NEW YORK CITY: Playwright Cathy Tagnak Rexford has been chosen as this 12 months’s Nationwide Theatre Convention (NTC) Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award winner, making her the primary Native American playwright to obtain the glory.
Rexford will probably be awarded an honorarium of $2,000 for her play Chilly Case on the December 2022 NTC annual assembly. The assembly can even function a studying of Chilly Case, with a talkback in regards to the play and Rexford’s profession to comply with. Actors DeLanna Studi and Muriel Miguel will carry out the main roles. Rexford was chosen out by the Nationwide Theatre Convention’s Stavis Committee, who had 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 distinctive perspective as an Alaska Native author, a standpoint that’s so not often seen on this nation’s levels,” stated Leslie Ishi, inventive director of Perseverance Theatre, who will direct the NTC studying, stated in a press release. “Cathy approaches storytelling with a degree of thoughtfulness, braveness, and compassion that conjures up empathy and deep emotional response, and he or she is unafraid to deal with, head on, probably the most urgent points that Native/Indigenous communities face.”
Chilly Case depicts the heartbreaking story of a lady in rural Alaska as she fights to get well her aunt’s physique from an Anchorage morgue. The weird 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 forms 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. Different works embody The Namesake, Land Claims, and Whale Music. The Namesake was chosen by Native Voices on the Autry for his or her First Look Sequence in 2008. This fall, Rexford will function producer for the HBO collection True Detective: Evening Nation, starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis.
Rexford holds an M.F.A. from the College of British Columbia in artistic writing and theatre, a BA from Evergreen State School in Native American research, and a B.F.A. with honors from the Institute of American Indian Arts in artistic writing.
The Nationwide Theatre Convention (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 have a good time excellent achievement within the American theatre.
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