MELUS Interview: William Yellow Robe

Abstract

Thefollowing interview with playwright William Yellow Robe r. was adapted from remarks prepared for the New WORLD Theater Multicultural Theater Festival and Conference in 1989 and a later interview conducted by New WORLD Theater artistic director Roberta Uno. Yellow Robe has had his work produced both in the ethnic and regional theater. His play Sneaky was published in Slant 6: New Theater from the Minneapolis Playwrights Center (New Rivers Press, 1990). Other works of his have been read or staged by Theater Center, the American Conservatory Theater, the New WORLD Theater, the Montana Repertory and the Purple Mountain Theater. Yellow Robe has served as the literary manager for the Seattle Group Theater and was a Jerome Fellow at the Minneapolis Playwrights Center in 1988. He was the only playwriting winner of the 1989 Princess Grace Award and currently serves as the literary manager for the Seattle Group Theater. An enrolled member of the Assiniboine Tribe of theFort Peck Indian reservation in northeast Montana, he was raised in traditional Indian ways in Wolf Point, Montana, where he graduated from high school. Raised by his mother, Mina Rose, he is the second youngest of nine children. Yellow Robe attended Northern Montana College in Havre and the University of Montana in Missoula where he studied history, journalism, and the performing arts. Although many of Yellow Robe's plays and short stories examine traditional Indian themes, he has also written for children's theater and, most recently, a play on AIDS. In the past three years he has written five commissioned plays. His one-act and full-length plays include: The Independence of Eddie Rose, Wink-Dah, Sneaky, Harvest, My Walks with Grandma, The People, The Breaking of Another Circle, The Pendleton Blanket, A Great Thing, Taking Aunty to the Wake, WA-KIK-NA, and A Coyote's Tale.