Kira Apaachuaq Eckenweiler's first play opens in a bird blind — the low shelter where hunters wait for geese to come to them. That is where Spruce sits at the top of the show, cursing his luck at hunting and at life, according to a review of the premiere by the Twin Cities theater blog Cherry and Spoon. His luck changes when a boy named Tim wanders into the blind, running from an abusive home. What follows is a story about a village on Alaska's Norton Sound, a mother named Ellen who leaves for Anchorage to look for work, a father whose drinking has hollowed out the family, and the makeshift kinship that forms when two people who have lost things sit still together and wait.
On October 22 and 23, 2026, Anchorage audiences get to hear that story in the room where it began. New Native Theatre, the St. Paul company that premiered The Bird Blind in April, brings a staged reading of the play to the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts' Elvera Voth Hall for four free performances: 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 22, and 1 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. on Friday, October 23. Admission is free. The company lists a run time of about 120 minutes including intermission and warns that the play contains mature themes and strong language and is not recommended for children; because the material deals with addiction and recovery, the box office invites anyone with sensitivities to contact them before attending.
The playwright is from Unalakleet, the Norton Sound village where the play is set. Eckenweiler was raised there, the daughter of Gary and Willa Eckenweiler; her maternal grandparents were the late Clarence Sr. and Guerie Towarak of Unalakleet, and her paternal grandparents were the late John and Neta Eckenweiler of Montana, according to a profile published by Bering Straits Native Corporation, of which she is a shareholder. She graduated from Unalakleet Schools, earned a bachelor of music at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and completed a master of fine arts in musical theater at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee in 2020. She has sung with Anchorage Opera and Intermountain Opera Company, and she played Nayak in Aklaq and Nayak, an Inupiaq adaptation of Hansel and Gretel staged in Unalakleet and Nome. When she is home in Alaska, she hunts, fishes and gathers.
Her public life has been unusually varied for a playwright making a debut. In October 2020 she was elected mayor of Unalakleet, a volunteer post she held until October 2023, and she used it to push for replacing the village's aging water system, helping assemble a $30 million project, according to her biography on the Playwrights Realm website. In February 2021 she joined the Norton Sound Health Corporation's INUA program, which promotes culturally competent suicide prevention and wellness, and by May 2022 she was administrative director of behavioral health services, overseeing outpatient care, a prevention team and a day shelter. She has spoken about having lost friends to suicide. The subjects of her play — addiction, grief, the question of how a family heals — are not abstractions for her.
In an interview with MPR News around the premiere, Eckenweiler described the play's animating question as one of legacy: how people might always try to be there for future generations, "so that they could be healthier than us," so "that they could live a life that's beautiful." Rhiana Yazzie, who directs, told MPR that the play explores what healthy relationships look like, and that heavy subjects like addiction and domestic violence are woven into a story that feels "very real and at the same time very heightened, theatrical." The cast in St. Paul included 13-year-old River Lane as Tim and Frank Katasse as Spruce.
Yazzie is a Navajo Nation citizen who founded New Native Theatre in 2009 in the Twin Cities, after coming to Minneapolis on a Playwrights' Center Jerome Fellowship and calling the city a "Mecca for Native arts, writing, culture." The company's stated purpose is to produce, commission and devise authentic Native American stories for the stage, written first for Native audiences — the theory being that when a story is made for a specific community, it becomes powerful for everyone else too, no translation required. Its open-door policy has put community members on stage at ages ranging from three to 76, with most in their late twenties to mid fifties, many of them people who had never knocked on a theater's door before. Yazzie has described the company's focus as nurturing and developing Native artists, and she directs this production herself.
The Anchorage dates are a homecoming of sorts, and not only because the play is set a few hundred miles down the coast. The Alaska Center for the Performing Arts sits on West Sixth Avenue downtown, and Elvera Voth Hall is named for a longtime Alaska music educator and conductor who taught at UAA and Anchorage Community College, led the Anchorage Community Chorus and founded the Alaska Chamber Singers in 1986. It is a small, plain room by design — a fitting place for a reading, where the audience supplies the tundra and the actors hold scripts.
A staged reading is a particular kind of theatergoing. There are no sets to hide behind, no elaborate cues; the language has to carry the weight. For a play built around people sitting quietly in a shelter, waiting for something to fly overhead, that stripped-down form may suit it. The Anchorage performances are billed as a special opportunity to hear the work in the format in which new plays are usually developed, and to hear a story rooted in the people and landscape that made it — in front of an audience that includes the communities it came from.
The play runs two days only, with four chances to see it, and it costs nothing to attend. Given the subject matter, the company's guidance is worth repeating: this is not a children's show, and anyone who wants to know more about the content before walking in can write to the box office at [email protected].