Native Voices at the Autry boosts indigenous playwrights

by: Eva Thomas

LOS ANGELES - Over the last decade, a virtual who's who of American Indian theater artists has worked with Native Voices at the Autry. From Canadian playwright Drew Hayden Taylor, Ojibway, to up-and-coming playwright Larissa Fast Horse, Sicangu Nation, Native playwrights are finding a home to develop works for the stage.

Native Voices at the Autry is a professional Los Angeles-based theater company devoted to developing new scripts by American Indian writers. It is becoming a hot bed for contemporary Native theater. Taking the writer from workshop to staged reading to full Equity productions, Native Voices is committed to creating Native stories.

While teaching at Illinois State University, Native Voices Artistic Director Randy Reinholz, Choctaw, and Native Voices Executive Director Jean Bruce Scott began the task of finding American Indian plays and playwrights.

''I was asked to champion work around Native Americans,'' Reinholz said. ''We found some plays written by Natives and produced a number of staged play readings.'' From 1994 - '96, Reinholz and Scott organized a festival of plays at Illinois State featuring Native works.

Reinholz and Scott continued to develop the plays of Native playwrights; and in 1999, Native Voices at the Autry was born in collaboration with the Gene Autry Museum located in Los Angeles' Griffith Park.

In the mid-'90s, the Autry Museum was putting together an exhibit focusing on images of American Indians and turned to Reinholz and Scott to help create a live theater piece as part of the exhibit. That production was ''Urban Tattoo,'' a one-woman show by Marie Clements, Metis.

Since then, Native Voices has grown and developed into a gathering point for Native theater artists in Los Angeles.

For more information on Native Voices at the Autry, visit www.autrynationalcenter.org/nativevoices.php.