from the series Something I Said
By DWIGHT HOBBES
What’s An Indian Woman To Do When White Women Act More Indian Than Indian Women Do, part of a prose-poetry reading at Jungle Theater, was my first exposure to the bone dry wit of singularly gifted writer, Marcie Rendon. Catching her irreverent theatrical tour de force, Free FryBread at Bryant-Lake Bowl. a take-no-prisoners satire cum indictment of the prison system, I sat back in my seat, thinking, ‘Scared of her: this lady ain’t nothin’ nice.’ Her play, Sweet Revenge, receives a March 20th stage reading at the Jungle and I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Between books Murder on the Red River, Girl Gone Missing and upcoming releases, Anishinaabe Songs for the New Millennium and Where They Last Saw Her, she pretty much has two speeds, asleep and overdrive. Rendon took time for an email interview with the alley.
Dwight: Maggie’s the matriarch, nurturing backbone of the family. If that character isn’t modeled after you, I’ll eat my hat. Just how autobiographical is the play?
Marcie: The part that’s autobiographical is the urge to do in the ice cream truck drivers. When you are raising children in the ‘hood and that dang driver comes by every 15 minutes at the beginning of the month and then tapers off to one day a week at the end of the month, it does get on a mother’s nerves. That ding-ding-ding call to sugar and the beg for money from the children is tough to cope with.
Dwight: How do you like working with this director?
Marcie: Sequoia Hauck, White Earth citizen, gets the nuances of Native life and humor. They are not afraid of the humor, satire of this piece.
Dwight: What brought you back to theater after all this time since SongCatcher’s world premiere at History Theater in was it ’96?
Marcie: I’ve never really left theater. But working on scripts and the development of scripts is a whole other process than writing books. My performance script, Say Their Names, about the issue of #mmiw, [Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women] had a staged reading at the History Theater in 2022; and is in development with Out of Hand Theater, Atlanta, GA for Equitable Dinners production in October of 2024. One can write a script but it seems to take much more work and time to go from writing to production. Sweet Revenge has been ‘in process’ for a good twenty-years.
Dwight: Are there plans for a new Raving Natives project?
Marcie: If no one picks up Sweet Revenge there is always the possibility of self-production, but that would require raising a decent chunk of change. I am also trying to find production monies for my script, friends…, that asks: why did god create lice? It is a ten minute play that has been translated into Ojibwe and is about a twenty-minute piece in the language.
Dwight: Anything you want to add?
Marcie: Nada.
Stage reading of Sweet Revenge by Marcie Rendon is at the Jungle Theater, March 20, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
Dwight Hobbes is a long-time Twin Cities journalist and essayist.
