Title: Public Reading: From Above
The Arts Research Center and Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies with Alternative Theater Ensemble are proud to welcome Playwright and Berkeley Alum Drew Woodson for a residency at UC Berkeley, April 14 - 18, 2025. At 6pm on Thursday, April 17th, Woodson will present a public reading of his new work From Above. The reading will be followed by a talk back.
During his residency, Woodson will spend the week developing From Above in workshops with local Indigenous actors. Script development workshops will be open to UC Berkeley student observation on Tuesday April 15th & Wednesday April 16th. In addition to giving a public reading, Drew will give an Artist Talk in conversation with TDPS Lecturer Patrick Russell at 2pm on April 17th. More information at arts.berkeley.edu.
About From Above: In the middle of an unnamed desert sits a lone church just at the edge of town. Sister Karina, Sister Maggie, and the Father all lead the small Native congregation that comes through its doors. In the five years since Sister Karina has found God and joined the church, calamity has struck the small town, leading to a string of deaths that some in the community believe to be God punishing them. Inside his darkened room, the Father believes he’s hearing the voice of God, and what God has told him to do reverberates through the Native community, causing an uproar inside and out – leading to a decision that the community must make that tears each other apart. (This reading of From Above is produced by Alter Theater’s R. Réal Vargas Alanis, Leah Sanginiti, and Zoë Aiko Sonnenberg, and directed by R. Réal Vargas Alanis.)
Drew Woodson is a Western Shoshone playwright based in New York City. He has had his work read in multiple theaters across New York, including Rattlestick Theater where he was asked to open the first annual Northeastern Native Arts Festival with his play Your Friend, Jay Silverheels. For this same work, Drew was named Yale’s Young Indigenous Playwright of 2021. More recently, Drew completed a two month artists residency on Governors Island for AICH, and completed a workshop of a new work From Above under the direction of Madeline Sayet. As a writer, Drew seeks to tell stories where Native people are allowed to take up space, be complicated, and ultimately be more than a storytelling device. Drew is an MFA Graduate from the Dramatic Writing department at NYU, and an alumni of UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies.
These programs ware featured in collaboration with Alternative Theater Ensemble’s Indigenous Performing Arts Residency, a collaborative initiative piloted by Berkeley’s Arts Research Center and the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. AlterTheater’s residency extends from 2024-2026, offering the opportunity to produce new work by an Indigenous performance-based artist each spring of the residency’s duration.