2.3: Case Study- Mary Kathryn Nagle and Sovereignty

Writing Native Histories for the Stage

Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty (2017) sits at the crossroads of law, history, and performance. She is not only a playwright but also a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a practicing attorney specializing in tribal sovereignty and Native women’s rights. These dual careers inform Nagle’s writing. In her plays, court cases and historical memory are juxtaposed, dramatizing how law is not abstract but affects real people’s lives. Sovereignty, commissioned by Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., as part of its Power Plays series, explores the legacies of the 1830 Indian Removal Act and the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, the agreement that led to the Trail of Tears. The play weaves together these nineteenth century events with a contemporary legal battle over tribal jurisdiction and violence against Native women. Sovereignty moves fluidly between centuries, linking historical figures like Major Ridge and John Ridge to their descendants in the present day. Nagle’s dramaturgy emphasizes continuity: the struggle for sovereignty did not end in the nineteenth century but continues in today’s courtrooms, households, and tribal councils. By collapsing past and present, Sovereignty refuses the idea that Native history is over. Instead, it highlights how colonial violence persists through legal structures, and how theatre can act as a site of resistance. As a case study, Sovereignty exemplifies how contemporary Indigenous playwrights reclaim theatre to tell stories that dominant historical narratives have silenced. Similarly, Canadian Cree painter Kent Monkman’s 2025 exhibit History is Painted by the Victors at the Denver Art Museum appropriates the style and scale of Hudson River Valley paintings and historical paintings such as Emmaneul Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware to reassert Indigenous peoples place in the North American landscape and story. Nagle’s Sovereignty also asks students to consider how performance interacts with law, politics, and lived experience. Her work demonstrates that a play is not simply entertainment but a political act, one that can both preserve memory and advocate for change.

“Fighting for the Same Thing My Grandfathers Were”: A conversation with Mary Kathryn Nagle

Mary Kathryn Nagle: My name is Mary Kathryn Nagle. I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. I’m an attorney and a playwright, and I use she/her pronouns. I wrote my very first play as an undergraduate student at Georgetown University as a part of the Donn B. Murphy One-Act Playwriting Contest. I acted in high school plays. I acted in some college plays. I had never written a play before. When I won the contest and saw it produced—and it was a student theatre production, so imagine, people were acting on black boxes. But watching the actors bring it to life was incredible. In that moment, I knew that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I didn’t know how and I thought probably it wasn’t possible for playwriting to be my profession. I’ve had a lot of conversations with other playwrights recently, and the truth is it is challenging to, in this economy and with the way theatres are structured today, to be a playwright and only a playwright and financially support yourself. Most working playwrights are also professors or teachers or baristas or, maybe they do some childcare on the side. I’m a lawyer. You could write in a TV show in a writer’s room in L.A. But unfortunately, the reality is that unless you’re Lauren Gunderson and your plays are being produced en masse, all over the country, it’s not economically sustainable. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be a playwright, and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t advocate to change the system so that it’s more viable for artists, actors, designers, playwrights, directors, everyone.

I knew I loved playwriting, but I also didn’t think that would be my profession for life. I also really wanted to be a lawyer. So, I went to law school. While I was in law school, I wrote and produced three plays, one each year, and I got my fellow students and faculty to act in the plays with me. It was a real community event. It brought the community together. People who had never seen a play before were laughing and enjoying theatre. These were law school student productions, so the costumes were things people found at Goodwill, and the set pieces were made of cardboard and painted. There was no funding. And it was some of the best theatre I’ve made in my life. I was at Tulane Law School, and it was after Katrina. All three plays were about Katrina and the impacts of climate change on New Orleans. I then left and thought, that’s probably the end of my playwriting career.

I began clerking for a federal district court in Omaha, Nebraska. While I was there, I found a case from 1879 where a federal judge declared Indians to be persons under the law. I was so taken with this case I convinced the federal judge I clerked for to let me write and produce a play about the trial that we performed in the federal courthouse on the trial’s 130th anniversary. In 2011, we were invited to bring the play to the Smithsonian Museum of American Indian in D.C. Someone there came up to me afterwards and said, “You live in New York.” I was living in New York at this point, working at a law firm. And they said, “You live in New York. You’re Native. You should apply to the Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theatre because they have a grant from the Ford Foundation to do Native theatre.” I reached out to Liz Frankel, who was then at the Public. She told me a little bit more about the Emerging Writers Group. I applied and I got in.

That opened a lot of doors and I’m so blessed because that’s how I got my agent. Then it took a few years after that. It was hard because I finished with the group and I had no productions, no commissions, nothing. I thought, I guess that was my playwriting career. Then a couple years went by, and I got a commission from Arena Stage. Molly Smith took a gamble on a playwright that no one was producing, and no one commissioned. That’s when I wrote Sovereignty. That jump-started the career that I have now. Had it not been for Molly Smith commissioning me—it takes an artistic director who’s willing take a risk on a playwright who hasn’t been produced or commissioned before. A lot of artistic directors don’t want to take that risk. They want to commission a writer who’s already established. They want to commission Dominique Morreseau, right? You name the playwright that’s known and has a high success rate, not the nobody, no one’s ever heard of. Molly Smith really changed the trajectory of my career.

 

Gibson Alessandro Cima: Did you ask her what made the decision for her?

 

Nagle: The play I wrote for the Emerging Writers Group was Manahatta, which I wrote in 2012 when I was at the Public Theatre, which is ironic because it didn’t get its first production until 2018 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and it didn’t get produced at the Public until 2023. 11 years after I wrote it. It’s an interesting play in terms of how it impacted my career, because it took me a while, six years to get it produced after I first wrote it. But it opened a lot of doors. Molly [Smith] read it and said “this is a really talented writer. I want to commission her.” She didn’t say, “I want to produce the play,” which was heartbreaking to me for a while. People kept saying, “I love Manahatta, we’d like to commission you.” And I kept saying, “I’ll write another play. But what about my beautiful baby right here that I love?” Molly [Smith] said she loved that, but she wanted something more D.C.-focused. It was part of the Power Plays cycle at Arena. I had to pick a certain decade, and it had to be about power. Sovereignty has the United States President from the 1830s Andrew Jackson. It focuses on Jackson’s legacy and regime from the 1830s. It was slated into the 1830s slot in the Power Plays series at Arena Stage.

 

Cima: What was the kernel of the idea that became the play Sovereignty?

 

Nagle: This was a conversation I had with Molly [Smith]. She said, “What have you always wanted to write about?” When I interviewed for the Public Theatre Emerging Writers Group, I told them I wanted to write a play about my grandfathers, Major Ridge and John Ridge and how they fought to save Cherokee Nation, but were assassinated by their own fellow Cherokee Nation citizens, because they signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. Molly [Smith] asked, “Why didn’t you write that play?” I started living in Manhattan and felt it was an atrocity that no one living there knew who the Lenape were. I lived in New York right when the Occupy Wall Street movement was happening, but no one knew why the wall was originally built. There were no land acknowledgement statements back then. There was no cultural expectation in the United States that you would identify or recognize who the historic indigenous land caretakers were or what tribal nation used to be there or still exists today. I wrote Manahatta because I thought this is the play that New York needs to hear. And ironically, no New York theatre would produce it for 12 years after I wrote it. I told Molly [Smith] that I got into the program on the Cherokee story, but then while I thought, “I’m in New York, I need to write this New York story.” And Molly [Smith] said, “Why don’t you write the Cherokee story now?”

She said, “What are you most passionate about this story?” Her wife Suzanne is from Yankton Sioux, which is a tribe in South Dakota. Suzanne’s worked on the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). As a lawyer, I’ve also worked on that. Molly [Smith] said, “What about your work on the Violence Against Women Act?” I said “I’d love to write a play about VAWA, too.” But I had my Cherokee grandfathers, the Cherokee Nation’s Story of Survival, and VAWA, and they don’t seem to connect. She said, “Talk to me more about that. Tell me about VAWA.” I tell her about VAWA and what Sarah goes through in the play. I explain what VAWA is and how it interacts with Oliphant. Molly [Smith] sat there listening and then she said, “I think you’re fighting for the same thing your grandfathers were.” I got goosebumps. I said, “You’re right. I am. I want to write a play about that.”

The play itself is fictionalized. I’m not Sarah Ridge Polson. I didn’t go to Yale Law School. I’ve never worked at the Cherokee Nation, and I’ve never argued a case in the Supreme Court. (I’d love to.) But that was my way of articulating the connection between Native women, or Cherokee women specifically, but any Native woman who fights for the restoration of tribal criminal jurisdiction today, and what my grandfathers fought for. These were my ideas, but they came out in a conversation I had with Molly [Smith]. I was a very new playwright. My first draft of Sovereignty was 190 pages. She didn’t say, “Mary Kathryn, it’s too long.” It was too long. I knew it was too long, but I just had to get a lot out. She never batted an eyelash. She was never taken aback. Some artistic directors, they get a commission that’s long and they go, “Oh my God, we’ll never be able to produce this.” It’s okay, calm down. We’re just starting the writing process. Nothing intimidated Molly [Smith]. She said, “Okay, let’s dive in and there’s some really amazing stuff here and let’s get to work.” It was a long process of rewriting because it was my first play that was produced at a full equity theatre of that size. It was an incredible experience.

 

Cima: I can imagine. Arena is one of the most prestigious theatres in the country. Can you talk to me more about that writing process. How long did it take you to get to that 190-page draft and how long afterwards did you have the production?

 

Nagle: The contemporary scenes in the play are all fictionalized. But a lot of the law and policy in the contemporary scenes is real. It’s the work I do as an attorney every day. I’m an attorney for Native women who are survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault. I work with families of missing and murdered indigenous persons. I didn’t have to research that part. A lot of what’s in the scenes set in the past were stories that my grandmother told me as a child. And what was interesting was one of my good friends at the time who was Cherokee, Brenda Pipestone, told me, “You need to talk to Dr. Duane King.” He’s not Cherokee. He’s a white guy from Georgia who grew up in her community. She’s Eastern Band Cherokee; they’re in Western North Carolina. He grew up there. He got his PhD in Cherokee studies and became fluent in the Cherokee language. He did a lot of incredible history research. So Brenda told me, “You have to meet Duane King.” At that point, he was working at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They have a collection of papers called the John Ross papers. I had lunch with Dwayne [King], and he was the most knowledgeable person you could talk to about Cherokee history or politics.

I would tell him things such as my grandma growing up had a lot of resentment towards the Rosses and blamed John Ross for my grandfather’s death. She said, “Everyone says the Ridges got rich off the Trail of Tears, but it was the Rosses who got rich, they made millions.” I always thought that wasn’t true, because no one else in Cherokee Nation would say that. I told Duane King that. He’s said, “Oh yeah, I’ll send you the paperwork.” He had the government contracts signed between the federal government and John Ross’s brother Andrew who made a million dollars because he outfitted the whole Trail of Tears journey. I thought, “Oh, I guess what my grandma said was true.” Time after time, I remember my grandma said that John Ross canceled the elections because he didn’t want John Ridge to win when they were in the middle—it’s interesting how it reminds me of the whole Zelensky conversation right now—but that was John Ross’s argument, “We’re under attack. They’re trying to destroy our whole nation. We will not have elections. Right now we’re in a constitutional crisis.” My great-great-great grandfather was the prime candidate to run against him, the opposing political party. He said, “This is a constitutional violation. We need to be able to hold elections.” My grandmother always thought the Rosses were corrupt because they wouldn’t hold elections. Duane King told me, “Oh yeah, here’s the newspaper publication on that.”

We became close friends. He brought me into the Gilcrease Museum to read the Gilcrease papers. There were handwritten letters. The originals. From John Ridge to John Ross when they were working together on the Worcester case in the Supreme Court. There were handwritten letters between Ross and William Wirt, the attorney who argued the case between John Ridge and William Wirt. They’re all in the Ross Papers. Phenomenal. It’s an amazing collection. I got to hold letters that my great-great-great grandfather wrote. I did a lot of research. I read a lot of books that have been published on the subject. The Cherokees were pretty lucky that we have a lot written about us. Not all tribes have as much material from the 1800s, or even before. All tribes have oral histories. I also talked to a lot of John Ross descendants, and I really wanted to connect with them. And I said to them, I’ll share the script with you. Obviously, it was coming from a Ridge perspective, but I wanted to be fair to the Ross side. I wanted to show how both sides were trying to save a nation.

I mapped out what happened, starting with John Ridge in boarding school, meeting his wife, coming home, working for his dad. John Ross is also under the tutelage of Major Ridge. They’re like family, and then the Governor of Georgia starts making the government illegal, making it illegal for non-Cherokee citizens to come into Cherokee Nation territory. At the beginning, they’re unified. They take their case up to the Supreme Court, they win, and Andrew Jackson isn’t going to enforce it. I was watching CNN a couple weeks ago and they were talking about it because all these judges are blocking different Trump executive orders. And Jake Tapper on CNN said, “There’s that proverbial line from the whole Cherokee case about, Andrew Jackson said John Marshall made his ruling, let him enforce it.” Then they started having this conversation about whether or not Andrew Jackson ever actually said that. I thought, “Hey, first of all, does it matter? Second of all, people wrote it down at the time. If he didn’t say that, he said something pretty damn close to that, and then that’s what he did.” It’s funny how people can become hyper-focused on something like that from history. But it was funny to see that on CNN because, in many ways, history just repeats itself.

 

Cima: So, how did you go about revising the draft?

 

Nagle:  I started focusing on the central driving point of the play. I collapsed a lot of scenes. A lot of what I wrote was historically accurate. I had scenes with John Ross visiting Andrew Jackson in the White House that happened, but then we didn’t have space for it. Some of the conversations between the Cherokee men in the past, what took place in three or four conversations were collapsed into one. You have to do that in theatre. You have to move things along. It’s different in film. You can flash for four seconds over here and then move for an eight second conversation over here. You can do that in theatre, but it’s a different type of theatre. I wanted the moments to have more breath to them. I had to cut a lot and I had to collapse and not fictionalize things, but just change the way in which some of the story was presented to streamline it. I had a lot of scenes where different members of Congress came to meet with Andrew Jackson about the Indian Removal Act. It was All the Way [by Robert Schenkkan], but instead of LBJ trying to get the Civil Rights Act passed, it’s Andrew Jackson trying to get the Indian Removal Act passed, which was fascinating to see him politicking, to get that piece of legislation through Congress. It narrowly passed, I think by one vote. It was fascinating to me to learn about all these machinations that Jackson went through to get this done, most of which I learned from Duane King. When you’re writing historical fiction, David Henry Hwang, I think, said it well, you do all the research and then you go away and you never look at it again. A play is not a non-fiction history book. It’s a work of art. You’ve got to massage it all into an artistic story and you can’t keep checking back thinking, what was the exact transcript of this meeting or what are the five meetings that happened in what order, and how do I get every single detail? You just have to dive into the world and write it.

 

Cima: Can you talk about why you choose to write plays? Why the theatre? Why not write an article or write a book?

 

Nagle: I think that there’s something very different that happens in a theatre experience, different than reading an article, different than watching a movie. At these last Oscars. I think people are a little bit traumatized in this country right now, and many of the artists that were getting awards were speaking about the need to hold and cherish the experience of sitting in a theatre and watching a movie and laughing and gasping. Well, live theatre is like that times ten. When the performers are right there in front of you going through the moment, it is so much more palpable. I think it impacts people in a more significant way. I think our challenge for theatre is not how to make better theatre, it’s how to make it more accessible and how to get more audiences into the theatre, including, folks who are not progressive minded, who don’t want to see theatre for all voices, who are really happy that Trump has gotten rid of all the DEI. Theatre needs to welcome those people, too. That’s one of the only ways that some people’s hearts and minds are going to change about other people is through the humanization of their stories. That can happen through film and TV as well, but I think live theatre impacts people in a way that’s harder to disconnect from because you’re right there in this shared human experience.

 

Cima: You’re someone that uses theatre. You’re also a lawyer who is actively involved in social justice. How does theatre function for you as a vehicle for social justice?

 

Nagle: When I appear at a hearing or a trial as an attorney, that’s performance too. That’s theatre. It certainly helps me perform better in those settings because I understand storytelling. You’re in the same room as the judges. Everything they see, everything they hear, the rhythm, not just the words you say, but how it’s presented to them, impacts what they end up deciding. But we also have a lot of work to do around our issues before we end up in a courtroom or before we end up in a Senate hearing. Because if people are going into those moments with ignorance or prejudice, then bad outcomes are more likely. And theatre is an amazing way to educate people.

I didn’t anticipate this or fully appreciate it until now, but I also think that having students read my plays is an incredible way that theatre can work for social justice, because I’ve had a lot of friends and colleagues ask if I can send them my script so their students can read my plays. High school teachers reach out to me. I think that’s largely because a lot of high school teachers go to OSF and other theatres where my plays have been produced. Then they say, “I want to teach this to my students.” That means you’ve got all these kids in a class, many of whom may never go see a live play. But they’re taking a theatre class. They may never professionally work in the theatre field—maybe they’ll go watch theatre—but they’re reading your play now. They’re learning about an issue for social justice that they’re not going to get anywhere else. I think that’s an incredible tool, seeing plays used in classrooms.

 

Cima: Have you had women come up to you and say that they recognize themselves in Sarah?

 

Nagle: Yes. The interesting thing, too, is that women of all walks of life have approached me. One of the challenges we had in trying to get theatres to do Native plays is some of them would say, “You’re such a small percentage of the population. Who’s going to buy tickets to a Native play?” They were thinking, “We do a black playwright, there’s a lot of black audience members. If we do a white playwright, obviously there are a lot of white people in the audience.” I thought it was crazy. All the people who are not Native, because most of the people in this country are not Native, they would say, “Oh my gosh, this character of Sarah really resonates with me. I really feel like it’s my story.” I was always amazed by that because her story is very particular. But yes, she resonated with a lot of women.

Discussion Questions \(\PageIndex{1}\)

1. Nagle draws parallels between her legal work and playwriting. How does her approach to storytelling bridge these two professions?
2. In what ways did personal history and family stories shape the creation of Sovereignty?
3. How does Nagle’s process of historical research inform her fictionalized storytelling, and what does this suggest about the role of accuracy in theatre?
4. Nagle talks about accessibility and reaching audiences beyond those already aligned with progressive causes. How might theatre practitioners work toward this goal?
5. Why do so many non-Native women feel that Sarah’s story is their own? What does that say about the theatre’s ability to tell stories that feel simultaneously universal and particular?