"When it comes to depictions of America’s indigenous peoples, most audiences carry the heavy baggage of celluloid stereotypes and other cultural tropes, which the Native Voices at the Autry strives to dispel by presenting plays expressing aboriginal perspectives. Cherokee/ Muskogee Creek Carolyn Dunn’s The Frybread Queen may be about Navajos and Cherokees, but this tribal playwright shares much in common with dramatists such as Anton Chekhov and Eugene O’Neill, who plumb the depth of the human soul plus family dynamics and dysfunction in classics like The Cherry Orchard or The Iceman Cometh. Indeed, Frybread could almost be titled “The Indian Cometh.”

Frybread’s long night’s journey into day begins with 60-year-old Navajo Jessie Burns (Jane Lind, an Aleut who acted in the TV productions Return to Lonesome Dove and Crazy Horse) lightheartedly telling the audience what her recipe for making frybread is. This gives the audience the false impression that they’re in for some whimsical drollery. In any case, frybread and the various recipes for cooking it are a leitmotif for this four-woman show.

Jessie is proud of her award-winning prowess preparing this tribal staple diet, and indeed, she is considered by herself and others to be a frybread queen. However, as that other playwright, William Shakespeare, noted, “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” and there’s big trouble with a capital “T” in her majesty’s realm, as Jesse’s California-based daughters-in-law (Shyla Marlin, a Choctaw, as Carlisle and Cherokee Kimberly Norris Guerrero as Annalee) gather at Jessie’s ancestral home on the reservation, following a violent family tragedy."

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The Indian Cometh (Hollywood Progressive 3/18)

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Review: Engaging and surprising narrative in 'Frybread Queen' (3/16)