News Release

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'Unto These Hills' rewritten, staged
by Cherokee from tribe's viewpoint

CHAPEL HILL - Big changes and big names are coming to outdoor historical drama in North Carolina this summer.

In Cherokee, "Unto These Hills" will be an all-new show, re-written as a celebration of Cherokee history and culture by a Native American author, professor and consultant for 30 years on representations of Native Americans in theater, film and TV shows.

Playwright Hanay Geiogamah also will direct the show, the first Native American to do so in 57 seasons of the story about the Cherokee people.

In Manteo, famed stage and screen actress and Golden Globe Award winner Lynn Redgrave will play Queen Elizabeth I on June 2-3 and 5-8 in the 69th season of "The Lost Colony," the nation's oldest historical outdoor drama.

Those mountain and coastal productions will highlight a record 12 historical productions this year in the Tar Heel state, also home to two annual Shakespeare festivals, in Asheville and Wilmington.

"Never before has one state produced so many outdoor historical dramas in one summer," said Scott Parker, director of the Institute of Outdoor Drama, a public service agency of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "For as long as I can remember, North Carolina has produced nearly twice the number of outdoor historical dramas as any other state, but this is going to be a bumper crop."

The plays dramatize historical events and are performed on or near where those events occurred, Parker said. The institute, a resource for dramas in 40 states nationwide, lists 109 theaters that will stage 40 history plays, 63 Shakespeare festivals (the festivals will produce 130 plays) and 10 religious dramas this year. All are described, with performance dates, locator maps, Web sites and contact information, on the institute's Web site, www.unc.edu/depts/outdoor.

Parker knows of only one other drama written, directed and produced by Native Americans, but it is not in production this year: "Trail of Tears" in Oklahoma, also about the Cherokee.

Geiogamah, ( his name is pronounced "han-A GIG-a-ma"), a Kiowa/Delaware on the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, co-founded the American Indian Theater Ensemble and was senior producer for the PBS series "Native Americans in the 21st Century."

A professor in UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television and director of its American Indian Studies Center, Geiogamah has written more than a dozen plays and co-edited "Stories of Our Way: An Anthology of American Indian Plays" and "American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader."

He produced the Turner Network Television Native American project's feature films, including "Geronimo" and "Crazy Horse," and was principal writer for the six-hour 1994 documentary series "The Native Americans," for Turner Broadcasting System.

Opening on June 8, the new "Unto These Hills" will be more musical theater than play, Geiogamah said. Selu, the Corn Mother, and Kanati, the Great Hunter - two major figures in Cherokee legend - will narrate. Spirits of the seven clans of the Cherokee - represented by actors in masks and costumes - ask them to help create a new kind of cultural presentation for the tribe, Geiogamah said. That creative process becomes the new show.

"But we have not in any way reduced the spectacle" of the show, Geiogamah said. "There is abundant Cherokee music, abundant Cherokee dance and abundant Cherokee ceremony."

I n fact, there will be double the previous number of dances, including a war dance and a hoedown. The eagle dance, a highlight of the original show, will return.

"We have devised a way of presenting the story that will be entertaining and informative and definitely move the show along," Geiogamah said. "The driving energy throughout is creativity and renewal."

The old script lacked two major aspects of Cherokee culture, said James Bradley, executive director of the Cherokee Historical Association, which puts on the play: "One, that it was matrilineal, with women playing as important a role as men. The other was the sense of humor that Native Americans have, and how we relate to each other through humor."

Selu and Kanati solve that problem with some of their banter back and forth, said Bradley, a Cherokee who has been with "Unto These Hills" since 1985.

Geiogamah expects to cast Native American actors, singers and dancers from all over the country, "with sizeable representation from the Cherokee community itself."

After the historical association's overhaul of "Unto These Hills" this year, Bradley said, "We're hoping to start a trend and be able to help other tribes that might be interested in this."

The original script by the late Kermit Hunter sympathized with the Cherokee in its portrayal of the tragic removal of most of the tribe from its native Great Smoky Mountains to Oklahoma in 1838. But it left an impression of the Cherokee as a woeful and broken people, Bradley said.

"The new show has the Cherokee rising up from the ruins of that past," he said. "It has more of a spiritual awareness of what being Cherokee means now, and how we implement that."

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Note: For a list of North Carolina outdoor dramas, visit http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/apr06/nclist042806.htm

Photos: To download drama photos, visit the Institute of Outdoor Drama Web site, www.unc.edu/depts/outdoor/, and click "Media Info."

Note: For more on "Unto These Hills" and "The Lost Colony," respectively, visit
http://www.cherokee-nc.com/ and www.thelostcolony.org.

Institute of Outdoor Drama contact: Scott Parker, (919) 962-1328 or parkers@email.unc.edu
"Unto These Hills" contact: James Bradley, (828) 497-2111 (ext. 201), jbrad@cherokeehistorical.org
"The Lost Colony" contacts: Elizabeth Evans, (757) 625-7068, evansPR@cox.net; John Buford (252) 473-2127, ext. 225, john@thelostcolony.org

News Services contact: L.J. Toler, (919) 962-8589