Native Voices at the Autry continues its vital role as the country’s only equity theatre company dedicated exclusively to developing the work of Native American playwrights with its Short Play Festival, featuring six engaging short plays written by veteran and first-time playwrights, on Saturday, November 3, 3 pm, at the Wells Fargo Theatre at the Autry National Center, 4700 Western Heritage Way
in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park.
The festival’s theme, “Indians in America: Native American Athletes Take The Field,†honors the 100th anniversary of Jim Thorpe’s (Sac and Fox*) Olympics achievements. Thorpe, described as the greatest athlete of the 20th Century, won Olympic gold medals in 1912 for both the pentathlon and the decathlon and played professional football, baseball and basketball. Each of the six plays range from five to fifteen minutes in length and has a sports theme. One will be selected for the 2012 Von Marie Atchley Excellence in Playwriting Award, a $1000 cash prize, by a national panel of judges.
The featured plays are:
SOCCER DAD by GARY HARRINGTON (Comanche*), who holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and has written, produced and directed short films for more than ten years. The play involves a man at his son’s soccer game recalling his own experiences playing sports in Oklahoma amidst discrimination, and he begins to recognize the connecting force that sports plays in his family.
THE RECORD HOLDERS by DENNIS TIBBETTS (Ojibwe*), who served in Vietnam and earned a Ph.D. in counseling using the G.I. Bill. In his play, Truman Gordon is a track legend at his old university, and Jaiden Fairbanks is the young athlete expected to break Gordon’s 30-year-old record. Though they are a generation apart, they soon find that their stories of struggle are not all that different.
The Short Play Festival, held in conjunction with the Autry American Indian Arts Marketplace, is free with admission to the Autry American Indian Arts Marketplace ($12, $8 for students, seniors and children; free for Autry members).
For more information: http://theautry.org
