Westport Center for the Arts is honored to offer a staged reading of Dianne Yeahquo Reyner’s Weaving the Rain on Friday and Saturday, April 5 and 6. Reyner was awarded the Grant K. Goodman award for this work and the script and production were a Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival finalist.

She describes the play this way:
The Two Crow family must unravel the wall of silences and secrets that prevent them from taking their place as a family.  They are called to the hospital as the father is brought in by ambulance. These trips have become routine because of the father’s physical deterioration from cirrhosis.  However, this will be his last trip to the hospital. 

Trapped in the waiting room, this family is also trapped by history and the choices they have made. Each person feels isolated and angry in the life they feel forced to lead.  As the night progresses, they are guided by the spirit of the Old Man and the spirit of the oldest son, Roy. As the family members begin to purge the poisons from their lives, they realize that they are never alone, and never forgotten. The family comes to understand that their survival is founded in the strength of the land and their culture.     

Dianne Yeahquo Reyner is an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and is part of the Yeahquo, Queotone, and Spotted Horse families. She did her academic work at Haskell Indian Nations University, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and the University of Kansas, working extensively with Thunderbird Theatre touring productions Songs of Life and N. Scott Momaday’s Children of the Sunwhile performing Thunderbird’s campus productions.

Focusing on bringing Native lives to the stage, Reyner has worked with the University of California at Los Angeles American Indian Center, New York Public Theatre, Obie-award-winning artist Ping Chong, and Native Theatre artists across the country.  As a founding member of the American Indian Theatre Ensemble and while teaching at Haskell Indian Nations University, she revived the Thunderbird Theatre by producing and directing the work of Native American playwrights.

The staged reading will be held April 5 and 6 at 7:30 p.m. The cost is $15. There will be a talkback with the playwright and cast after each show.