NEW YORK CITY: Playwright Cathy Tagnak Rexford has been chosen as this 12 months’s National Theatre Conference (NTC) Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award winner, making her the primary Native American playwright to obtain the dignity.
Rexford will probably be awarded an honorarium of $2,000 for her play Cold Case on the December 2022 NTC annual assembly. The assembly will even function a studying of Cold Case, with a talkback concerning the play and Rexford’s profession to observe. Actors DeLanna Studi and Muriel Miguel will carry out the main roles. Rexford was chosen out by the National Theatre Conference’s Stavis Committee, who have been drawn to the facility and humanity of Rexford’s characters, and to a narrative of lacking and murdered Indigenous girls and their households, who are sometimes unrepresented within the theatre.
“She shares her unique perspective as an Alaska Native writer, a point of view that is so rarely seen on this country’s stages,” mentioned Leslie Ishi, creative director of Perseverance Theatre, who will direct the NTC studying, mentioned in a press release. “Cathy approaches storytelling with a level of thoughtfulness, courage, and compassion that inspires empathy and deep emotional response, and she is unafraid to tackle, head on, the most pressing issues that Native/Indigenous communities face.”
Cold Case depicts the heartbreaking story of a girl in rural Alaska as she fights to get well her aunt’s physique from an Anchorage morgue. The uncommon construction and ease of writing and the play’s distinctive illustration of life in an off-road Alaska Native village brings dwelling the claustrophobia of being smothered, not simply by a blizzard however by the paperwork and circumlocution of a authorities intent on dismantling village life.
Rexford is a playwright, poet, and fiction author from Anchorage. She is of he’s of Iñupiaq, French, German, and English descent. Other works embody The Namesake, Land Claims, and Whale Song. The Namesake was chosen by Native Voices on the Autry for his or her First Look Series in 2008. This fall, Rexford will function producer for the HBO sequence True Detective: Night Country, starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis.
Rexford holds an M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia in artistic writing and theatre, a BA from Evergreen State College in Native American research, and a B.F.A. with honors from the Institute of American Indian Arts in artistic writing.
The National Theatre Conference (NTC) is a corporation based in 1925 that meets yearly in New York to debate related points in in the present day’s theatre group and to rejoice excellent achievement within the American theatre.
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