Four Directions Native Playwright Residency
About Four Directions
Four Directions Residency was an idea that grew naturally out relationships that Native playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle had with the Great Plains Theatre Commons, the Tulsa Artists Fellowship, and KCRep, along with an artistic connection between the GPTC and the Tofte Lake Center.
The idea of having a residency that took place in four different parts of the country over a year’s time came into focus as we began to imagine a network of support for a Native playwright. We found resonance in the idea of a residency which would all take place along the 100th Meridian, allowing the playwright to spend time writing at points across the great plains, and reaching all the way up into the old growth forests and glacier formed lakes of the north.
What Four Directions Playwright Residency is
The Four Directions Playwright Residency is a collaborative program with four arts organizations: The Great Plains Theatre Commons (GPTC), Tofte Lake Center, Tulsa Artists Fellowship, and Kansas City Repertory Theatre (KCRep). Each organization provides a weeklong residency for a chosen Native playwright and play, over a one-year timeframe. Each week takes place in a different part of the country and provides a different focus for work on the play. The residencies provide for travel, room, and board, and a $1000/week stipend for each of the four weeks.
The 2024 Four Directions playwright is Drew Woodson.
Drew is a Western Shoshone playwright based in New York City. He has had his work read in multiple theaters across New York, including Rattlestick Theater where he was asked to open the first annual Northeastern Native Arts Festival with his play “Your Friend, Jay Silverheels.” For this same work, Drew was named Yales Young Indigenous Playwright of 2021 and was workshopped at Yale under the direction of Tara Moses. More recently, Drew completed a two month artists residency on Governors Island for AICH, and had two new works “From Above” and “As We Were, So We Are” read at HERE Arts and The Duke Ellington Room with the Eagle Arts Project. As a writer, Drew seeks to tell stories where Native people are allowed to take up space, be complicated, be the center of attention, and ultimately be more than a storytelling device. Drew is currently completing his MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU.
The inaugural (2023) Four Directions Residency playwright was Madeline Easley.
Madeline (she/her) is a Wyandotte artist whose work as a playwright and performer converges at the intersection of magical realism and elevation of Tribal Sovereignty, the inherent right of Tribal Nations to govern themselves. Born in Kansas City four generations after her people’s removal, Madeline positions colonialism as dystopia and examines the many threads that wind this reality, positing its fracturing through a truthful examination of the whole. She is the inaugural Four Directions Resident Playwright for 2023, a new partnership between Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Tofte Lake Center, Great Plains Theatre Commons (GPTC), and the Kansas City Repertory Theatre (KCREP). She is a 2022 Greenhouse Playwriting Resident at SPACE on Ryder Farm and a 2021 First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellow. Madeline is one of six filmmakers who premiered short films at “We The Peoples Before” in the summer of 2022 at the Kennedy Center. Her film The Feathered Girl was a 2022 LA SKINS FEST featured selection and made its west-coast premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Her plays include FEAST FOR THE DEAD, SHIFT, and REPRESENTATIVES FOR THOSE AT PEACE, a new play commissioned by KCREP about Lyda Conley and her protection of the Wyandot National Burying Ground in Kansas City, KS. As an actor, Madeline has performed regionally and Off-Broadway.