BURBANK, Calif. — The four women in the new play “Four Women in Red” meet in the waiting room of a sheriff’s office. They are four women in mourning. Four women frustrated. Four women determined. Playwright Laura Shamas has been writing Indigenous roles since 1980.
An enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation, she has long used her voice as a writer to give voice to her community and the issues that aren’t being heard, in this case, the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women whose cases go unsolved.
“It’s a horrendous crisis,” she said. “I don’t think one play can change the whole balance of something, but I think it can join the growing chorus of things and help to make some noise about it.”
According to the Urban Indian Health Institute, murder is the third leading cause of death for Native women. The CDC estimates that the murder rate among Native women and girls is 10 times higher than the national average. Shamas said the reasons why these cases go under reported and unsolved are many: distrust of law enforcement, jurisdictional questions, the prevalence of global human trafficking and a lack of communications among agencies, to name a few.
“There’s just a lot of different sociological and geographical reasons for it,” Shamas explained, “but we have to find a way to solve it. And it starts with everybody caring and trying something.”
Director Jeanette Harrison is a member of the Onondaga Nation and has been working with Shamas on this material since 2022. She said the lack of Native representation in media hurts the community and bad representation that perpetuates stereotypes does even more harm. To have a cast of Indigenous women playing authentic, complex Indigenous characters, she said, is a necessity.
“The truth is that invisibility is literally killing native people,” Harrison said. “Storytelling, increasing visibility for native people, native communities, native issues, and supporting native artists and positions of leadership on native stories is the way that we make change.”
"Four Women in Red" was first developed as part of the Autry’s Native Voices — the only Actors’ Equity theater in the country devoted to developing new works by Indigenous playwrights. This fully-staged world premiere production is actually making history as the first play in Native Voices’ 30 years history to be produced by another theater in Los Angeles.
Shamas and Harrison credit the Victory Theatre’s founder Maria Gobetti with not only being willing to produce the play, but hiring mainly native theater professionals as well as an on-call trauma therapist for the cast as they delve into difficult material.
“Maria is a fantastic director herself,” Harrison said, “so the fact that she was willing to hand over the reins to a native director is really lovely.”
“It’s amazing,” Shamas agreed, “and it’s such an example for what other theaters should do. A great example of leadership, artistic leadership.”
Shamas hopes audiences will be moved to take action and she has some suggestions.
“You can start calling your reps about it and say, ‘I care about this. What are you doing about it?’” she said.
She also urges people to donate to organizations devoted to the issue as the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center. But mostly she invites people to come together in the community at the theater and listen.
“And laugh and cry and feel and care,” she explained. “The theater is a place where stories can heal you.”
And in the native community, she says, storytelling is medicine.
