Interview with LeAnne Howe, artistic director

By Robert Leonard

Robert Leonard: I’ve sent you a lot of stuff. The basic idea is for us to be looking at a wide range of artistic ensembles that are working at the grassroots level. That is specific in the sense that grassroots is work with the community to give voice to a community that doesn’t have a voice, or if they do have a voice, it is limited. I read your play, and in that it said you had put together a company so I contacted you. You haven’t been able to shake me off, so here we are.

LeAnne Howe, photo by Susan Mullally Clark (c) 2001 [image gallery]

LeAnne Howe: I have one thing that might be kind of fun, somewhere I have the NPR version we did. It would be fun to listen to. In 1993, here is the tape of what was uplinked. That was a lot of fun. This information system that you put together would be accessible to everyone, with the hopes of helping other communities foster their own theater?

RL: Mm-hm. One of the things that is beginning to become clear – I came up in what may have been the heyday of the not-for-profit arts organization. There were support systems that seemed to be in place. Not to say that we ever made any great money, but I was able to find grant support through the National Endowment for the Arts and sustain a small ensemble in Johnson City for 20-25 years. It was always touch-and-go, but those pieces were there. Things are changing. The Endowment isn’t as it used to be. It is working under a lot more political restraint. What the art world is going to do is going to be determined by the artist, as always. WagonBurner existed while it had a little something, and then it stops. It starts again when it has something, and people expect their life support to be coming from some other support?

LAH: That is the difference between white people and Indians. White people had a Depression in 1929, Indians did not. If we had a Depression it began in the 19th century. It began for Choctaws in the 18th century. Starvation, poverty, removal, destitution occurred for us. You can talk to Indian people across the United States and they will say "What Depression?" We were already depressed. The same is true for arts organizations. For white people, this is a very important time. Their own constituents have said that art is not important to our government. So, in some ways, what we offer as an alternative model is sustainable – you know, things don’t have to be in stone for them to be together. I think of it like an amoeba. It comes together, it expands, it grows, it explodes. We expect it to be very difficult. Our expectations are already very bad, so we will manage somehow. We will come back together and it will be very fluid, elastic. You know, whatever white people have done to us, they do to themselves eventually. "We don’t want you, we don’t appreciate you." In fact, under Jesse Helms...you know what he is doing? He is cutting out the ballerina classes at the downtown YMCA, but they don’t care. Ultimately, how you starved or how you created and how you treated Indian people always comes back to you. Kill off all the buffalo? Well, hell, look around! Mad Cow Disease is wiping out the cows. Ultimately all these things are in a circle. So, in a way, I think this is an ideal way. It is so loose. For people who are used to structure, it won’t work. It might not be the best ideal. You’ve got to go with it, just trust. Having said all those negative things, what I do think sustains theater is that same belief that things are fluid. You come together and you make a show. Even among non-Indian communities. So, that is how I think we have similar points of understanding. Do you think?

RL: I agree, and certainly what I heard from Justin (Data) completely supports that. I asked him at one point, "So, this kind of got together because people wanted to do it? What holds it together?" He was very clear. He spoke about how everybody shared a sense of what you were doing. It wasn’t doing it for anybody, it was the individual. Each individual wanting to do it. And your leadership. You have an energy that can call people together.

LAH: I don’t know if that is true or not. But it will come back together. The theater at Sinte, we were talking the other night after you called. The way we do things, the way the Indian community does theater in Minnesota, the way it gets done in Oklahoma – Indians can pull together. Wherever I know there are Indians that you can pull from, theater gets done that way. It goes, and then it comes back. It just works out.

RL: Are there a lot of people that you feel are in the circle that is WagonBurner?

LAH: I guess I would count everybody who had ever been involved. I think we had about 22 people. Several people now from Sinte have joined, want to be in WagonBurner. Of course, everyone is welcome.

RL: What is Sinte?

LAH: It is the university out at Rosebud. I said "Sure. We’ll get together and we’ll do a new play." I want to get us together and do a show out at Aberdeen. So, I am kind of working on that. Aberdeen is the home of Baum, who wrote the "Wizard of Oz," L. Frank Baum. The book and then, actually, I don’t think he wrote the script.

RL: He didn’t write the script, but I am remembering now that there was a novel and then it became a play.

LAH: Well, it was a very political book. It is in Aberdeen. He hated, hated, hated – let me say that once again – he hated American Indians. He wrote editorial after editorial saying we should be wiped off the face of the earth. We want to do an Indian parody of the "Shaman of OK," out there at Aberdeen during his festival to make a point. But you know, when the kids out at Vermilion did "Indian Radio Days," it was the first time the American Indian kids at the university had been on a stage, ever. Ever. And the white kids protested the show when it opened. We had 400 people in the audience. So, you can imagine...

RL: This was at Rosebud?

LAH: No. This was in Vermilion, South Dakota, at the University of South Dakota there, in October of 2000. The white kids protested. A comedy. Can you imagine?

RL: What were they protesting?

LAH: They don’t want Indians on the stage. Why do we need a historical comedy? Can’t we get over the past? Why do we have to have that? It was awful. They wrote letters to the paper. We had 400 laughing people in the audience, and lots of Indians. Probably half the audience were Indians, and these pitiful white kids outside: "Just can’t you get over the past? It isn’t our fault." So, I asked the director of the theater department , "What on earth do you do if you do a play like ‘For colored girls..."? And she said, "We never do any African-American theater out here. The community would just shit in their pants." So, this is the country of Baum. Still very contentious. So, you can just imagine the climate, and still here we are doing our own thing. Jesse Helms has got nothing on South Dakota.

RL: He just has a pulpit to speak from, but it is everywhere. Help me figure out, in October of last year you did a performance of "Indian Radio Days." Just one performance?

LAH: No. It was on for about a week at Vermilion. I went out there as a playwright.

RL: Who made the show, who produced it?

LAH: The university produced the show.

RL: Did you direct it?

LAH: Huh-uh. You know it has been done at the Mark Taper before and I didn’t direct then either. After we picked it up in ’95, the Mark Taper did it. But anyway WagonBurner did it for a couple of years. Mark Taper got a hold of us. I forget who turned them on to the play. They hired all the cast. It was nice. You know, they didn’t do as well as we did. But they didn’t have the music and all the gags that we did. But it was a great audience. A lot of Indians came.

RL: That was at the same time that you were doing workshops at Rosebud?

LAH: Mm-hm.

RL: What all were you doing at Rosebud?

LAH: I got brought out by Project HOOP, which is a theater project. It was produced and funded by the Kellogg Foundation for UCLA and Sinte Gleska to be sister institutions. I was asked to come out there and teach theater – no, I wouldn’t say "teach," I was brought out there to encourage people to write their own plays, show them how it is done, and mount a production. So, we mounted two productions in four weeks. They wrote them, directed them and produced them and we had a performance night. The student lounge was packed. We probably had 250 people on the reservation come. The kids performed it. I showed them how to write it, direct it, put it in the computer and do it. It was great! And it was all filmed. Everybody loved it. One of the women who was here was enrolled in classes there at the time. Liz Hopkins, and her son – her son! She has a bunch of kids! This is how Indians do things. We needed some basketball players and some break dancers and some Hare Krishnas. And so the students brought all their children out and that evening they turned into break dancers, and Hare Krishnas and we costumed (not fully of course) and pulled it off.

Everybody and their brother, apparently, goes out to Rosebud looking for divinity. They’ve got the Hare Krishnas, they’ve got Jews, they’ve got Mormons. Everybody comes in summer, and the Catholics live there. And break dancers, sometimes they have the skinheads, and the Harley Davidsons, and everybody comes to the reservation in the summertime. This really ripped on the Mormons. It was an interactive play because they had different people hold up signs and say lines from the audience. So, it looked very interactive, it was great, it got the whole community involved: kids, old men. We needed elders, so we had them sitting on stage while we were talking. Also we needed someone to speak Lakota, so they got that. All these things going on, it is just great. Liz, in the meantime, has written a new play and she hopes to get that mounted in the fall when she gets back. Of course, they are having a few difficulties right now. Jeff Kellogg will still be there and if you want to take a trip out there I’m sure she would be able to help you.

It is like this: It is like when people go looking for their god. Sometimes they don’t find him, right? But, if you are looking and you are pretty positive that you have it, then it will happen. That sounds kind of squirrelly. I meet Indians who maybe weren’t raised in Indian communities. They’ll say, "I want to put on a play, but I can’t find any Indians." Well, you are just not looking. And you don’t know how to ask either. Theater will happen and it will get done, but you may wonder if it is going to get done. That is how it gets done.

RL: So, when you were there working on Project HOOP – I like your careful distinction between teaching theater and helping others do it.

LAH: Yeah. I didn’t teach.

RL: But they learned.

LAH: Yeah, and they did it themselves. That is the thing. Once you do the show you can go, "Hey, I could do this again."

RL: Do you do certain things to get it started?

LAH: Well, it is real easy with Indians. I’ll give you a perfect example. Jeff has these classes that nobody shows up for, bless his heart. It is not him. They’ll do it, and he knows it, he is a real sharp guy, and he is a good kid. So, the way I work is with the collective. We just get everybody. Go out in the yard and get people and say that we are going to write a show. This was with one class. Get that old man sitting out front and come in. So, we start talking, and we write collectively together line for line. Just start talking. And then they’ll say, "Oh we are writing a play. What does she say now?" So, he typed, I typed so that we would have two different records into our laptops. They wrote the play. It got real big and we had to bring it back down, which they figured out for themselves. It was called "Rosebud." The Homestake Mine in "Citizen Kane." What Orson Welles was writing about was the theft Indian land. Homestake Mine is right outside of Rosebud, and it took in Rosebud. So that little key, that little "Rosebud" and the Colorado gold mine. all of that is Sioux land. So, he was getting at something deeper than the old woman and the mine and the land and the money. He was talking about, "Look how bad my life has been from the theft of this land, and they got that." So, we did this play, "Rosebud," and the character was named Rosebud, but she was carrying around a cardboard sled. Then we had the bingo, and the tribal police, the Hare Krishnas and all this stuff. It got real big. It ballooned even bigger. because you just let it go and write the three acts. Then when we began to rehearse, we got it all typed out and everybody edited. We didn’t edit just two or three of us, we waited until we had the group. Or any group, it doesn’t have to be the original group, but we edit. We edit together, we write together, and then we read it together.

I’ll give you a perfect example. So, I go into the other class, which was the English class. The teacher had said, "Well, okay, we will write a play, too." She had about ten students. I told them a little about Jeff’s class and then asked them if they wanted to do this working in groups or if they wanted to do this all together. Right without skipping a beat ,"We want to write together." So, they start in and they write what was called "Indian Lullabies." Two scripts, same exact process. We do it together, we edit together, we get together and rehearse together. And then what happens? We have two different scripts that are done and ready to go into production. Who is going to direct? And like always, it is a collective, everybody takes turns with directing. It replicates WagonBurner to a T because I don’t think we are comfortable with everybody, you know, "What do you think?" But I think that is what theater is all about. Not always. You don’t always have that, but in a company that is fluid, and I expect in grassroots organizations it has got to be like that or it is not going to work. So, that is how they did it. It was the same kind of amoeba. They thought about making Shakespeare an Indian and having a festival out at Sinte.

So, the "Shaman of OK" I wrote. It is a parody. Do I think that is very original? No. But it is very funny. Dorothy Hauntus is our central character and her little white armadillo that she drags around with her on stage. She sings "Somewhere Over the River Way Out West." Oh, and the Cowardly Killer Rabbit. So, those are just funny things. I know what my agenda is. The reason I wrote "Big Pow-Wow," the reason we wrote "Indian Radio Days," the reason we will do "The Shaman of OK" is to teach about the absurdities of the things that have happened to us. Instead of following the yellow brick road we are having to walk on the red brick road from our bingo palace in Mississippi to Oklahoma. I am really trying to teach people what a horrific event the Trail of Tears was with humor. The Wicked Witch of the East is Andrew Jackson, only he is a cross-dresser. He is Andrea. He is the one we drop the house on. Instead of the monkeys it is the flying nuns who swoop down and pick up all the little children to take them to boarding school.

So, all of those are my gags. They are meant to teach about all the horrific things that have been done to us. It is a way to use humor to think about: We don’t want to repeat these lessons do we? That is not going to be very helpful. So, it has to have that for me or it is not worth doing, even though I think it should be funny. Brecht, talks about theater for social change. I did that with a group of my students at Carleton. They wrote their own plays. It was great. I had originally envisioned that we would do some guerilla theater, but they were a little timid about that. Someone might have shot us up there. You never know. They hired three colored teachers. Me, another Lakota woman and a Mexican woman. The headlines in the paper read "Mexicans Invade Northfield" because they had hired us all at once. So, that was an unfortunate thing. People are just incredible. This was in 1997.

RL: You come in to do this class and the town greets you with this headline. How do you negotiate that in yourself?

LAH: I just turn it into theater, or use it somehow in my work. The thing that was most shocking was that two things happened at one time. First of all, they thought we were janitorial help when I went to get my faculty card, and when the woman who was Mexican-American went in to open a bank account and the woman at the Northfield, Minnesota, bank said, when she walked up to the counter, "We don’t have any jobs. We don’t have any jobs for you." And the woman said "I just want to open a bank account, I have a job at the university." "Oh. Well, welcome to the community." Can you imagine? We went into the deli together and the girl behind the counter said to us, "Do you speak English?" She was yelling at us. Isn’t that funny? It is tragic. But if you don’t laugh. I used that as a scene in my book. A lot of the most outrageous things that are in "Indian Radio Days," half of that stuff has happened to us. So, I actually think that is why burlesque and Yiddish theater is so funny to their community. They are just acting out the horrific things that have happened. Otherwise, you might just keel over.

You know we were talking about doing a performance up at the ALA Conference in March of 2002. When Liz was here we got to talking about what she wants to do. And then we are going to be her mock panel. She is going to make a case for digging up Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and I don’t know who else, because Indians just want to know. She is going to take some documents about them digging up our cemeteries and graveyards and bones and turn that into a big performance piece. I am going to be one of her moderators and comment seriously on how Indian people just want to know: Were they buried with Mason rings? We thought that would be hilarious. It comes right out of being at a conference where people are talking about digging up your community. If I have a sense of humor it is out of everyday you are just shocked.

RL: On the other end, when you go to performance, what is the relationship you like between the performer and the audience?

LAH: It depends on the intention of the piece. My instinct is to say that I like it real up close and personal. I like breaking that wall. I like coming out into the audience. We did that and it just felt right. We should always be in the audience. Anything I ever write, I always think I should go out. We’ve even sold 25-cent cent bags of dirt. Get your nickel bag of America. It is a gag. Or church-lady fashions. I like that a lot. I like to be real physical with the audience. Now, not always, it depends on the piece. But my instincts are to break that wall and make the audience part of that moment. It is not passive anymore, it is interactive. That seems to be the best. I don’t want them to think it is TV. That is my instinct. I was really thrilled because the kids at Vermilion, that was so instinctive for them. They went out into the audience and drug people up on stage. I didn’t have to tell them to do that. It is about getting everyone involved and a part of that show. That way they come away with a sense of participation in the group. I like that.

RL: I was really interested in talking with Justin. I guess his work with WagonBurner was the first time that he had acted on stage. I was asking him what the difference is between his experience as an actor and his experience as a musician. He was sort of squint eyed for a minute. Then he realized that as a musician he wanted an audience to feel what he was feeling, and he said that in performance as an actor in WagonBurner he felt that he was up there as a person, as an individual wanting for the audience to be with him in the idea. It was one of the most clear expressions of how comedy is intellectual. There is a point that he wanted for them to enter into this moment so that the audience and he were together wrestling with this idea. He is very articulate about it and it was very interesting. Of course, some theater proposes an illusion that someone watches and feels. The actors job is to bring the audience into a feeling, but his work with WagonBurner was more about asking them to engage in an event and to wrestle with them in the ideas of the event.

LAH: I think that is typically Native. Consider hand games, that is a theatrical performance. It involves the whole community, but it is a performance. You’ve got singers, magicians, I don’t mean medicine people. If you are trying to fake out the other side. then you’ve got to be a magician with that little piece of hand game. Then you’ve got people that become invisible. It is a performance. Hand games are performance. Stickball is a performance. It is an act, a theatrical act that happens between two players. Winter counts, that is a theatrical performance, and it involves the whole community. But these are ideas. You have to involve, interact – our anolis, which are tellers, when they tell the story, they are teaching and telling an idea and you become a part of that as the teller tells the story. Everybody gets involved and is changed by that story. That is what Indian theater is about. You know, if you are raised in that kind of community, I think that is the only thing you know how to do. Now, there are Indian playwrights that are doing respectable work with good ideas – I don’t want to take anything away from anyone – but it is not the same. It is Indian sitcom. And that is good. I’ve always thought we should do "Sinte Gleska" or "Santa Fe" – like a soap opera. Have stuff like that. I think an Indian sitcom would be very funny. Like the Mexican soap operas. It would be just a scream. But that is TV. A performance has got to pull the audience in, in some kind of way.

I don’t know if you have ever seen "Harold of Orange"? It is a film written by Gerald Vizenor. The Indians are just con artists and Harold of Orange is just a con artist, and he has the idea to make money from an arts council, a non-Indian arts council in Seattle. It is very, very funny. What they do to get the arts council involved is they take them to play Indian baseball. But they give the whites shirts that say "Indian" and they wear the white people shirts. So, what they do is get them to be Indians for a day. Everybody has a big time. They have hotdogs at the end of the day. The arts council thinks it is the best thing that they have ever seen. They let them win by the way, the arts council. I just laughed and laughed because they got their audience to be Indians and walk around in these shirts that say "Indian." These men in business suits just have a great time. They participate in it and they give them the money for this little scam Harold’s got. He becomes a better person, so to speak, at the end of the movie and he isn’t quite the trickster. But you see, it is the same thing. That is what I think makes community theater so much fun. Now, you are never going to make any money.

RL: Between your sense of humor and your sense of collective community participation, that is really hot. That is the way I think of it, as opposed to cool art. Hot art. People are right on the edge, right there, with everything hanging out. Do you ever get into trouble?

LAH: Well, only a few times. We’ve had people walk out. Not really. You know, who you can pick on in an audience and who you can’t. If you were to drag the horrified old lady up out of her chair, that wouldn’t be good. But I think actors instinctively know that. People with sensibilities, you know that you can’t drag that one up. But there are people in an audience who want to go.

RL: Do you ever talk about that with the actors?

LAH: No. Never. Just leave it up to them.

RL: I agree with you, but there are times when – now, not a lot – but over the course of twenty years there were times when I had to speak with the actors and say "Now remember, be smart." Actors can get feeling that they have power. There are times when we have to be compassionate about the use of that.

LAH: I have never had a problem. We did this kinda guerrilla teaching thing at Carleton. We had this last whole semester of guerrilla theater. We had lots of fights in class. We had 30 kids; 90 percent were in minorities. It was that way on purpose. We did lots and lots of debriefing. Sometimes, kids would get in fights with each other. The other thing that was very tense was that we filmed each and every class, so their fights were on film. Fighting out questions of race, sexual identity, every hot thing we could layer in there we did. One night, I was up until three in the morning with students that were in crisis – a lot of crying in the class, a lot of tears and fighting. That wore me out. They were brilliant. They interrogated their own color, everyone else’s color, whatever the identity was. And us, all three of us. That was the hottest, hottest, hottest. Sometimes those kids would start carrying on and walk out of class. I would think, "Shit we are going to be sued for sure." They would come back. We filmed every class, the performances and the plays.

They did their own directing and did three plays. Then at the end they debriefed the audience on their experience. The theater was packed for over a week, and I mean packed. We had the president, the dean. Some of these things like, "Can You Speak English....?" You know, if they did it to the faculty, imagine what those kids were living through in the whitest town in America, which is Northfield, Minnesota. I had great colleagues. Like when the headlines came out, a lot of the faculty went over and just expressed. So, we weren’t treated badly. It was just the community wasn’t ready for colored people. They had seen blacks before, but they just weren’t about to let the Mexicans in. So, that was very emotionally hot. Finally they came together and did it. I think that was the most intense thing I’ve ever done. By the end I was thinking, "Hmmmmm." And it was my idea to do it. We had a little fight in the cafeteria the first semester I was there. I proposed doing theater, pulling everyone together to work out questions of race or sexual identity. We had a boy who was a cross-dresser, had some homosexual kids or lesbian kids, but there were variations on all those themes. I thought it would be a good idea, but it was hot. We have had, one time in New York a Mohawk woman got very upset with one of the jokes in "Indian Radio Days." We had to debrief that audience. She said "You know I am really insulted by that...blah, blah, blah..." We went up and talked and by the end she was okay. We had gotten Mohawk history wrong and so she set us straight. So, we were all a bit disturbed by that. We don’t want to get the history wrong.

RL: A couple of times you have talked about talking. You watched "Citizen Kane" and then you talked about it. You debriefed with an audience. Is that a regular thing? The show happens and then you keep on with the audience and open up to talk? Or do you keep a distinct difference between the show and a talk-back section?

LAH: Well, we didn’t always do a talk-back session. The National Museum of the American Indian brought us up to New York, and because it is a museum, they asked us to debrief the audience and ask if they had any questions. And so, that time we did. We got invited to a school, and for those performances we came out on stage afterwards and asked if they had any questions or if they would like to talk about the show. Oh, New York was a tough house. They never laughed, hardy at all. They just sat on their hands. It was really hard. Some of our best performances were in New York. What I have learned since then – and see, here is the thing – Roxy and I thought when we were writing, and what I thought we were doing as performing, I thought being so ethnocentric. I think that is what I really learned – more about, myself – is that people don’t know anything about Indians. Not anything. They don’t have any frame of reference. They don’t know what the Trail of Tears was. They can’t laugh because they don’t have any frame of reference. And so, that is why I think New York was such a tough house. They also don’t think the Mayflower is really funny, and Columbus isn’t really funny because there are so many Italians and that just isn’t funny. So, when we had the talk-backs there, it was part of the museum gig because we were teaching. Now, a lot of colleges, we had some of that, we had a talk at Lake Forest. Typically one of us would go out and say, "We are going to come on stage now as ourselves. We are from different Indian communities. Is there anything you want to know about?" Someone would inevitably say, "Is it true that Indians don’t pay taxes? Do Indians have cats?" You get that question. "Do Indians live in houses today?"

RL: I wanted to ask about talking within the company when you built the piece. The process of talking, is it equally loose or do you have any techniques or things that you secretly have done in order to move it forward? How did you get the company pulled together? You put a call out for WagonBurner and different people show up and you get started? What I am hearing from Justin and Debbie is that there is a shared understanding of what you are doing. How does that happen?

LAH: That is a really good question. I’ll give you an example. Usually I just let things happen, that is probably a weakness. Balloon out and then try something in rehearsal and bring it back if it is just terrible. Whatever you want to bring, just do it and see if it works. Let that be a group decision, if it works. What does everybody think? By that time, the person will know if it is working or if it isn’t working. I let that happen at a collective level. The idea is to have fun. That is really the basis of the idea, and is this going to be a good piece. Does it fit? Now, when it doesn’t, everybody knows it and I don’t have to do much after that. It is just like, "Oh that was bad. Don’t do that again." I did more directing, I would say, in New York than I ever like to do. I don’t like to have that much control. We had to get really tight. They kept cutting our time. We had an hour and they wanted the show down to 50 minutes, 55 minutes, and then down to a 30-minute timeline and they would break for the shows. We had to cut a lot and be really tight to hit that mark. I remember thinking that I like it to be a little bit looser and a little bit more free for artistic innovation than being this much of a real director. Like what we see on TV. That was when I was more bossy, more like a boss than I like to be. Normally in rehearsal those kinds of ideas come up and we just go with it.

RL: Then do you have times when you analyze a particular moment, or is it always done on your feet in a rehearsal?

LAH: No, we would always go together. We always rode together and sometimes we slept in the same room. There would be ten people in the same room. We would go over and rehash. There was a lot of debriefing and a lot of talking. You eat, sleep and work with people and you know what they are feeling.

RL: Kind of like that instinct that says this person is a good person to pull onstage and this person isn’t a good person for that, do you have a sense of when it is good to talk and when it is not good to talk?

LAH: Yeah. And I am good with clearing the path. Making the path smooth between us. That is probably my best asset. And if I don’t want it to be good, I am also good with that. If I don’t want the path to be smooth between us, I am good with that too. I think all teachers are. We have to be good with students. Not all teachers, but most good teachers have that built in. Now is the time to pounce on a student and get the most out of their mind. You know, every class that I do, no matter where I teach, I always have theater and performance. My colleagues are bored witless with that. Even in my lit classes. I get them to do a play and act out some piece of history, or write it themselves. Get up and perform that, and be that. My colleagues, I must say, just are not the least bit interested in that approach to learning. It has to be one of those little discipline things. Well, that is over in the drama department, or that is in the theater department. We are looking for the text. I’ve got great text. "Oh what a novel approach..." And then go on as if you have never said anything. I think that is a problem in the academy. Do you agree?

RL: I have a similar story. I agreed to teach some Shakespeare with a group of English teachers. The idea of trying to get at it through the question of "how would you play this character" was a novel notion. I was trying to say that the guy wrote it to be played. They were very hard pressed. The students were getting excited about something that was alive and functional. So, the teachers weren’t opposed to the consequences, but the way we got at it seemed to be too easy. They wanted it to hurt more. So yes, I know what you are saying.

LAH: It is a problem. I think theater across the disciplines is the way to go. How better to teach history than to turn those moments into theater and have them perform it. Then they get it, as opposed to just having it as text. That, to me, is the essence of learning. That is the same approach as innovative theater. I don’t want to do anyone else’s scripts necessarily, I would rather see students write their own. And I would rather see my friends write their own. You learn so much more about a script. Then, if you want to go into another kind of theater, you are more prepared. You know what went into writing "Angels in America" if you write your own. That is kind of what I am about. It comes from the idea, and that is the way the culture is. It is not what people think.

RL: Do you have a sense of who your intended audience is?

LAH: I used to think it was white people, and it’s not. This is back to Roxy and I, we thought for sure – and you know, everything we wrote was always collective. We would just laugh, and, "They’ll think this is so funny." But it didn’t work out that way. It was our naiveté. And so, now I guess I’ve come 180 degrees. I used to think I was trying to educate the mainstream at large, but now I don’t think I can do that. That is probably not going to happen. We, as Indian people, are forced to learn about the Bosnians and everyone on down. That is not true of anything that has to do with our culture, and we are neighbors. I probably can’t do that if 50,000 people before me haven’t tried to do that. Now I think Indian people are my audience. We had talked about writing a screenplay. I do want to do a film, but I want to do it for Indian people. I’ve got the idea and I’ll just show it at Indian conferences. It is about a woman going to her first MLA conference and thinking she is going to hear something about Indian literature, and all the horrific things that happened at MLA or any conference like that. One of the guys at Winston-Salem, or at Wake Forest, who has written a screenplay – and I have written a screenplay – said "Who is your audience?" I said it has got to be Indians. He said, "No one will see it then." And I said, "Well yeah, just some Indians." It was like, "Well, if you would just write some white people in, you might be able to get some money to do this." But that is not what I am interested in. It doesn’t matter. I think I can do a digital camera and do this. Get some actors together and it will be fun. I could have talked myself blue in the face.

RL: Do you think that your style, or your way of telling stories or making theater could change, or will change as you shift from a sense that your audience is the mainstream white to this?

LAH: I think that was a shock: The theater that I have written really was for an Indian audience. I thought I was writing for white people.

RL: But your audience was white?

LAH: No, not really. At the University of Iowa we had one whole house that was filled with Indians. My best audiences are Indians. The best houses are Indians. Out in Los Angeles, I flew out there for that. They had managed to get a whole bunch of people from the Indian communities. They get it, they laugh. I thought, "So this is what is wrong. I’ve been playing to the wrong crowd. They get it and they laugh. They know it. It resonates with them." So that was a big teaching thing for me to learn. Yes, we’ve gotten good reviews. We’ve had good white reviewers that are like, "Yeah, I got that." We’ve had good audiences. The best audiences are Indians. With the growing Indian population in America, with our exploding population in urban Indian communities and reservation communities, and our big conferences, we now have enough Indian educators where we can pull a conference of 1,000 people. I thought I would change the world, you know, the non-Indian world. But it is enough, I mean it is kind of cool and it is enough for me to be a part of the change within my own community. That is it. That is it. That is where my gifts are. And you know, I am still teaching at white schools, but that is a good way to get money.

RL: I’m interested in resources, and how you think about that. It takes people to go get dollars. It is easier, in a sense, for opportunity to come along and take what you’ve got and never mind going to try and find the dollar. Are you totally comfortable with that, or would you like to have more resources for WagonBurner?

LAH: Well ], if we had resources we would do more plays and would be able to have more gigs. We would be able to get people together again. But those are predicated on grants, or they are predicated on all of us putting our own money up. We’ve certainly done that before. But we also eked out a little money for ourselves, which was always the same amount no matter who got involved. I would like to have the resources to do full-blown productions, but since that is highly unlikely, especially now in this political climate, I suspect we will just have to keep going on the way we are going on. I know other companies around the country: Illusions Theatre, every time those guys get the money together they put on a show. I’m going up to Minneapolis, there’s about four or five clumps of people that put on plays up there. They just do it when they can get a couple of hundred dollars to get some costumes and the tickets and the venue and go with it. That is just the way it is going to happen. I am doing a three-woman performance, also in March, and we have scheduled to do that and get together and rehearse in the fall. We know that I have to put up the money for that. Then we want the show to travel. Mine is my comedy, which is about to be or not to be Choctaw. I’ll probably be the second act. I guess I wouldn’t know how to do it any other way. Oh, and you know why? I was asked to go out to that show, Ally McBeal. They want an Indian consultant. Joy wouldn’t do it and she sicked them on me. Fox? Fox Network sent me a thing and asked me to be their damn consultant. Oh, I just can’t think of anything worse. I can’t think of anything worse. Who else wanted a consultant? Someone got some money to do another TV series on Indians in the 21st century. Sent me the proposal and asked if I would come out and write some of the scripts for the television. It would be like a mini-documentary and have six segments. The money is good, but you are so constrained by politics. It has to be things I don’t want to sell myself to do. I have to become a different kind of Indian to do that. There is a big cost when you get money from people, also, which is constraining. You were talking about the way the NEH and the NEA grants are getting to be. We aren’t going to be talking about queer Indians, are we? Not with NEA money. So, you’ve got to be a little bit of a prostitute to do that. That is not bad. If you are able to do it then it is good, but I don’t want to go. I’m too old now. I’m not hungry enough. There was a time when I probably was hungry enough but that time has passed. We will just keep on keeping on. In fact, I am thinking about writing for some money, but you’ve got to be careful. What do you want me to do for it? Or somebody else’s little agenda. You are working for Nazis and you didn’t know it. I love teaching, but every once in awhile you get trapped in the worst places possible. Elite schools are like that. I’ve taught at Carleton and Grinnell and now Wake Forest. They are little elite bastards. "Oh we just love colored people, but you can’t stay very long." They are just awful, even though you have a good time.

RL: Do you anticipate being here in Cincinnati for awhile?

LAH: For awhile. I’m going to go on the road for awhile with this book. Matter of fact I am starting next week. I’m tired now, but I start that in the fall with the book tour. I thought I might go teach at Clemson. They asked me and I went down there for an interview, but I probably asked for too much money. It is also at this point, you have to give up some money for me to uproot again and come teach for a semester.

RL: Do you think of Cincinnati as home?

LAH: No, home is Oklahoma and home is Texas. I grew up in Oklahoma in this awful, conservative state that I love and hate. But, I mean, we live here. I like it. Jim likes it. We’ll be here awhile, but then we don’t know.

Robert H. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at Virginia Tech where he teaches directing and improvisation. He brings 30 years of experience as founding artistic director of the Road Company, a nationally recognized theater ensemble (1972-1998) based in Johnson City, Tennessee, which created and produced two dozen original plays reflecting the history and issues of the Upper Tennessee Valley and Central Appalachia. Leonard served as a site visitor for WagonBurner Theater Troop for "Performing Communities," and currently serves as a member of the national board of Theatre Communications Group.

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