NDNs in Unexpected Places

NDNs IN UNEXPECTED PLACES:
Pawnshops, Palm Springs, and the Rift in the Time-Space Continuum in "Perhaps The World Ends Here"

Test your might at NDN trivia! Join us for a kiki about comedy and contemporary Indigenous performance in TISCH DRAMA STAGE’s Perhaps The World Ends Here, running February 29th through March 9th. Hosted on Zoom by the glorious writer and director Daniel Leeman Smith and joined by the intelligent, excitable, and Indigenous Carolyn Dunn and Andrina K. Smith.

About the Play

Perhaps the World Ends Here is a sci-fi epic that blends video game culture and Choctaw cosmology in the style of Theatre of the Ridiculous. Frankie Brown is a young Choctaw woman with big dreams and an even bigger destiny. Hopelessly devoted to becoming a professional video gamer and e-sports star despite some serious ineptitude, she pawns her personal belongings to pay rent and further her dreams. After unwittingly losing the key to the universe, she must undertake a journey of epic proportions accompanied by her queer best friend, her granddad, and a fearsome hopaiyai to prevent a great cataclysm.

Panelists

Daniel Leeman Smith (Writer/Director) is a proud two-spirit citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma currently based in New York City. He is a director, playwright, and theatre educator whose work is often positioned at the intersection of community, art, education, and activism with a focus on Native joy. 

Carolyn M. Dunn, MFA, PhD. (Company Co-Elder) is an Indigenous artist of Cherokee, Muskogee Creek, and Seminole descent on her father’s side, and is French Creole (French-Canadian, African, Tunica/Choctaw/Biloxi/Ishak) on her mother’s. Her life as a storyteller encompasses both poetry and playwriting with works about family, grief, resilience, and the landscape in all genres and in between. Her plays The Frybread Queen, Ghost Dance, and Soledad have been developed and staged at Native Voices at the Autry, and her current work in progress is the pow wow comedy entitled Chasing Tailfeathers, commissioned by Oklahoma Indigenous Theatre Company.Dr. Dunn is a member of the Dramatists Guild and Actor’s Equity. She lives part-time in Los Angeles and part-time in Oklahoma with her family. 

Andrina Wekontash Smith (Company Co-Elder) is Shinnecock storyteller, writer, performer, and educator whose work explores the complexity of racial and indigenous identity. Her show 'East Coast Native'  was purchased by ABC Signature, and is being produced under Kerry Washington's Simpson Street banner. She was the writer on TIME Studios 'MLK: Now is the Time' VR experience that examined persistent racial disparities in policing, housing, and voting in society during the civil rights era and today. It won Audience Favorite at South by Southwest 2023 and was nominated for a primetime Emmy.