Crossroads Project Chair Kee-Yoon Nahm spoke with playwright Marty Strenczewilk and director Dr. Shannon Epplett about the upcoming staged reading of Pink Man, Or, the Only Indian in the Room, winner of the 2023 Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative. The staged reading will take place on Friday, April 14, at 7:30 p.m. Use the link below to register for this in-person event.
Marty Strenczewilk is an Ojibwe theatre artist and storyteller, enrolled with the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Select credits include: co-founding a New York City-based theatre company that created sustainable productions of new plays; touring Europe with Trisha Brown Dance as master carpenter; writing/performing slam poetry across New York City; choreographing a 9/11 anniversary show; performing in Tony & Tina’s Wedding off-Broadway; and performing in the first staged production of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle in New York City. He has a B.A. in Theatre from SUNY Buffalo and has studied at The Barrow Group, Broadway Dance Center, Alvin Ailey, HB Studio, and Joffrey Ballet. He is currently a member of the BETC Writers Group and a member of Creative Nations, an all-Indigenous led artists’ collective. His plays can be found on New Play Exchange.
Shannon Epplett has been an Instructional Assistant Professor in the School of Theatre and Dance at Illinois State University since 2015, where he teaches theatre history, script analysis, devised theatre, and Native American popular culture. He is the faculty co-advisor for TRIBE@ISU, a member of the Indigenous Advocacy and Student Support Team (IASST), and a member of the President’s Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee, where he heads the subcommittee on land acknowledgement. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his M.A. at Illinois State University. Epplett’s research focuses on the history of Chicago’s Off-Loop theatre community, through a sociological lens. His work is included in the recently published book Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theatre and Performance. He has presented papers and served on panels for MATC, ATHE, and SETC; and published articles in the New England Theatre Journal and Theatre History Studies. He is an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and he is currently developing a performance piece based on the life of Anishinaabe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. He is also collaborating with Illinois State University Wonsook Kim School of Art Professor Ruth K. Burke on Domestic Rewilding/Sunset on the Longest Day, an environmental sculpture and performance piece dealing with land acknowledgment to be staged at the ISU Horticulture Center on June 20, 2023.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kee-Yoon Nahm (KN): Marty, if I could start with you, what was your own journey of writing this play?
Marty Strenczewilk (MS): When I was growing up, it was not safe to be anything but white. I grew up in a tiny town with one stop light. I learned how to shoot a gun at 9 years old. It was that kind of town. At school, there was one Black kid and one Middle Eastern kid, and I saw how they were treated. So, consciously or not, I did not want to identify as anything other than white. Then, when I went to college, I was thrust into that part of my identity. I had pushed away from it, even though, for my mother, it was a big part of our lives. But there I was, living among other Natives and in Native programs. It was a terrifying thing. I had moments like that throughout my life where I was in and out of my culture.
One day, my therapist said: “You know, you have this internalized racism against yourself.” And we started talking about what that was. This was only four years ago. Up to that point, I never spoke about that part of myself. I never thought about it. It was just something that I did not connect with. My brother embraced it. He has long hair and tattoos all over him. He has been named. He has been through so many things. And I am the exact opposite of that. I stopped going to powwow the second my mom stopped dragging me there. In fact, the first time that I have been back since then was just last year.
Meanwhile, I started to have more time for myself to explore theatre again, and I found quickly that I was drawn to writing. It is something easy to do on your own time, and I used to write a lot of poetry and monologues and 10-minute musicals when I was a full-time theatre professional years ago. So, I started writing. Pink Man started as a monologue that I now call “John Wayne,” a section in the play about my grandmother being married to a guy who watched John Wayne movies. I wrote about how weird that was because those movies have the most stereotypical images of Indians possible. I remembered sitting in the living room, watching those movies on my grandfather’s knee, while my Ojibwe grandmother was in in the kitchen making sandwiches. I never thought about that again until I was 41 years old, and it struck me how weird that is. With that monologue, I went into a playwriting workshop with the playwright Arlene Hutton, and she helped me figure out the story. Quite honestly, it turned into my own journey of discovery. In essence, Pink Man is about me finding a way to live between being a pale-skin person growing up in a community of pale-skin people, while also being steeped in my culture from my mother’s side and fighting it every step of the way growing up.
KN: Shannon, I remember emailing you once we knew that Pink Man would be one of our finalists this year. The Crossroads members were all excited about this play, but I wanted to get your take since the play contains a lot of specific cultural references. At that point, I had not realized that you and Marty are from the same tribe: the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Would you recount your initial response to the play? Of course, it is obvious that you liked the play since you offered to direct the staged reading.
Shannon Epplett (SE): Yeah, I really like the play. I said at the time that even if the play does not win, I am going to get in touch with Marty myself because I want to do it. The play spoke to me because I had a lot of similar experiences. Marty, it is interesting that your mom is very connected to Native identity—the tradition and the culture. I did not have that. I am the person in my family who took that on. Your rebellion was to not do what your mom wanted, whereas my rebellion was to turn to the culture. It came later in college and in my 20s. That is when I more actively embraced our tribe and our culture. It is interesting what we rebel against when we are young and how we engage with it.
MS: I did not even think about how that can be a different story for other folks. Interestingly, the relationship my mom and I have now is different. We have different conversations. For example, the grandmother character in the play is based on my actual grandmother, but she also had a twin sister. So, we talk a lot about their story and what it was like for them. My mom would send me pieces of information about their lives. My aunt is kind of like the family historian—as opposed to the tribal historian—and she would dig things up for me. I am more immersed now in that part of my family’s life than I have ever been. It has changed my relationship with my mother. I imagine, Shannon, that it changed your relationship to your family in some shape or form as well.
KN: Shannon, when you say that you recognize a lot of things in the play, you are not just speaking thematically. When we were discussing the part of the play where Indian talks about the casino in the reservation, I remember you saying that you have been in that casino. I think you are the perfect director for this play because you have a firsthand experience of the setting. Will you talk more about how your own experiences and memories resonate with the play?
SE: Sault Ste. Marie is where my family lived, and that is where our reservation is. I was up there every summer, every holiday. But also, we did not go to the powwows. We were not traditional in that way. My grandfather resisted being identified as Indian for a long time. But it is odd to read about the casino in the play and think, ‘I have been to that casino.’ I know the community center and all these places in Sault Ste. Marie. It was uncanny when I read the play. So, yes, I do recognize things in the play firsthand, but I also have a different experience of some of them.
MS: I read an article a couple of days ago about Indian boarding schools. In the article, a woman told a story of her grandmother coming and recusing the children from the boarding school. They escaped and lived in the woods so that the children would not be taken back to the boarding school by the Catholic Church. The article talks about how it was OK to be “Indian,” but not “Indian Indian” at the time. In other words, you could be Indian as long as you found ways to navigate the white world safely. Or, you could practice your traditions in secret and try to sneak by in society. But you were at risk at all times of being sent back to these terrifying places. The generation that his grandfather and my grandmother are a part of saw boarding schools as a really scary thing. So, how much you allow yourself to be in that culture is a dangerous matter to that generation in a completely different way than it is to Shannon and I.
SE: My grandfather identified as white. He had blue eyes and curly hair, and his mother was proud of the Scottish side of her ancestry. But my grandfather also referred to his own grandmother as “the squaw,” because she tanned deer hides and made moccasins and picked berries. My grandfather told a story of living in a lumber camp town called Shelldrake in the Upper Peninsula. The family was making money at the time working in a sawmill. One day, my grandfather and his grandmother went berry picking but then a forest fire broke out and they were lost in the woods for several days. But she knew how to keep him safe. In a way, the old ways saved them. Still, the family was embarrassed about her. She was this anomaly who kept these weird old traditions, while everyone else lost them as soon as they could. If you are too Indian, your kids can get taken away. So, I think there was a good reason for my grandfather not wanting to be known as Indian until very late in his life.
KN: I think one strength of Pink Man is that, while it is clearly an autobiographical play, it is also a play about history. The protagonist’s journey takes him through a kind of history lesson, where he learns about his grandmother’s life and the atrocities committed in these boarding schools. But there is someone who guides Indian on this journey of self-discovery. Would you tell me about Nanabozho, both the figure in Ojibwe culture and the character in the play? Who is Nanabozho?
MS: That is a very complicated question. You will get a hundred different answers if you ask a hundred different people.
SE: Culturally, he is the hero. He is the first man, the first Indian. He is a son of a spirit and a human woman. He is the being who named the world and showed Native people how to live in it. He is at the center of almost all the traditional stories in Ojibwe culture. However, there is not one version of any story because a good storyteller would spin a tale as long as people were listening and interested. Nanabozho is kind of everything. Sometimes he is stupid and sometimes he is wise. He is not quite all-powerful but he is learning to be. He is human in that way. Marty, does that set you up to talk about who Nanabozho is in the play?
MS: One of his strongest personalities for me is his trickster nature, and the way that Nanabozho is used by parents and grandparents to teach lessons to children. Nana is a useful tool, if you will, for Native families to pass on lessons to younger generations. Typically, Nana is playing some kind of role in the story. That is why Nana is also known as the Raven or the Rabbit or the Coyote. These are all trickster-like animals. Nana can change forms. Shannon described Nana as the son of a spirit and a human woman, and traditionally this is true. But in the storytelling culture, Nana can be a man or a woman or be amorphous.
SE: There is never anything consistent.
MS: Right. In the play, Nana serves two purposes. One, Nana is a teacher and guide. But also, Nana is a trickster. I think a lot about the duality of being both the guide and the trickster. The trickster wants to have fun along the way and does not always give you what you want. They do not make it easy on purpose because that is how we learn the best. But the guide makes sure you stay on the right path. You may veer off a little bit, but they bring you back on.
KN: Speaking of dualities, I want to ask about the play’s title. The title Pink Man refers to the two sides of Indian’s identity. To quote a line of his from the play: “I’ve been stuck in the middle my entire life. I’m afraid to be red. But, I’m not just white, either. I guess I’m…pink.” That is a great line. But I am also interested in the play’s subtitle: The Only Indian in the Room. The phrase resonates with me because I always find myself scanning a room quickly to see if I am the only non-white person there. And I often am. Would you talk about your experiences of being the only Indian in the room? What does this scenario mean to you?
MS: There are two important parts to this. First, while developing the play, I started to recognize that I could not get all the feedback I wanted because I was always the only Indian in the room. I have been in diverse playwriting groups with Black playwrights, women playwrights, transgender playwrights, and so on. It was not a bunch of straight white men, to be clear. Still, I was always the only Indian. The same thing at my workplace. My company has a diversity committee, and guess who is the only Indian in the whole company? When we were discussing what to do for Native American Heritage Month, everyone turned to me and asked what I thought we should do. And I remember thinking that no one turns to the Black people here and ask what we should do for Black History Month. What a weird dynamic! Also, racism towards Native people is so common that many people do not even know that they are doing it. They say things like, “Let’s go powwow on that” or “I have to climb the totem pole”—these are things that have become engrained in everyday conversation. I am often stuck in this position, and I do not always want to have to speak up. I just want to live my life sometimes, but you are forced to respond.
Also, I think about how Native American stories are almost never seen onstage. I am trying to make that story so that the audience member who feels like they are always the only Indian in the room can see something that they can connect to. I mean, even Shannon, who has been in theatre for a long time, says that working on a Native play is a rare experience. I joined an arts collective called Creative Nations, and for the first time, I am around other Native artists. It fills my soul in ways I cannot explain to just talk about the art with them and not have to explain it because they just get it.
SE: I totally got the subtitle. I am usually the only Indian in the room. I am one of two Native faculty at this institution, and after this year it will be down to one. So, there is a burden of having to show up and represent for Native people. Marty, I get what you are saying about being in an arts collective with other natives. I am the advisor for TRIBE@ISU, the Native student group here at ISU. Last year, we did an outreach trip to a Native community group in Chicago, and I do not think I had ever sat in a room with that many Indians who I am not related to. There is a power to that. But also, what happens when you do not look Indian and not counted as Indian? I went to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for my Ph.D., which has a problematic mascot. And I remember getting into conversations with people about “the Chief” who did not realize that I was Native. Sometimes I let it go because I did not want to get into it. Other times, I was forced into situations where I had to explain to a table full of white people why this is a bad thing. You have to pick your battles.
MS: Shannon, when you mentioned being in a room with all these Natives who were not your family, it reminded me of going to the Denver March Powwow last week. Kee-Yoon, I do not know if you have ever heard of the Denver Powwow, but instead of being one tribe’s powwow, it has all these nations come together in a 15,000-seat arena. The Grand Entry alone took 45 minutes. I am not exaggerating. There were more people on stage dressed to dance than the entirety of our tribe. To be in the room with that many Native people—all from different cultures—dressed to celebrate, was incredibly empowering. It was a stark reminder that there really are a lot of us. We are just spread out everywhere so that we do not get to see each other sometimes.
KN: Going back to that shared experience of always being the only Indian in the room, how have things changed? Both of you have described powerful experiences of being connected with other Natives. And even in the play, Indian is not always isolated. Even if we set aside Nanabozho as his guide, Indian does meet other Natives throughout the play. Have these communities and support networks always existed, or are they a more recent trend?
SE: I think social media has made a huge impact.
MS: That’s what I was going to say: social media.
SE: The TV series Reservation Dogs exists because the The 1491s started on YouTube and other social media. Because they could not get jobs, they just started doing their own thing. In my Native Studies class, I talk about how social media is democratizing and it is cheap. If you have a phone, you can do this. It has served a lot of people. Sterlin Harjo is where he is now because of YouTube. But also, social media is good for connecting communities, language learning, reclamation, cultural teachings—it has done a lot. People live all over the place, but they show up for, say, Ojibwe Word of the Day on Facebook on Thursday nights.
MS: Even beyond the more culturally significant changes that social media has enabled, it has also created a lot of community connection. I find this fascinating. I am on Twitter a lot because I work in the video game industry. So, I spend a lot of time on there for work. But if I follow a Native person on Twitter, whether they are famous or not, almost always they follow me back. And we converse. Dallas Goldtooth and I have had Twitter conversations.
SE: We all know each other.
MS: Yeah. But we actually do not—that is the funny part. I now know a bunch of animation writers and filmmakers who are Native. I have connected with people whom I have never met through social media because we are all artists who are Native. It is as simple as that. There is no proving your credentials or asking if you are a good enough artist because we have never had a seat at the table. I do not check whether this person is important enough to be following in Native social media because we are just trying to connect one another and create that community. It is cool to watch us celebrate each other’s victories and it empowers others as well.
SE: And support each other too. It is not just the good times that we share. That is powerful too.
KN: Is there anything else that you would like to share?
MS: I will say that I did not intend to write Native plays. In fact, my earliest work, my very first 10-minute musical was a parody of The Golden Girls with Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears as characters. So, not Native at all. But then I saw that very few people are telling these stories, or maybe very few people are able to. I am not seeing them. I want a Native kid to walk in the room and see themselves onstage. That is why I am developing this play. But also, I recently had an amazing reading of a different play that I am working on. And the audience was quite diverse. There were these three Native ladies who were very specific in their feedback and gave a lot of interesting comments. And they had such a different experience of the play than the two white guys sitting next to them. I hope to reach both audiences. There is an opportunity to educate and open up new experiences on the one side, but there are also people in the room who can connect to it. That is who I am writing the play for. I am primarily writing for that Native kid who has nothing to go see.
KN: We have quite a few Native students, alumni, and community members in the cast for the Pink Man staged reading. I imagine that they also have not had many opportunities to tell a Native story.
SE: Marty, another thing I like about the play—and it is also what I like about Reservation Dogs so I am putting you in good company here—is that while it is a Native story, it is also a story about living with an intersectional identity. Anyone who does not feel comfortable in their own skin, whether you are mixed-race or unsure of your gender identity, can relate to this play. I like that the play has a culturally specific context. That is what I like about Reservation Dogs. These are specific Native people that live in a specific time and place. It is not a generalized idea of Natives. But they are also teenagers. When I teach Reservation Dogs, any student who has lived in a small town or tightly-knit community, or pushed back against adult authority can connect to the show. And I see that in Pink Man as well. The play is about a character who is struggling with his identity and finds it in his culture and in himself. It was there all along, but he has to accept it. That is a human story, a universal story.
KN: That you both for this enlightening conversation. I am excited to experience the play together with an audience at the staged reading.
A staged reading of Pink Man, or, The Only Indian in the Room, by Marty Strenczewilk
When: Friday, April 14, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Milner Library, Room 122
