The Keening
In 2023, Howe was an invited artist to Ground Floor’s two-week Summer Residency program at U.C. Berkeley, working with dramaturge and playwright Emma Denson, and Irish playwright and director Colm Summer. Their play, The Keening was work-shopped and had a staged reading at Ground Floor in Berkeley, CA. Howe and Colm Summers’ play The Keening was performed in November 2022 at the Irish Cultural Centre in NYC.
The play is set in Indian Territory, and Famine Ireland, and present-day New York. The three act play begins with Aoife, mourning the death of another child from starvation in Ireland. Kinta, a Choctaw in Indian Territory hears Aoife’s keening and responds with a Choctaw mourning song. The story time travels to modern NYC and centers around the eviction of a Choctaw mother and grandmother from their apartment in NYC. A U.S Marshall named Pat, an Irishman, has been sent to evict them. The first reading was held at the new Irish Arts Center in NYC, August 2021. In 2023 The Keening had a staged reading at the Berkeley Rep Theater in San Francisco.
Star Panther and the Gold Digger, The Musical.
Howe began work on a new musical with writer Nathan Dixon in 2021. Star Panther and the Gold Digger, The Musical. The play is about deSoto’s first encounter with Natives in 1540 and includes a pink flying deSoto car that belongs to the Lady of Cofitachequi. A Muskogean teenager, she and her friends prove to be deSoto’s undoing as they dance and sing their way across the heavens – destroying deSoto and the gated community he tried to create in what is now Florida.
Indian Radio Days
INDIAN RADIO DAYS
Written in 1985 by LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) & Roxy Gordon (Choctaw) with contributions by the Wagon Burner Theatre Troop. Original music by Jarryd Lowder, Jon Kerstetter & Erich Gaukel. Since 1993, the play has been staged across the Midwest, New York City, and in Maine with the actors from Wagonburner Theater Troop, who contributed to the script. The play was written as an “evolving bingo” experience and takes place at a tribal bingo hall. Authors Howe and Gordon encouraged the Native actors in the play to ad lib the script from their tribal perspective.
Big Pow Wow
Written in 1987 by LeAnne Howe and Roxy Gordon, the three-act play was first produced in Fort Worth Texas by Sojourner Truth Theater. It was the first collaboration between American Indians and African Americans in 1987.