PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / Playwriting

Long a leading figure in American literature, N. Scott Momaday is perhaps best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn and his celebration of his Kiowa ancestry, The Way to Rainy Mountain. Momaday has also made his mark in theater through two plays and a screenplay. Published here for the first time, they display his signature talent for interweaving oral and literary traditions.

In American Gypsy, a collection of six plays, Diane Glancy uses a mélange of voices to invoke the myths and realities of modern Native American life. Glancy intermixes poetry and prose to address themes of gender, generational relationships, acculturation, myth, and tensions between Christianity and traditional Native American belief systems.

While award-winning author Rudolfo Anaya is known primarily as a novelist, his genius is also evident in dramatic works performed regularly in his native New Mexico and throughout the world. Billy the Kid and Other Plays collects seven of these works and offers them together for the first time.

Nahuatl drama, one of the most surprising results of the Catholic presence in colonial Mexico, merges medieval European religious theater with the language and performance traditions of the Aztec (Nahua) people of central Mexico. Aztecs on Stage presents accessible English translations of six of these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Nahuatl plays. Louise M. Burkhart’s engaging introduction places the plays in historical context, while stage directions and annotations in the works provide insight into the Nahuas’ production practices. The translations facilitate classroom readings and performances while retaining significant artistic features of the Nahuatl originals.