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Feathers - continued

Over the years Ward would work with Kizer on the songs for Feathers as well. Eventually he finished the whole score and produced the CD, using singers and actors from the production of Les Miserables in L.A. The result is startlingly professional. Thirty-four songs follow each other in tight and rapid-fire order.

Over the years, also, Dik Kizer looked for the right people to get the show produced. In New York, in L.A., in other places.

"It's been close a couple of times," he says. "But it's hard to get through the door in big cities."

So Kizer took off to Spain for a few years, painting, doing sculpture, writing something like half a dozen screenplays ("Know anybody who needs a screenplay?" he says now. "I got em.").

He got back late last year, wondering what to do next. He wound up sitting at a coffee shop in Tucson chatting with a guy who used to live in — yep, Bisbee.

Now the late afternoon sunlight streams through the big windows in the dining room of the Oliver House where the big table is cluttered with storybooks and scripts, indexes of songs, print-outs of lyrics, sketches for the set, charts, a couple of old-timey looking digital photos of the cast. Dik Kaiser rocks back in his chair with his hands laced behind his head thinking about the guy from Bisbee he ran into at the coffee shop in Tucson that morning.

"He could tell that I should be here," says Dik.

Ted Weller

The story of Feathers is the story of Crazy Horse, the great Sioux leader known to his people as Tsunka Witko.

"This is a serious show," says Kizer. "It's not a musical comedy. It's a tragedy. And also it's a love story. Here's a man who loved his wife, loved his daughter, and he dies and loses his daughter.

"And even though Crazy Horse was a Sioux, he's meant to represent all Native people everywhere."

The story of Tsunka Witko unfurls on the stage as the players and props appear from the colorful show wagon of the somewhat unsavory Jacques Alouisious Bordeaux, come to town with a ragtag troupe, the last of the Lakota Sioux, trained by Bordeaux and called by him the American Indian Renaissance Tuba Band.

Half price sale on a squash blossom turquoise,
Merchandise Red Man Chew to the cowboys
Firewater in your eyes, Sitting Bull he never lies
Too many chiefs walking Indian style
twenty-four bucks for a Manhattan Island
Who ever said that an Indian never cries?

— Jacques Bordeaux

And like a child's magic doll the story is stitched together by different voices: the songs of Bordeau and his troupe, the stories a Grandmother tells her Granddaughter, here and there the wisdom of a Native Elder.

Maybe even between the lines and words and songs we will hear the voice of the Great Mystery. We don't know.

Continued
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The world premier of Feathers is scheduled for Labor Day at the Bisbee Rep. The show will run through the end of the year — ed.