Unseasoned writers are typically advised and encouraged to write about what they know firsthand, and Navajo playwright Rhiana Yazzie has followed that prescription, creating plays about culture clashes and misunderstandings and about mistaken, lost, suppressed, or uncertain cultural identity. Yazzie grew up in the urban Indian community of Albuquerque, New Mexico—part of a broader atmosphere of ethnic diversity and intercultural strife. Her early experience has given her a personal perspective on life in a mixed cultural environment, and this viewpoint has strongly influenced her work in the theatre.

Not yet thirty years old, Rhiana Yazzie has already authored several works that have been performed in readings and productions around the country and internationally. In this pursuit, she joins an elite group of Native writers in the US and Canada whose work is finding an ever greater range of outlets for expression.

How did she come to professional theatre? As a child, Yazzie had an innate love of storytelling and performance and knew that she wanted to pursue those forms of expression in the future. At first she thought she would be an actress, but she soon realized that writing suited her personality even better. As she puts it, acting is the hook, because it’s the main focus in theatrical performance, but it can often lead people into working behind the scenes, as well. In her case, that’s certainly been a fortuitous path.

Yazzie began writing early. By the time she was in middle school, she had already filled many a notebook with scenes, scenarios, and half-written plays. She then took charge of writing the screenplay for a short film that was to be produced by a group of students in her class and found that this seemed a very natural task.

Both her mother and brother had attended the University of New Mexico, and her high school drama teacher suggested that she apply for a scholarship there. She put together and submitted a collection of writings from her notebooks and won a scholarship enabling her to enroll in a playwriting program at UNM. The head of the program happened to be a well-known British playwright and comedian, Digby Wolf, who had been one of the two head writers of the iconic Laugh-In television show and had previously written for Britain’s landmark series That Was the Week That Was. Wolf felt that there was great passion in Yazzie’s writing, and he soon became a mentor and encouraged her to go further as a budding dramatist.

While at UNM, Yazzie was referred to notable Assiniboine playwright William Yellow Robe Jr., who was in the process of putting together an American Indian theatre group. He contacted and teamed up with a number of university students, and Yazzie then became the associate artistic director of the Wakiknabe Native Theatre Company, where she wrote, directed, acted in, and produced plays, as well as designed and constructed costumes.

At Wakiknabe Yazzie wrote and produced a one-act play she called Remnants of the Chinese Grandfathers, something of a commentary on the Indian Health Service as a system in which clients are treated like second-class citizens. The title was a reference to popular scientific theories postulating that American Indians derive from Asians who came over a land bridge to the Western Hemisphere. It also explored the internal racism that members of the same oppressed culture can inflict on one another on the grounds of superficial distinctions such as variation in skin tone (lighter vs. darker shades). The play later received a Panelists’ Choice Award at the Edward Albee Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska.

After earning her bachelor’s degree at UNM, Yazzie headed west and settled in Los Angeles, where she began a graduate program in professional writing at the University of Southern California. While at USC, Yazzie learned through a friend (Native Voices Advisory Council member Dolores Chavez) about a theater company at the Autry National Center whose mission is developing and producing new works written for the stage by Native playwrights.

Yazzie became a volunteer at Native Voices at the Autry and then submitted the first play she had written and staged at Wakiknabe, a full-length comedic farce entitled The Duel. The play concerns a sixteen-year-old Navajo-French Mormon girl who is undergoing an identity crisis. Native Voices gave The Duel a public staged reading, beginning an affiliation that would prove tremendously fruitful over time.

USC granted Yazzie a master’s degree in 2002. That year she also began a workshop offered by the David Henry Hwang Writers Institute, a development program of East West Players in Los Angeles. Her play LA Arrimada (AKA Two in LA) was subsequently presented as part of the institute’s Full Frontal Reading series and was also given a staged reading at the EWP Writers Gallery. Yazzie invited the directors of Native Voices at the Autry, Jean Bruce Scott and Randy Reinholz, to attend the reading, further cementing their burgeoning professional relationship.

LA Arrimada explores the internal evolution of a young Navajo woman who moves to Los Angeles and is consistently assumed by other residents to be a Latina. She starts out feeling alienated but eventually becomes comfortable in the knowledge that she is surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people of color, including tens of thousands of Indians, all of whom look much like she does. The play also deals with the issue of immigration of indigenous people and others across (artificially designated) borders, particularly post-9/11.

While at USC, Yazzie had written a one-act entitled The Long Flight, and it was later submitted by EWP for consideration for the 30th World Congress of the International Theatre Institute, to be held in Mexico. When the entry was accepted for a staged reading, Yazzie asked Native Voices’ Reinholz to direct.

The play, in which a Navajo man takes an imaginary flight through tribal and family history, was then translated into Spanish and presented during the theatre festival in the city of Tampico. There it garnered high praise even from the Mexican actors performing in it, who had never before read a play with an Indian central character. Yazzie was fascinated and dismayed to learn that Mexico’s indigenous culture has virtually no voice in professional theatre there.

Yazzie then wrote a couple of screenplays and a two-act play entitled Asdzani Shash: The Woman Who Turned into a Bear, which was given a workshop and staged reading during a Native Voices play festival. The play weaves Navajo mythology into a contemporary story dealing with such major issues as culture, ethnicity, aging, religion, choice, love, and trust. It was a finalist in the 2005 Bay Area Playwrights Festival in San Francisco and will also be staged and read this fall at the American Indian Community House in New York City.

Another recent piece by Yazzie is slated to be produced as a radio play at the National Audio Theatre Festivals Audio Theatre Workshop in June. THE Best Place to Grow Pumpkins, a children’s play that addresses the issue of dealing with diabetes through a young girl’s struggle to keep her grandfather healthy, was one of three Native plays chosen for production at NATF by The Native Radio Theater Project, a collaboration of Native Voices at the Autry and Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT).

For the past three years, Yazzie has also been among a handful of rising and renowned American Indian writers selected to participate in Native Voices’ annual retreat for playwrights. In her estimation, that opportunity has facilitated tremendous growth, both creatively and professionally. Offering the guidance of dramaturges that include internationally recognized authors, the retreats have given her access to the advice of professionals who would ordinarily be unavailable to emerging dramatists. Native Voices has provided a place where there are people with a passion for theatre who also represent the faces of her characters, and she stresses that it has been invaluable for boosting the confidence of indigenous authors and performers. She gives much credit to Native Voices for enabling her to gain connections and credibility and to learn to compete successfully in the professional arena.

According to Jean Bruce Scott, "Rhiana is an extremely clever and hardworking playwright. We love having her in workshops or at the playwrights retreat because she's not afraid to tackle the difficult subjects. When she does it's always with an unflinching eye and a wicked sense of humor. She challenges all of us to do better work."

In 2005 Native Voices commissioned Yazzie to write a new play. Wild Horses, whose central character is a California Indian girl from the Gabrielino/Tongva nation, will be presented next month in Washington DC at the John F. Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices festival of new works for young audiences. Scott is assisting with overall project development, and Reinholz will direct.

"When I think about my work and Native Voices," Yazzie says, "I think about mainstream theatre not really having the opportunity to develop an emerging writer, not to mention a Native writer. My breakout play was Asdzani Shash, which showed Native Voices that I had an ability to write… which then led them to commission Wild Horses…. The unique thing about developing Asdzani Shash (which I am sure wouldn't have been written without Native Voices' support) is that, by bringing in professional writers to dramaturg the piece and offer career advice—and who can empathize with your journey into a career of writing plays—they gave me the tools I needed to write a play that's competitive in the mainstream."

Yazzie has additional projects scheduled to keep her busy. She has been awarded a Jerome Fellowship beginning in July at the Minneapolis Playwrights’ Center, a prestigious honor bestowed each year on only a few new playwrights. This will offer her further opportunities to network, get exposure, and work with professionals to hone her craft. She is looking forward to using the venue to help broaden legitimate theatre’s awareness of Native drama and its talented dramatists.

"Through Native Voices I’ve met so many other indigenous playwrights, and for most [theatrical organizations], they’re not even on the radar. I’ve met [Cherokee playwright] Diane Glancy, [Metis author-performer-director] Marie Clements…I think they’re some of the best writers working today, but mainstream theatre isn’t really aware of them, which is heartbreaking. I want to see a vibrant, living Native theatre community, nationally. I’m excited to be going to Minneapolis because I’ll be able to contribute to that dialogue.

"I’m also excited to be going to the Kennedy Center to share a Native story that mainstream culture just does not know about or want to acknowledge. Especially, sharing about the indigenous residents of Los Angeles shows that there is more to California history than what we’re told…and perhaps this play might spark people to want to know more about the Native cultures indigenous to their own cities."

As with many other indigenous writers, Yazzie’s early work was built on a strong foundation of social and political commentary and continues to make pertinent statements, although perhaps less directly over time. As she has become more confident as a writer and has refined her individual voice, her plays have begun to focus more on personal relationships, though these often unfold in the context of an ever more absurd and politicized world. Even so, she still feels it’s important to her to use her gifts to express a specific point of view, to reveal urgent matters of the human condition, and to speak for the disenfranchised, especially among her own.

"…The people who I feel are worth taking note of on paper play an extremely important role in this world that often goes unrecognized…," she says. "[Their] voices often are never heard, and I know it is my role to write about [their] experiences."

In Yazzie’s view, writers have an obligation to make a difference. "I don’t like to hear stories without purpose and without the ability to move [audiences]. Use the opportunity to tell the audience about the hidden places and lives that never see daylight. Use your story to give validation to muffled voices, to let an audience know…‘my people are alive,’ and tell them, ‘This is how we get through our lives, living in the cracks.’ I crave a story that has a purpose, that says something important. I need to be moved, and I want to see how people solve the problems of their hearts in conflict."

With deeply motivating convictions, passion, and compassion—and with her crowded schedule as proof of their actualization—it seems certain that Rhiana Yazzie will be fulfilling her promise and her sense of purpose in the months ahead and well into the distant future. Giving voice to the hidden lives of others, she is finding hers.

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