DIRECTOR'S NOTES:
Marie Clements (Metis) is one of the most inspired and adventurous voices currently working in Native theater. Her play, The Unnatural Accidental Women inhabits the borderlands between film and theater, and has been staged numerous times in Canada with carefully conceived and designed slide projections. Our production of the play at Washburn University, its U.S. premiere by the way, forgoes the slide projections. Instead, the production team and I have tried to find correlatives for the poetic imagery handled by slides, shifting more expressive responsibility to the bodies and voices of the actors. This process of translation invariably has its benefits and drawbacks, but we hope you will take this play to heart, as we have.As Marie Clements notes, these characters are based on real life women, whose “deaths are a drowning of hopes, despairs, wishes.” Throughout the course of the play, Rebecca’s determination to find her mother draws the spirits to become her helpers, exercising the agency they were denied in life. Her victory is their victory, and vice-versa. Clements’ moving play underscores the Native belief that words are powerful and must be used responsibly. Be careful what you promise, be careful what you ask for. Spirits are listening.