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 a free staged reading of Measure for Measure: An Indian Boarding School Comedy, a bawdy adaptation of Shakespeare's play set in the Old West by Randy Reinholz (Choctaw*), founder and producing artistic director of Native Voices at the Autry, on Thursday, October 24, 2013, 7:30 p.m., at the Wells Fargo Theater at The Autry National Center in Griffith Park. The reading, which is followed by an audience "Talk-Back" with Reinholz, director Chris Anthony and dramaturg Robert Caisley, is part of Native Voices' signature FIRST LOOK SERIES: Plays in Process, which brings playwrights together with professional directors, dramaturgs, and actors for a workshop and public presentation at the Autry, providing an important next step in the play's development.
In Reinholz' new play, love, righteousness, faith and mercy compete for provenance on the frontier when an Indian boarding school, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and local town and saloon inhabitants collide over the fate of a young teenage boy unjustly sentenced to death. Reinholz, who describes the play as "Blazing Saddles meets Shakespeare," says, "the peculiar American institution of the Indian boarding school system, where children were 'stripped' of their culture, rouses deep emotions among Americans - Native and non-Native - even today. I felt that this subject, and its related theme of standing up to authority, needed some theatrical distance - so I chose to make it a comedy." A rich linguistic amalgam, the play preserves passages of Shakespeare's original text for the highbrow characters, while commoners use the vernacular of the day, as do the Native American and immigrant characters, whose speech is also peppered with their respective languages. Intended to examine the questionable ways in which Native culture is portrayed in contemporary American schools and history books, the play, says Reinholz, "gives those ideas serious comic 'pies in the face.'" This is the play's first public reading.Videos