LeAnne Howe: Choctalking on Other Realities
Friday and Saturday, January 23 and 24 at 7:30, 2009
Krannert Center, Studio Theatre
In its premiere at Krannert Center, Choctalking, a one-woman theatrical production, evokes the richness and fluidity of Howe's prose and her particular sense of place, which, according to literary critic Craig S. Womack, himself Oklahoma Creek-Cherokee, resides in "intersecting and competing jurisdictions, the tensions going in and out of borders, in short, disputes over who constitutes the indigenes of a given geography."
Indeed, geography is at the heart of both Howe's exploration of landscapes and the journey that she and her characters traverse in Choctalking. Howe roams from the 1970s to the early 1990s, from Oklahoma City to Jerusalem and Jordan and back again, breaking through spatial and temporal constraints to connect multiple cultures and countries. The dense textures of history, fiction, and analogous cultural references will conjure a modern odyssey in which new implications of the American Indian experience will be uncovered outside the US borders.
Below, please see a full rehearsal of the play.