Cathy Tagnak Rexford says her hard-hitting new play, "Cold Case," wasn’t an easy play to write. But she hopes that by telling one family’s story, she might get Alaskans to look at the high rate of missing and murdered Indigenous people with new eyes.
The Alaska Department of Public Safety's Missing Persons Clearinghousecurrently lists more than 1,300 people as missing. More than a quarter of them are Alaska Native.
Rexford hopes her play puts some faces to these numbers.
"The statistics are mind-boggling when you think about them, and then when it's your population that is a very high statistic, I don’t know if I have the words for it actually," she said. "It's very, just very close to home.”
Perseverance Theatre is producing a world premiere of the play, which had its first run in Juneau and opened in Anchorage last week, with performances scheduled through Oct. 20on the main stage of the University of Alaska Anchorage's Arts Building.
"'Cold Case' is the story of a granddaughter and a grandmother, who are trying to bring their relative home," Rexford said.
Her two main characters live in Gray Bay, a fictional Iñupiaq community that’s a lot like Kaktovik where her family is from. The relative is the grandmother’s daughter, Magnolia Ayapqutaq, who left home for Anchorage and has been missing for more than six months.
Tagnak said she began to write the script not long after an uncle disappeared and died. The birth of her play also coincided with the birth of her son. Since then, "Cold Case" has taken on a life of its own.
“It's really, in a very odd sense, not really felt like my story," Rexford said. "It's felt like it's come from the place where all stories come from. It feels very much like our story.”
Rexford said stories like Magnolia's are mostly told by people who look at the Native world through an outside lens, a process of marginalization that she calls "othering."
"I hope this play humanizes the enormous impact of loss of our sisters, our aunts, our mothers, our daughters," Rexford said.
The play centers around two women, Akka, or Grandma Mary, and Akka's granddaughter, Joanna.
Akka is played by Nutaaq Doreen Simmonds. Joanna is portrayed by two different performers, Xáalnook Erin Tripp and Julia Keeffe.
Both Rexford and Simmonds might sound familiar to those who follow TV crime shows. Rexford was a producer on the HBO series "True Detective: Night Country," which recently won actress Jodie Foster an Emmy. Simmonds played an Iñupiaq elder in the series. Both traveled to Iceland, the setting for the mythical town of Ennis, Alaska.
RELATED: HBO’s ‘True Detective’ collaborates with Iñupiaq for Alaska accuracy
"Cold Case" begins in the Ayapqutaq family's home in Gray Bay, where there's a box of Pilot Bread on top of the refrigerator and a parka that's being sewn for Magnolia on the kitchen table.
Joanna, who has long resented her Aunt Magnolia’s risky lifestyle, has just learned that she has been murdered — but has yet to tell her grandmother. She is desperate to get a flight to Anchorage to claim her body, so she can bring it home, but a blizzard has kept her trapped in Gray Bay.
“They are caught in a storm, and they are caught in a storm of bureaucracy,” Rexford said.
As Joanna frantically works the phone — trying to reach people in Anchorage, who can help her bring her aunt's body home — she struggles to penetrate a wall of indifference to her aunt's death, yet the gap between urban and rural, Native and non-Native, only grows wider. Eventually, Akka has overheard enough to know her daughter is dead, and soon a storm rages between grandmother and granddaughter.
The dialogue and its delivery is eerily authentic, maybe because almost everyone involved in this play — from the writer, to the actors, to the director — are Indigenous. When Simmonds' character learns Magnolia has been murdered, she angrily tells her granddaughter that she must bring Magnolia's body home — because she has been sewing a parka for her and wants to bury her in it.
Simmonds, whose Akka Mary flows back and forth between English and her Iñupiaq language, steals the show.
"She's incredible. You can't take your eyes off of her," said "Cold Case" director DeLanna Studi, niece of acclaimed Native American actor Wes Studi. "I had no idea that she's never done a play before."
But at age 77, Simmonds said acting seems to come naturally.
“I've always considered myself a late bloomer, so I am not surprised that I'm doing this now," Simmonds said.
She describes her character as a "grumpy, grumpy old lady."
Although Simmonds is not a grumpy person like Akka Mary, she said she understands how she feels.
"I do, because of the missing daughter," she said. "I miss my daughter."
Simmonds said she lost her own daughter to addiction and also had an aunt whose granddaughter went missing. After the snow melted, a couple walking on the beach came across her remains, so the range of emotions she brings to the stage — and stirs among Alaska Natives in the audience— is very real.
"It's at the heart of everyone," she said. "I believe everyone knows someone who has been missing and murdered. Not just women but men too."
While the term MMIP has become all too familiar in Alaska, "Cold Case" looks at another group, MMIRs -- Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives.
"Where we have missing and murdered indigenous people, it's up to the family to do all the groundwork," Studi said. "It's up to the family to lead the searches, because otherwise no one else is looking for this person."
Studi, who is a Cherokee Nation citizen, works at a national level to raise awareness about Indigenous peoples. She recently became artistic director of Native Voices at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.
"It takes a lot to get these stories out there," she said. "And I think for our non-Native audiences, it will raise their awareness of the issue and hopefully galvanize them to be better allies, right?"
Rexford believes her play has struck a chord of truth.
"That's hard to do, I think," she said. “I just hope that it is healing, and that it is reaching into the hearts of the people who are here to see it."
Rexford said the arts, especially theater, can be more powerful than any other media, because audiences experience a play together.
"Cold Case" won the 2022 National Theatre Conference Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award. The New York Times has also named "Cold Case" one of the top plays in the nation to see in the fall of 2024.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Nutaaq Doreen Simmonds' surname in some references.