Restless Spirits

A collection of plays by American Indian playwright William S. Yellow Robe Jr.

A collection of plays by American Indian playwright William S. Yellow Robe Jr.

Finalist for the 2020 ForeWord INDIE Book of the Year in the Multicultural Adult Fiction Category

Restless Spirits is a collection of previously unpublished plays by contemporary Assiniboine playwright William S. Yellow Robe Jr. Including one full-length and seven one-act plays, this book reflects one of the author's most creative and productive periods in his career. Selected by Yellow Robe, in consultation with editor Jace Weaver, the plays reveal the range of Yellow Robe's writing from tragedies to farce. They are unified by their supernatural themes or significant elements, including Wood Bones, his most recent and highly successful full-length play. Weaver's introduction says that the works in this collection clearly demonstrate that Yellow Robe is not just a great American Indian playwright, but a great American playwright in the company of David Mamet, Lynn Nottage, and Wallace Shawn. Renowned American Indian playwright Hanay L. Geiogamah provides a foreword and calls this volume "a real gift to the American Indian theater-and to theater, more generally."

Jace Weaver is Franklin Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the author of many books, including (with Laura Adams Weaver) Red Clay, 1835: Cherokee Removal and the Meaning of Sovereignty and The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927.

"…a beautiful example of the richness and depth of the Native theater scene. In this, his third anthology of plays, Yellow Robe lives up to his well-earned place as a creative, prolific, and thought-provoking leader in the field of Native theater." — Native American and Indigenous Studies

"Yellow Robe's Restless Spirits is a smart, funny, beautifully sad collection, one that knocks you over with its irreverent-yet-reverant Indigenous worldview. The characters in this collection are simultaneously the kinds of Indians you'd meet on the street—and yet, deeply transcendent, shining, and otherworldly. There is no playwright like Yellow Robe—there couldn't be, not in this world." — Erika Wurth, author of You Who Enter Here