A new play exploring another facet of the Native American experience will have its very first reading in Spokane this week.
Randy Reinholz is an enrolled Choctaw Nation citizen and co-founded the Native Voices theater company. He’s also the playwright and sole performer of “Grandma Stories.”
Reinholz grew up hearing stories from his Choctaw grandmother as she tried to teach his family to handle hardship with humor. The play follows his own life as he recounts the tales she shared.
Through this play, Reinholz says he hopes to expand audiences’ perceptions of what the Indigenous experience can look like.
"What does it mean to be Native American in this country? There's so many different paths," he told SPR News. "My path was unique, and I hadn't seen it on stage before. And I thought this might be useful for people to see."
His family wasn’t one that tried to preserve their cultural heritage.
"We didn't go to ceremonies and we didn't speak language," he said. "That all was sort of driven out of my family through the boarding school system."
“Great grandpa, who I met, spoke Choctaw," Reinholz said. "He had the old ways, but he was dead set on making sure he didn't pass them on to his kids, because they would have taken his kids from him."
Part of his inspiration for the play, Reinholz said, was to create more stage roles for young Indigenous men because the characters available often rely on negative stereotypes.
"They're not really great people. A lot of them are abusers. A lot of them have been abused. A lot of them are self-medicating," he said. "And so I thought I wanted to present a set of monologues for college-age guys that can have a real positive outcome, even though it's mining the conflict.”
Though the show is autobiographical, Reinholz says he’ll eventually rework the show so any Native actor can play the part.
The first ever reading of “Grandma Stories” takes place at Gonzaga University’s Magnuson Theatre Wednesday evening, Oct. 29, at 7:30 p.m.
