The Nebraska Dispatches

After a sold out evening in February, The Nebraska Dispatches returns for one night only!

When playwright Christopher Cartmill returned to his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, to write a play he unknowingly began a poignant and complicated adventure. As he followed the story of a Ponca chief who fought so hard to return to his homeland in northern Nebraska from a reservation in Oklahoma, Cartmill stumbled into the politics of identity, contested notions of homeland, and his own past. Chronicling these adventures in a series of dispatches, he documented the transformation of a research trip into a three-year exploration. These dispatches, presented in Cartmill’s celebrated performance offers snapshots of a New Yorker’s travels into the heartland, insights into a very personal journey, and glimpses into a history that critiques and continues the American story.

“Delightfully intimate yet soaringly ambitious, Christopher Cartmill’s lovely and lovingly told memoir of his journey through personal and national history is a fascinating meditation on the infinite meanings of home. This is a terrific nonfiction debut from a terrifically gifted writer.”—Adam Langer, author of Ellington Boulevard and My Father’s Bonus March

“This is a mature, sophisticated work. Like rainwater in the Nebraska Sandhills, the play’s haunting truths seep into the cracks where life begins and ends. And it is here where those hard truths are delivered with whispers—not megaphones—which of course make them resonate even louder.”—Joe Starita, author of I Am a Man

A playwright, actor, director, and professor, Christopher Cartmill is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Theater Department of Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. He has appeared in films like Spielberg’s Lincoln and the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. His plays have earned awards from the Kennedy Center, Chicago’s Joseph Jefferson Committee, and the Los Angeles Drama-Logue. Nebraska’s Lied Center for the Performing Arts commissioned Cartmill to write a play, and the experience of writing that play, titled Home/Land, became the solo performance The Nebraska Dispatches. Christopher has also translated works and adapted by Molière, George Sand, Voltaire, Schiller and Carlo Gozzi. Working on the soon to be published translation of Gozzi’s The Little Green Birdie, Christopher will soon leave for Italy as a visiting artist/scholar at the American Academy in Rome.