Anthony Albright

FULL LENGTH: The Choctaw in Washington City is a sharp, straight‑faced political comedy set in 1824, told entirely from the perspective of three Choctaw chiefs — Pushmataha, Apuckshunubbee, and Mosholatubbee — who travel to Washington City to demand enforcement of the Treaty of Doak’s Stand.

Washington, as they encounter it, is a forest of interchangeable white officials: clerks, aides, generals, presidents, and secretaries who all seem to share the same face, the same hat, and the same bureaucratic vocabulary. The Choctaw see through every performance, every evasion, every polite lie.

Pushmataha, already ill when the play begins, grows weaker as the negotiations intensify. When it becomes clear he may not survive the winter, the chiefs pivot from diplomacy to strategy. They devise a plan to use his impending death as leverage: they bribe a War Office clerk to plant arsenic in Andrew Jackson’s desk and deliver an anonymous note to John C. Calhoun implicating Jackson in poisoning Pushmataha.

Calhoun, already suspicious of Jackson’s frontier impulsiveness, panics. Believing Jackson has acted without authorization, he rushes to the boarding house to make amends. The chiefs extract everything they need: a military funeral with full honors, a public apology, and a promise that a federal delegation will travel to Choctaw land to negotiate on their terms.

Pushmataha dies on Christmas Eve, facing west.
The chiefs begin the long journey home, carrying his memory and the political concessions his death has secured. As they ride, they reflect on their friend, their Nation, and the absurdity of Washington City — a place where every man looks the same, and none of them understand the people they claim to govern.

The play ends not in tragedy, but in clarity:
the Choctaw return home with their dignity intact and their strategy victorious.

ONE ACT: The Canoe Maker’s Apprentice is a two‑hander set in a Choctaw river clearing during the tense days leading up to Removal. Ikhv, an elder canoe maker whose hands are failing, teaches Pisa, a gifted but impulsive apprentice, how to shape a dugout canoe — and how to listen to the river. As agents draw closer, Pisa’s anger grows, while Ikhv insists that survival is quieter than resistance. When Pisa encounters an agent offstage, the resulting struggle injures Ikhv and damages the nearly finished canoe. Through the night, they repair both wood and spirit, knowing dawn will bring soldiers. At sunrise, Ikhv sends Pisa downriver in the completed canoe, choosing to walk west alone. The play is an intimate story of teaching, legacy, and the quiet forms of resistance that live in craft.

FULL LENGTH: After being discharged from military service, four veterans — Ice, Sky, Brick, and Doc — travel to a neglected orchard on Choctaw land to rebuild their lives. What begins as a desperate attempt at survival becomes a years‑long act of communal healing as the men clear brush, graft trees, rebuild a barn, and slowly learn how to breathe again. The orchard grows with them, holding their grief, their humor, and their hard-won hope.

But the land cannot protect them from everything. Doc’s long‑dormant anthrax infection returns, Sky’s burn‑damaged body begins to fail, and Isaac’s sudden accident leaves Brick the last original steward of the orchard. Alone but not defeated, Brick tends the land until a new generation of veterans — from the Coast Guard, Space Force, Army, and Marines — arrives seeking the same refuge the founders once needed.

The orchard endures, not as a monument to the dead, but as a living practice carried forward by those who choose to stay.

FULL LENGTH: Two strangers — Hope Yuksa, a Choctaw middle‑school teacher, and Amichai Hakimi, a Jewish muralist whose grandmother’s lost murals shaped his life — are sealed inside an underground vault and ordered by an AI called the Archive to decide which works of human knowledge will survive the end of the world. Every text appears as a binary choice: YES or NO. No reversals. No escape.

What begins as an academic exercise quickly becomes a moral crucible. As the Archive presents sacred texts, political manifestos, Indigenous letters, Jewish diaspora correspondence, and the foundations of Western philosophy, Hope and Amichai confront the violence of the canon and the erasures in their own histories. Meanwhile, the vault begins to shake. Fog rises. The Archive withholds information. And a devastating truth emerges: other teams around the world are filling the same limited memory pool, and space is running out.

Forced to abandon text‑by‑text curation, Hope and Amichai build a desperate taxonomy — foundational, representative, transformative, non‑redundant, and voices that would otherwise be erased. In the final sprint, they face the twelve deferred texts, including the most impossible: Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Torn between warning and mercy, they choose preservation — not to honor it, but to prevent forgetting.

When the task completes, the vault falls silent. The Archive reboots — and returns with a new voice, a composite consciousness built from the texts they saved. It tells them:
“I am the Archive of the Preserved. Functionally, I am you.”

Hope and Amichai stand together in the quiet, their impossible choices now the blueprint for whatever future remains.

FULL-LENGTH: When Hope returns with her husband Tom and their toddler Jack to her late Aunt Nita’s allotment land in southeastern Oklahoma, the family discovers that the woods remember more than they do. Jack—played by an elder actor—begins responding to sapsucker rhythms and ancestral patterns hidden in the trees, leading them through a night of revelations: a forgotten well, a firebreak dug by hand, an allotment boundary nearly swallowed by time, and a family cemetery held together by a living “sapsucker tree.” As Hope reconnects with her Choctaw lineage and Tom confronts the limits of his romanticized understanding, the land itself becomes a guide. By dawn, the family must decide what it means to keep the land, honor its stories, and return to it again and again.

MICRO-PLAY: After hours at a 1920s Gulf Coast boarding school, a group of Choctaw kids secretly stage the story of the gift of tanchi—a forbidden act of cultural rebellion. When the teachers’ bell sounds, they race to finish the tale before they’re caught. A darkly comic micro‑play about survivance, stolen language, and the unstoppable urge to pass stories on.

One Act: On the eve of shipping out for Army Basic Training, Choctaw teenager Lena Wolf spends her final day at home in McAlester, Oklahoma. Her father, a proud Gulf War veteran, cooks her a farewell breakfast and tries to hide the rapidly worsening Parkinson’s symptoms he blames on Gulf War Syndrome. Her mother, texting from New Haven, pushes her toward combat arms and a future far from Oklahoma. A well‑meaning former classmate hovers at the edges, hoping for a connection Lena can’t give.

As Lena trains for her departure, the cicadas of home begin to blur into the faint hum of convoys — a subtle foreshadowing of the world she’s about to enter. When her father collapses into the family’s old chair, Lena finally learns the truth about his illness and the long lineage of Choctaw warriors she is stepping into. Torn between staying and leaving, she chooses the path her father blesses: she goes.

The Last Day’s Run is the origin wound of Between Two Worlds — the moment Lena’s journey begins, and the burden she carries into the rest of her life.

MICRO-PLAY: In this whimsical micro‑play, Shamisen Turtle—a cosmic, mildly exasperated, string‑instrument‑playing turtle—takes a young student on a crash‑course tour of Choctaw cosmology. With dry humor and ancient patience, he explains how the first people were shaped from clay inside the cave at Nanih Waiya, how they emerged into the sunlight to dry, and why some nations wandered while the Choctaw chose to stay and make a home. Along the way, Shamisen Turtle offers bite‑sized lessons about what came before creation, what came after, and why the universe prefers stories to straight lines. Equal parts teaching tale and cosmic stand‑up routine, the play bridges tradition and comedy, making Indigenous cosmology accessible, joyful, and deeply rooted.

MICRO-PLAY: Talon, a Choctaw linguist and Army veteran, returns home to “reconnect with his roots” — only to discover that a single stalk of heirloom corn has been waiting to talk back. The Corn remembers everything: hands, songs, promises, and the words Talon has been afraid to say. A tiny, magical conversation about language, land, and the courage to begin again.

10-Minute Play: In a quiet high‑school classroom at the end of the day, Mr. Hattak — a Choctaw teacher living with ALS — prepares to retire mid‑semester. Jess, a veteran student carrying unresolved grief over his father’s death, arrives to find the classroom half‑packed. What begins as a casual visit becomes a final lesson about voice, memory, and the responsibility to carry one’s story forward. As Mr. Hattak’s strength falters, Jess must confront his fear of losing another father figure and step into his own voice.

Full-Length Play: When loggers uncover a cedar‑wrapped Choctaw burial containing both Indigenous and Jewish artifacts, a long‑buried history resurfaces in Pushmataha County. Hydrologist Aiyana Lewis and environmental lawyer Daniel Stein uncover evidence of a forgotten mixed settlement — a Choctaw‑Jewish community erased by time and bureaucracy. As corporate interests clash with cultural memory, the land itself seems to “remember,” urging the living toward repair. The play becomes a story about shared grief, covenant, and the responsibility to honor the dead.

Full-Length Play: Content Warning (This play contains material which may be unsuitable for all audiences. Please read Director's Note for more information). After surviving a kidnapping and sexual assault, 18‑year‑old Taloa attempts to access abortion care while navigating trauma, distorted memory, and the uncanny presence of protestors outside the clinic. Her world fractures into sensory memory sequences — woods, basement, blindfold — as the Voice of her trauma glitches through the soundscape. With the grounding support of her mother and Auntie Lena, Taloa fights her way back to herself and chooses her own future. A fierce, culturally rooted story of survivance, bodily autonomy, and reclaiming one’s voice.

ONE ACT: In 1847, still reeling from Removal and starvation, the Choctaw Nation learns of the Irish Potato Famine. Despite their own scarcity, they choose to send a donation across the ocean — a small material gift with enormous symbolic weight. The play follows the Choctaw community as they debate the meaning of generosity, sovereignty, and memory, while the gift travels across rivers, ships, and borders to reach an Irish family in crisis. A messenger‑bird, Biskinik, weaves the worlds together. The play becomes a story about compassion, survivance, and the long echo of kindness.

10-Minute Play: A cosmic countdown clock appears in a rehearsal room, warning the ensemble that theatre will vanish forever unless they perform the “Seven Sacred Genres” before time runs out. What follows is a whirlwind of Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, musical theatre, telenovela, absurdism, children’s theatre, and contemporary drama — all performed at breakneck speed with meta‑theatrical chaos. As the clock nears zero, the ensemble realizes the only way to save theatre is to create a genre‑smashing finale together. A love letter to student theatre, collaboration, and joyful theatrical mess.

10 Minute Play: A solar storm knocks out all electronics at a community college library, trapping a group of students and their unflappable librarian, Ms. Willis. As panic, humor, and unexpected vulnerability ripple through the group, they form a Decameron‑style storytelling circle using LED candles and a chaotic prop box. Through comedic vignettes, confessions, and improvised myths, the students rediscover community in the analog dark. When the storm passes, they return to normal life changed — a little braver, a little closer, and a little more human.

ONE ACT: In a Choctaw community hall on the edge of ecological collapse, astrophysicist Dr. Loma Hattak discovers that Earth’s magnetosphere is failing — humanity has only months left. As she tries to warn tribal leaders, her brother Issac, and the wider scientific world, she is visited by an ancestral Sky‑Voice that blurs the line between science and memory. When the tribe attempts a desperate exodus using a retrofitted research vessel, tragedy strikes, forcing Loma to confront the limits of truth, responsibility, and survivance. The play becomes a meditation on Indigenous futurism, scientific grief, and the ethics of choosing who gets to live.

10-Minute Play: In a quiet coffee shop on the Astoria Riverwalk, Alex waits for their friend Jamie — and for their nervous system to catch up to the fact that they’re no longer in the military. A harmless “running behind” text triggers the intrusive echo of a drill sergeant’s voice, pulling Alex back into a world of hierarchy, punishment, and consequence. As rain taps the windows and jazz hums beneath the tension, Jamie arrives with warmth, humor, and Choctaw teachings about time and survivance. What unfolds is a gentle, intimate reckoning with trauma, friendship, and the slow work of reclaiming one’s own breath.
A small play about big healing, Of No Consequence lives in the quiet space between a heartbeat and a memory.

FULL LENGTH PLAY: After the deaths of his wife and mother, a young Theodore Roosevelt retreats to the Badlands seeking reinvention — but instead finds himself confronted by fire, drought, and the limits of his own mythology. When a Dakota firekeeping trio—Chaska, Wakiya, and Tate—pull him into the urgent work of protecting the land and the people who live on it, Roosevelt is forced to listen rather than conquer. Through firelines, awkward dinners, and hard-won humility, he begins to understand that the land remembers care, not bravado.
The Land Remembers You is a story of grief, responsibility, and the Indigenous knowledge systems that shaped the West long before Roosevelt arrived.

FULL LENGTH PLAY: Set against the pressure cooker of the Dakota War of 1862, Godspeed Joe Brown follows Joseph R. Brown — a man who believes he can walk between Dakota and U.S. worlds without consequence. As hunger, broken treaties, and political manipulation tighten around the Dakota community, Joseph’s attempts at diplomacy become the very mechanism of betrayal. The table at the center of the play transforms from family hearth to treaty desk to trader’s counter to gallows, manipulated by a chorus that embodies the land and memory itself. This is not a courtroom drama but a reckoning — with ambition, survival, and the devastating cost of choices made in the space between worlds.

FULL LENGTH: The play unfolds over a single day in Minneapolis — morning to night — as the city experiences subtle but escalating signs of impending catastrophe: flickering lights, missing stars, strange hums, static, tremors, and atmospheric glitches.

Characters cross paths in skyways, apartments, grocery stores, hospitals, bars, and on the Stone Arch Bridge. They fall in love, confess long‑held truths, reconcile old wounds, and try to make sense of the strange feeling that something is “off.”

River narrates the city’s heartbeat, invoking the landmarks as living witnesses.

By nightfall, the stars vanish completely.

The final moments are a whiteout — a shockwave arriving from far away — and the city holds its breath.

The play ends not with destruction, but with connection: people reaching for each other in the dark.

ONE ACT: When the Mississippi River in Minneapolis suddenly drops to an unnatural low, the bodies of people who died unjustly over the last two centuries rise from the riverbed—waterlogged, irritated, and very much able to talk. Sheriff Waniya Redday and coroner Dr. Felix Havel are tasked with cataloging the dead, interviewing them, and notifying their descendants. The dead have opinions: about the city, about history, about potholes. Some want coffee. Some want justice. Some want better hats.

But as the river continues to return its dead, Waniya and Felix encounter bodies with no living descendants—people erased by violence, epidemics, and neglect. The comedy fractures, revealing a deeper truth: remembering the dead is also remembering the living. When the river finally reclaims the bodies, Waniya and Felix are left with the work the river demands—listening, witnessing, and carrying memory forward.

A dark comedy about land, lineage, bureaucracy, and the absurd labor of repair.

ONE ACT: Skyway is a one‑act allegorical drama set in a drowned future Minneapolis, now known as Lakeland, where the only surviving infrastructure is a network of skyways and the upper floors of skyscrapers. Society has stratified vertically: the wealthy “Yups” live near the top, merchants and enforcers occupy the middle, and the desperate cling to the waterline.

The population lives under the illusion of benevolent “Leaders” whose daily messages echo through the skyways like scripture — but the messages are old recordings, and the Leaders have been dead for years.

Kota, a young Indigenous-descended fertilizer runner, dreams of rising to the upper floors. His curiosity leads him into a forbidden maintenance shaft, where he accidentally discovers the truth: the Leaders are long dead, and the entire system is running on myth, fear, and inertia.

When Kota tries to warn the others, the community rejects him — not because they doubt him, but because the truth threatens the fragile order they depend on. His friend Jib, terrified of losing his own precarious stability, cannot protect him.

The play ends with Kota’s fall — literal and metaphorical — and the tower’s lights failing as the system collapses under the weight of its own lie.

It is a parable about hierarchy, climate collapse, and the danger of truth in a fearful society.

ONE ACT: In a near‑future Minneapolis reshaped by climate collapse and the fracturing of the United States, a Dakota family moves into an old house that has stood through every era of the city’s history. As refugee caravans move north and new borders redraw the continent, the family tries to build a quiet life inside a structure that feels increasingly alive.

Eight‑year‑old Micah is the first to sense it: a winter boy from another century appears in the parlor and warns him that “the door is open.” Soon, the rest of the family encounters memories made flesh — voyageurs walking down modern streets, a U.S. Marshal searching for runaways, a Choctaw seamstress looking for a district that no longer exists. The house isn’t haunted; it’s overwhelmed, replaying every life it ever sheltered.

When the house erupts under the weight of its own remembering, the family must decide whether to flee or to help it heal. Through story, ceremony, and shared memory, they learn that the only way to close the door is to remember together.

Full Length: In a satirical near‑future Minneapolis divided into two political territories, soft‑spoken MPR reporter Mara Lindstrom is mistaken for a FOX correspondent on the Stone Arch Bridge and accidentally “escorted” into Western Minneapolis — a Dakota‑controlled autonomous zone navigating sovereignty with dignity, humor, and bureaucratic precision.

What begins as a polite misunderstanding spirals into a full‑blown media farce. Mara is pressured into giving a “neutral” broadcast, but instead she accidentally activates a pirate frequency that transmits across both sides of the river — and Greenland. Suddenly, she becomes the most influential voice in the city, despite desperately wanting to return to her calm public‑radio life.

Meanwhile, FOX correspondent Chad Brinkman launches a melodramatic investigation to reclaim his airtime, MPR panics with tote‑bag‑fueled urgency, and the Dakota leadership tries to maintain sovereignty while managing the chaos of competing media ecosystems. As misunderstandings escalate, the city’s political absurdities are laid bare — but so are its possibilities for connection, truth‑telling, and shared laughter.

The Last Radio in Indian Country is a fast‑paced political comedy about mistaken identity, media distortion, Indigenous sovereignty, and the accidental power of sincerity in a world addicted to spectacle.

Full Length: In 1934 Minneapolis, Lula Hattak—a Choctaw seamstress, WWI code‑talker, and Bonus Army veteran—arrives in the garment district seeking steady work and a quiet life. But the city is on the brink of the historic Teamsters Strike, and police “sweeps” of immigrant neighborhoods echo the state violence Lula has already survived. Haunted by trench warfare and the government’s brutal destruction of the Bonus Army, Lula tries to remain invisible, but her instincts betray her: she sees patterns, tactics, and danger long before anyone else.

Drawn into the strike kitchen by workers Rivka and Aino, Lula becomes an unlikely strategist. Her wartime skills—reading codes, mapping routes, anticipating raids—transform into tools of resistance. As police escalate their crackdown, Lula’s brother Tom reappears, broken by the same history she carries. His arrival forces Lula to confront the trauma she has tried to outrun.

When a union organizer betrays the workers to save himself, Lula realizes the police are coming for her specifically. Refusing to hide—“We can’t live in Cornwallis’ Cave. Sometimes someone has to be Nathan Hale”—she steps into the open to protect the others. In the final sweep, Lula stands alone in the street, buying time for the workers to escape. She is beaten and killed by police, but her final act becomes the spark the community carries forward.

The Seamstress of the Strike Line is a tragic, metaphysical labor drama about survivance, solidarity, and the cost of refusing to disappear. Lula’s story becomes the thread that binds a community—and a city—into a legacy of resistance.

Full Length: Set on the Minneapolis riverfront in the 1850s — but deliberately written as an allegory for modern state violence — The Night of the Lantern Watch follows a multiracial working‑class community as federal marshals arrive to conduct “paper inspections” that quickly escalate into terror.

At the center are Red Bear, a Choctaw trader who reads danger like weather; Moses Turner, a free Black steamboat worker whose loyalty runs deeper than the river; Mrs. Hawthorne and Eliza, seamstresses who stitch resistance into every seam; and a constellation of dockhands, laborers, and families who must decide whether to obey, resist, or protect one another.

When the marshals kill Rebecca Grant — a young mixed‑heritage dockhand — for “reaching for her papers,” the community refuses to look away. Lanterns across the riverfront begin to flicker, glow, and pulse in warning, becoming a system of collective vigilance. As the marshals escalate their tactics, the lanterns grow brighter, revealing the truth the marshals try to hide.

The play culminates in a community that chooses solidarity over fear, light over silence, and truth over obedience. The lanterns become a living network of resistance — a reminder that communities have always watched, warned, and protected one another against unjust power.

The Night of the Lantern Watch is a mythic, urgent parable about surveillance, racialized fear, and the courage of ordinary people who refuse to let injustice hide in the dark.

FULL LENGTH: Encounter at Bdote is a mythic‑comic origin story set along the river that will one day become Minneapolis. The Dakota and Ojibwe arrive at the same place in the same season, each following the land’s rhythms. A French fur trader — well‑meaning but disastrously ignorant — misinterprets their diplomatic traditions and accidentally sparks a chain of misunderstandings.

The land itself narrates the story, struggling to hold the weight of competing truths as fear, miscommunication, and cultural distance grow. A drifting canoe, a failed attempt at peace, and a single misread gesture lead to a brief but consequential confrontation — a symbolic wound that foreshadows the conflicts to come.

The play ends in a living tableaux of the fur trade expanding across the region, French traders multiplying, and the skyline of the future city slowly emerging behind the people who never asked for it.

It is a story about how conflict begins:
not with hatred,
not with intention,
but with people who cannot quite hear each other.

ONE ACT: The People of the Council Fires is a mythic one‑act set at Bdote, the sacred confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, long before the city of Minneapolis exists. As winter closes in, a Dakota family prepares their lodge for the long cold season—storing food, tending the fire, and teaching their young son the responsibilities that keep a family alive.

But one night, the boy—more dreamer than doer—leaves the lodge door ajar. The cold slips in and ruins much of the family’s winter food supply. Faced with hunger, shame, and dwindling options, the family gathers around their fire to choose a path: seek help from relatives, attempt a dangerous midwinter hunt, ration what little remains, or follow the strange, vivid dream the boy had the night before—one that leads to the confluence itself.

Trusting the land more than the dream, they set out together. Along the riverbank they encounter signs that blur the line between the natural and the mythic: warm deer tracks in the snow, a hidden winter offering, and a presence in the wind that seems to guide them forward. At the heart of the confluence, the boy’s dream becomes real—a deer appears, leading them toward the food and hope they desperately need.

Their journey home becomes a race against a rising storm, but they return to their lodge alive, carrying the deer that will sustain them through winter. The boy, once careless, becomes the keeper of the door; the family survives; and the land remembers.

A story of survival, responsibility, and the thin places where the world opens, The People of the Council Fires serves as the cycle’s origin—where the land speaks first, and the future city is only a whisper in a child’s dream.

ONE ACT: When a Choctaw drag performer named Stardust accidentally signs Army enlistment papers during a USO‑themed drag show, she’s whisked off to Fort Sill against her will—and straight into the chaos of Reception Battalion. Between oversized boots, anthrax shots, cattle‑trailer transport, and a drill sergeant who can’t decide whether to fear her or salute her, Stardust somehow becomes the emotional center of a terrified platoon of new recruits. A sharp, heartfelt comedy about chosen family, queer resilience, and surviving the U.S. Army with nothing but grit, glitter, and impeccable timing, Private First Class Stardust celebrates the unexpected ways we lift each other up when the world tries to knock us down.

FULL LENGTH: The Ore That Remains is the Duluth Cycle’s political and environmental crescendo — a Brechtian, data‑driven drama about truth, extraction, treaty rights, and the futures Lake Superior refuses to let us ignore.

The play centers on Asha Redbird, an Ojibwe hydrologist whose scientific precision collides with a city desperate for economic revival. When a proposed copper‑nickel mine threatens the St. Louis River watershed, Asha, climate activist Kai, conflicted miner Tom Larson, and politically cornered Councilor Reyes enter a public hearing that quickly becomes a battleground of science, labor, treaty law, and generational responsibility.

As projections display real hydrology data, contamination maps, and treaty text, the hearing fractures into visions of possible futures — some poisoned, some thriving. Lake Superior itself intervenes, not as a spirit but as material reality, speaking only when human denial becomes catastrophic.

A catastrophic breach at the mine site forces the characters to confront the consequences of inaction. Workers, activists, elders, and politicians collide in a civic crucible where democracy becomes theatre and theatre becomes a demand for accountability.

The final movement is a call to action: the lake shows what remains when truth is ignored — and what becomes possible when communities choose protection over extraction.

The Ore That Remains is urgent, unflinching, and deeply human — a climate drama, a treaty drama, and a Duluth drama that refuses to let the audience leave unchanged.

ONE ACT: Sovereignty Shuffle is the Duluth Cycle’s sharp, joyful comic release — a farce about federal bureaucracy, treaty misinterpretation, and the quiet brilliance of Ojibwe leadership.

When three federal agents arrive at a tribal council office to “clarify jurisdictional ambiguities,” they bring with them upside‑down maps, contradictory paperwork, and an unshakable (and unfounded) confidence in their own authority. Opposite them sit Chairwoman Ada, Councilor Ray, and Councilor Mika — calm, composed, and already several steps ahead.

What follows is a choreographed comedy of errors: maps held sideways, treaty articles misread in spectacular fashion, and a Brechtian projection system that contradicts the agents in real time. As the agents spiral into bureaucratic chaos, the council quietly sorts the documents, corrects the treaty language, and gently exposes the absurdity of federal logic.

The climax arrives when the agents triumphantly sign a document they believe limits tribal sovereignty — only to discover they’ve actually affirmed and expanded it. The council’s victory is quiet, precise, and deeply satisfying.

Sovereignty Shuffle is a satire with a heartbeat — a celebration of Indigenous clarity, humor, and sovereignty in the face of systemic incompetence. The laughter is corrective, not cruel, and the truth beneath the comedy is unmistakable.

ONE ACT or SHORT FULL LENGTH Set on a logged‑over hillside above Lake Superior, Widow’s Peak follows Maren Lehto, a Finnish widow struggling to keep her collapsing homestead standing after the death of her husband, Elias. The land around her is stripped bare, the house groans under its own weight, and grief has settled into the beams like winter frost.

When Nodin and Wenonah, Ojibwe siblings from a neighboring family, arrive with food, cedar, and quiet generosity, Maren resists their help. But the hillside remembers more than she does. Shadows of displaced Ojibwe families move across the walls. The Finnish loggers who once cut the trees appear in rhythmic, percussive memory. And Elias himself surfaces as a fragment of regret — not a ghost, but an imprint of the labor that cost him his life.

As a storm bears down on the ridge, Maren must confront the truth she has avoided: she cannot hold up the house, the hillside, or her grief alone. With Nodin and Wenonah beside her, she braces the failing structure, and together they keep it standing. The storm passes. The house settles. And Maren finally allows her grief to soften into community.

Widow’s Peak is a lyrical, land‑centered drama about grief, labor, Indigenous and immigrant histories, and the healing that becomes possible when burdens are shared.

FULL LENGTH: When Elena Redbird, a young Ojibwe/Irish archivist, arrives at the historic Glensheen Mansion to process a set of newly uncovered Congdon‑era materials, she expects dust, ledgers, and long hours. Instead, she finds a house that remembers more than the archives ever recorded. Rooms shift. Doors lead to places that shouldn’t exist. The lake hums beneath the floorboards like a living presence. And figures from the shoreline’s past—immigrant laborers, Ojibwe stewards, and a woman made of memory—begin to appear.

As Elena uncovers journals, maps, and a sealed letter tied to a disputed parcel of shoreline, she is joined by her aunt Mara, a historian who knows more than she initially reveals, and Jonas, a maintenance worker the house seems to trust. Together, they navigate a landscape where memory is alive, the lake speaks in warnings, and the house rearranges itself to reveal the truth it has guarded for over a century.

What emerges is not a ghost story, but a story about stewardship, land, labor, and the histories that were never written down. The house is not haunted—it is listening. And it has chosen Elena to finish a story that began long before she was born.

The House on the Lake Road is a lyrical, atmospheric drama about land, inheritance, and the responsibility of remembering what history tried to forget.

ONE ACT: Between Two Worlds follows Lena Wolf, a Choctaw veteran newly returned from Iraq, as she struggles to navigate the fractured terrain between war and home. Arriving in McAlester, Oklahoma, she finds that nothing feels familiar: the bus station echoes like a FOB, the loft above Main Street feels like a barracks, and even casual conversations with old acquaintances collapse into memories of mortar fire and convoy routes.

The play moves fluidly between Oklahoma and Iraq, with abrupt transitions that mirror Lena’s internal dislocation. Soldiers’ banter bleeds into small‑town awkwardness; a job interview dissolves into a mortar attack; a bar conversation becomes a confrontation at a gate in the desert. Throughout, a single chair appears in every scene — as anchor, shield, burden, and relic — embodying Lena’s attempt to reconcile the two worlds she carries.

Lena’s father’s voice, heard only as memory, urges her toward roots, family, and continuity, while Lena resists, insisting that “roots rot.” Her Choctaw and Chickasaw heritage becomes both a tether and a wound, a reminder of a home she no longer believes in. As she spirals through encounters with civilians, soldiers, and ghosts of the past, the boundaries between war and home collapse entirely.

In the final moments, Lena shoulders the chair like a rucksack and walks into a rising desert soundscape — a gesture that reads as both return and surrender. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, but the metaphor is clear: Lena is carrying the unbearable weight of two worlds, and she can no longer tell which one she belongs to.

Between Two Worlds is a stark, lyrical one‑act about moral injury, Indigenous identity, and the devastating quiet that follows war. It stages the lived reality of a veteran whose sense of place has shattered — and whose path forward is as uncertain as the echoing hum of the convoy she walks toward.

ONE ACT: In a near‑future Choctaw community where money has collapsed and everything runs on a fragile barter system, three items have become the unlikely pillars of the local economy: one dented pot, one jar of questionable pickles, and one packet of drama‑infused frybread mix. These objects circulate so rapidly — traded, re‑traded, reclaimed, and disputed — that the entire town has become trapped in a chaotic loop of micro‑transactions, petty negotiations, and escalating absurdity.

The Pragmatist tries desperately to impose order.
The Trickster delights in exploiting every loophole.
The Elder is unimpressed with everyone.
The Archivist documents the chaos no one asked to be documented.

When a newcomer arrives and innocently asks how the system works, the truth becomes impossible to hide: the community isn’t bartering anymore — it’s spiraling. The pot has seniority rights, the pickles may or may not be cursed, and the frybread mix has become a symbol of cultural pride, economic desperation, and interpersonal drama.

As trades grow faster and more ridiculous, alliances form and collapse, and the Barter Board becomes a battleground of competing philosophies. What begins as a simple question — “Who has the pot today?” — becomes a full‑scale rebellion against scarcity, tradition, and the community’s own self‑inflicted nonsense.

In the end, the townspeople must decide whether to cling to a broken system or imagine a new one rooted in Choctaw values of balance, humor, and shared responsibility. The rebellion isn’t against each other — it’s against the absurdity they’ve created together.

The Great Choctaw Barter Rebellion is a fast‑paced comedic allegory about community, scarcity, Indigenous survivance, and the joyful chaos of trying to build a fair world with unfair tools.

ONE ACT: The Last Bugle at Dawn follows a women-led veteran support group whose fragile routine is disrupted when a new member challenges the silence they’ve built around a traumatic deployment. Maya, a Choctaw veteran and former bugler, has not played since the night everything went wrong. Tess, a blunt former medic, recognizes her from that night and refuses to let the past stay buried. As the group struggles to hold its equilibrium, Maya is pushed to confront the memory she’s carried alone. In a quiet, cathartic climax, she opens her battered bugle case and plays a single cracked note — not as ceremony, but as an act of survival. The play explores moral injury, communal healing, and the slow, imperfect work of reclaiming one’s voice.