How the ‘Reservation Dogs’ Writers Brought Signature Humor to Their First Play, ‘Between Two Knees’

variety.com:

Gordon Cox Theater Editor When Sterlin Harjo, the co-creator of “Reservation Dogs,” started writing his first play with the other members of The 1491s, the sketch comedy troupe of which he was member, he and the group began working on the project in the same way they would have brainstormed one of their comic YouTube shorts: “The first day of working, we sat around and drew dicks on a dry-erase board for half the day,” he said. Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below: Harjo recalled the process in a conversation with Bobby Wilson, another one of the five members of The 1491s, during the latest episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast.

The play, “Between Two Knees,” was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of a series of plays focused on U.S.

history. It premiered at OSF in 2019—just as the lauded TV series “Reservation Dogs” initially got sold to FX. (All five members of the 1491s would go on to work in the writers room.) Tracing the years between the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 through to the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, “Between Two Knees” follows multiple generations of one Native American family in a wildly comedic series of scenes.

It gets its New York premiere next month at the Perelman Arts Center in downtown Manhattan. “The way that we came up with each of those scenes was very similar to the process that we had been using for years for our sketches,” Wilson said. “Doing it on the fly, seeing what’s funny to us, what sticks.