen, Berkeley Rep, MoxieArts NY, Brava Theater, The Ashland New Play Festival, Forward Theatre, Tantrum Theatre Ohio University, Shotgun Players, TheaterWorks, Theatre Bay Area, San Francisco Playhouse, Renaissance Theaterworks, Children’s Theatre of Madison, Playwrights Foundation, Vortex Rep, others. www.shannonrdavis.com
Nick Garcia (Director) has worked extensively across the country as a teacher, actor, director, and designer. He has performed, directed, and designed for venues such as the National Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco, Alter Theater Company in Marin, Pella Shakespeare Festival in Iowa, The Miner’s Union Theatre in Silverton, Colorado, The George Daily Auditorium in Oskaloosa, Iowa, and both the Iowa New Play and Fringe Festivals. He is currently the Chair of Dramatic Arts at Los Medanos College.
Matt Kizer (Starlings; Artistic Director) is a seasoned song-and-dance man. His decades-long career has spanned his choir-singing as a kid, and his singing with Nevada Opera as a teenager, to his recent role as Tashtego in Dave Malloy’s Moby Dick at American Repertory Theater. Matt is a member of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California. He’s eager to share the stories and perspectives of his people in his new role as a playwright. By day, Matt works as a manager at everyone’s favorite grocery store (you know which one). He plays ukulele with his band and is co-leader—along with his wife—of his own tribe of three daughters.
Beth Piatote (Indian Reality Show) is the author of Antíkoni, a Native American adaptation of Sophocles’ play, Antigone, and is currently creating new works as a member of the Indigenous Writers Collaborative at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and an affiliate of the Native Writers Theater. She has published two books, most recently the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories(Counterpoint 2019), which was long-listed for the PEN/Bingham prize for Debut Short Story Collection and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and shortlisted for the California Booksellers Alliance “Golden Poppy” Prize for Fiction. She is Nez Perce, enrolled with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, and dedicated to Indigenous language revitalization. She is an associate professor of comparative literature and Native American Studies and affiliated faculty with the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Native Writers’ Theater was founded by Artistic Director Matt Kizer in 2021 as part of PlayGround’s Innovator Incubator program. Native Writers’ Theater is dedicated to: Creating opportunity by making space for the playwriting process and producing the resulting works onstage; Fostering dialogue to tell Native American stories to inspire open, decolonized communication between all people; Amplifying stories of a forgotten people to preserve our heritage that has been all but erased. We aim to bring Native American stories to the theater through creating new works and producing existing or evolving works. For more information, visit https://playground-sf.org/nativewriterstheater.
The PlayGround Innovator Incubator is a multi-year intensive incubation program to support theatrical innovation and the launch of new innovative theatrical production companies. In November/December each year, PlayGround will present the Innovators Showcase, a three-week new works showcase, featuring world premiere productions and numerous other new play developmental activities and staged readings highlighting the work of Innovator Incubator participants. Guidelines for the 2022 Innovator Incubator cohort will be announced mid-November 2021.
PlayGround, California’s leading playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’s (and now Los Angeles’) best new playwrights, including the monthly Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series, annual PlayGround Festival of New Works, full-length play commissions and support for the production of new plays by local playwrights through the New Play Production Fund. To date, PlayGround has supported over 250 early career playwrights, developing and staging more than 1000 of their original short plays through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series and the PlayGround Festival. PlayGround has also commissioned 90 new full-length plays by 60 of these writers through its Commissioning Initiative and, through the innovative New Play Production Fund, has directly facilitated the premiere of 32 plays at theatres of every size, including three that have gone on to NYC and other major theater communities. More recently, PlayGround renovated and relaunched the former Thick House Theater in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill as Potrero Stage, a state-of-the-art center for new plays, home to PlayGround’s expanding artistic programs and some of the Bay Area’s most distinguished new play developers and producers. Over the past twenty-seven years, PlayGround has served to identify some of the most important new local voices for the theatre. PlayGround’s alumni have gone on to win local, national, and international honors for their short and full-length work, including recognition at the Steinberg Awards, Humana Festival, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and The Lark’s Playwrights’ Week, among others. PlayGround received the 2009 Paine Knickerbocker Award for outstanding contributions to Bay Area theatre, 3 BATCC Awards for Best Original Script for PlayGround commissions, a 2014 National Theatre Company Grant from the American Theatre Wing (founder of the Tony Awards®), and a 2016 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award. Visit https://playground-sf.org for more information.
WHAT: New theatre company Native Writers’ Theater debuts with “An Evening of New Native Plays,” featuring works by Matt Kizer, Beth Piatote, Shannon Davis, Steven Flores, Anne Yumi Kobori, Ramon Real, Freddy Gutierrez and Addie Kaori-Walters, as part of PlayGround’s 3rd annual Innovators Showcase.
WHERE: Potrero Stage and Simulcast Online
WHEN: November 23, 24 & 26 at 7pm PT
TICKETS: Admission is free (donations gratefully accepted) but advance reservations are required. For more information or to reserve tickets, visit https://tickets.playground-sf.org.