Having recently closed this year’s very successful Tenth Annual Native American New Play Festival, the newly formed Oklahoma Indigenous Theatre Company are more than ready to produce not only plays from the stars of the Native playwright scene—yes, they do exist—but to also focus a spotlight on the up-and-comers as well.
Sarah D’Angelo (Mohawk), artistic producer and founding company member, said that even though they worked under the Oklahoma City Theatre Company for nearly a decade, in 2018 they had decided that they had finally respectfully “outgrown” them.
“We were ambitious to produce work more often and generate other kinds of community programming beyond the New Play Festival,” D’Angelo said. “We had built up a solid company of regular artistic folks and were functioning under our own systems of working and producing. We felt in order to really position Indigenous Theatre and Indigenous Theatre artists in Oklahoma further into mainstream visibility and create accessible live performance for all people, we needed to be regularly producing as a separate entity.”
With both the New Play Festival and its main headliner, Neechie-Itas, by Jo MacDonald (Anishinaabe), performed at Mitchell Hall at the University of Central Oklahoma to much acclaim, D’Angelo said that this year has been “successful collaboration” with many “wonderful, positive changes” for the company.
“The Native American New Play Festival is our centerpiece event,” D’Angelo said. “Every year for two weekends we produce a fully-realized full-length play and feature a staged reading series of new Indigenous plays, curated from a national call for scripts. Other festival events can include talking circle panel discussions with elders, language/culture keepers, historians…this year was our 10th consecutive year of the festival’s existence so it was really important to us that we produced it and produced it well.”