At its best, theater goes beyond entertainment to inform, inspire and even incite. This is the world Laura Shamas works in. Her latest, Four Women in Red, is set to premiere February 14 at the Victory Theatre Center in Burbank. In it, four Native American women search for their friends and relatives who have disappeared.

Jeanette Harrison (Onondaga) directs. The play stars Carolyn Dunn (Tunica-Choctaw/Biloxi, Mvskoke), Harriette Feliz (Chumash), Zoey Reyes (Dinéh and Chicana) and Jehnean Washington (Yuchi, Seminole and Shoshone). Shamas herself is an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation.

We spoke to Laura Shamas about the play and her body of work, including extensive exploration of mythology and its relevance today in entertainment.

Let’s start out with the subject of Four Women in Red: missing murdered indigenous women. What drew you to this subject?

In 2020, I was part of Native Voices, a group of indigenous writers, and it really moved me. So, when they announced their short play competition and festival at the end of the year, I entered.

The issue in 2020 I most wanted to write about was missing and murdered indigenous women. I got lucky and they picked my play. It was done virtually, and someone at the Transformation Theatre in Maryland saw it and told me that if I could make it a full-length play, they would program it virtually.

I expanded the 10-minute play into a full-length and they programmed it. Jeanette Harrison, who is directing the production at the Victory, directed it and Jehnean Washington, who is in the new production, was also in that virtual production, along with three other great actors. And Carolyn Dunn, also in the new production, was the dramaturg.

 I’m very interested in writing about strong women, how resilient women are, and why female leadership is so important.

It was seen by Maria Gobetti [of Victory Theatre] in November 2021, through the broadcast by Transformation Theater. Then Native Voices selected in 2022 and got to work on it with Jeanette and Jehnean. So I really owe the whole show to Native Voices.

We’re doing it to raise awareness of this overwhelming subject. The statistics are just mind-boggling. The inner workings are very complex, as to as to why it never seems to get better. It’s related to law enforcement, data collection, what is tribal land, what is reservation-adjacent, jurisdiction…It’s very complex. But in the meantime, women and girls, indigenous people are disappearing and not being found. And I’m very interested in writing about strong women, how resilient women are and why female leadership is so important.

You’re a Chickasaw Nation citizen whose background includes English, French, Irish, Lebanese, and Scottish heritage. How does your heritage inform your work?

I’m also part Chocktaw undocumented from dad’s side. I’m a tribal member matrilineally. Being from Oklahoma, it’s not uncommon to have a lot of lineages.

How does it inform me? Well, I was raised in Oklahoma, so I have a very strong understanding of what Oklahoma is, how it came to be, issues related to the Chickasaw tribe. I was raised by parents who prized aspects of their heritage. I don’t speak any Arabic but my last name is translatable in two languages to mean sunlight. The sun god Shamash is the symbol of justice from Babylonian Sumerian mythology.

When I went to UCLA as an undergrad, people would ask, How did you get your last name? I don’t present as having Middle Eastern background. They would ask, Did you marry into it? No, this is what third generation looks like.

I had a broad liberal education and my parents revered our Native American heritage, so I grew up really treasuring it. My mom’s a director and I think she directed the first production of the show 49 by Hanay Geiogamah when it was produced in Oklahoma. That’s when I was first exposed to original indigenous theater, at the age of 14, because my mom was directing it.

I worked at an indigenous theater in Toronto, Native Earth Performing Arts. I had a workshop of my play Chasing Honey many years ago and I’ve also been a facilitator there for at a workshop for First Nations [Indigenous peoples of Canada who are not Métis or Inuit] women writers. I’ve been lucky to work on both sides of the border, so to speak, although many tribes don’t believe in that border.

The Victory nominated me. Winning it made me cry. I am seriously shocked, grateful and humbled—and still not over it. It meant the world to me. It meant to me, keep going, keep at it, don’t give up. Many writers often feel like giving up. I feel that way frequently. It really was a show of confidence in the value of the topic and what we’re trying to do with it.

It also ties in with the fact that there’s a vibrant theater scene here. Los Angeles doesn’t get enough credit for the vibrancy of the original work that’s created here. I’m glad this award exists to help focus on new play work in Los Angeles. We’ve got a lot of great writers here.

Jeanette Harrison is directing the play. How was she selected?

I’ve known Jeanette for at least 15 years. She ran a theater up in the Bay area, Alter Theater, and I got to be in a wonderful, all-women’s writers lab, and they produced one of my plays. She’s a great director. She was assistant director on the Broadway run of Larissa Fasthorse’s Thanksgiving Play. [Note: a new Fasthorse show, Fake It Until You Make It, opens at the Mark Taper Forum later this month.] She’s a very talented director, extremely creative. She has also acted.

This is a very difficult topic. and she understands, when actors are working with traumatic wounds. Also, we’re at a really precarious point. [Interior Secretary] Deb Haaland, who was our first indigenous cabinet member, is now going to be out. Jeanette has a strong understanding of the Native American community and First Nations around the country. She brings so much to it every day, including a lot of creative staging.

I have had enough of the canon. I’m ready for new plays.

You also write fiction and nonfiction, including a book on Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters from Macbeth and an upcoming novel. How does playwriting fit into your writing life? And why did you choose to address the subject of missing murdered indigenous women in a play rather than a book?

First of all, I’m a budding novelist, even though I am a trained fiction writer from my first graduate degree in creative writing from the University of Colorado. There’s an idea I had for 20 years. I told a friend about it, and every year she would ask me about it. Finally, last year I realized, Am I going to die and not have tried it? It’s a long haul and I need to get back to it.

Weird Sisters was my doctoral dissertation. I tell people it’s the cure for insomnia. I wrote it 21 years ago, but there are still some things in it that I’m glad I got to say. I actually did write a play, The Weird Sisters, about that same topic, one of the few I’ve written about in both fiction and nonfiction. Any time I can write strong roles for women onstage, I will do it.

The book taps into the genesis of the Scottish play and why the women appear as hags when, in the time of Shakespeare, that isn’t how they were described. I was trying to investigate why Shakespeare wed together two pantheons of mythology. He put Hecate, a Greek goddess, in charge of Weirds, who are Scottish! I still get interviewed about that book because there’s something about the archetypal imprint of the three weird sisters and how they affected the way we consider witches, even today.

I have had enough of the canon. I’m ready for new plays. That’s mostly what I see as a theatergoer, that’s what attracts me. We have to have plays that reflect our times. We can put all of Shakespeare’s plays in outer space and do things that make it seem refreshed, but in the end we really need new work, to synthesize what the human experience is right now. That to me is the function of live drama, reflecting back what it means to be human, right now, in a temporary collective that’s been created by an audience.

Playwriting is not for the faint of heart. You’re trying to make people feel things. That’s one reason I think live theater is super important right now. The arts can uniquely address and heal things in our society.

I don’t think I’ve ever met someone with a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies. I saw a description of you as a cultural mythologist. What does that mean, and what role does mythology play in your writing?

The novel I’m writing is all mythology. One of the plays I worked on with Jeanette was a retelling of the battle aspect of the story of Odysseus and Circe, and the PTSD factor. So I’ve definitely written that way.

I’m not even sure, to be honest, that where I got my degree “cultural mythologist” was a term people threw around. I did a lot of consulting with different companies about this. It’s very interesting to me, very intellectually stimulating, to try and see how mythology is in your everyday life, in ways you don’t even know. Certain everyday objects might have a mythological or ritualistic usage that you don’t even think about.

Even having a hearth in a kitchen has mythological aspects to it, connected to Hestia and Vesta in Greco-Roman myth and the way the kitchen can become the center of the house, or represent the fire of the family.

I have an essay book called Pop Mythology. Some of those essays were published in the LA Times. For a while, I ran an archetypal myth column on Huffington Post, where I would look at movies and give you the archetypal connection. Myth helps us understand the essence of what it is to be human. It is hermeneutical: contemplative and interpretive. As a cultural mythologist, or someone who looks at myth in everyday life, I’m interpreting.

We’re down here right now on the earthly plane with the rest of the humans. Up there is the celestial plane, and below us we have the underworld plane. I’m stuck down here, but I can have characters that can go between those planes, like psychopomps who can go to the underworld.

 Women over 40 and 50 don’t have many opportunities in the American theater. And by the way, theater producers, that’s who buys your tickets.

Sadly, the number of plays produced by women playwrights remains stubbornly low, both here in Los Angeles and around the country. You have spoken out about this. What do you see as the causes and possible solutions?

I was a cofounder with the wonderful Jennie Webb of the Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative, so I was one of the people who used to do the statistics. It was pretty depressing.

What are my solutions? See plays by women. Make people more aware, like Honor Roll is doing right now. Women over 40 and 50 don’t have many opportunities in the American theater. And by the way, theater producers, that’s who buys your tickets. Why aren’t they being reflected as authors? I think there’s still a strong disconnect between who’s buying the tickets, why they’re buying the tickets, and what’s being put on. I don’t have a solution except we all have to keep trying.

 *The opening of “Four Women in Red” is scheduled to open on February 14, International Day of Action for missing and murdered indigenous women (#MMIW). The play will run through March 23 at The Victory Theatre Center, 3326 W. Victory Blvd. in Burbank, with low-priced previews February 8-9. Tickets are $20-41 and can be purchased here.