Andrina Wekontash Smith is having a remarkable year.
The Shinnecock storyteller, writer, performer, and activist -- she prefers not to be pigeonholed -- just learned that "MLK: Now Is the Time," a virtual reality piece she wrote for Time Studios, will be shown at this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin in March. The following month she will be inducted into Guild Hall's Academy of the Arts.
And then there's the pilot she just finished writing for a series on ABC. "The pilot just happened," she said during a phone conversation. Austen Earl, the showrunner for the series "Happy Together," was jogging past the Shinnecock reservation and wondering about the people there.
"He knew there had to be a story to tell, so he checked the internet for Shinnecock writers and I came up." He explored her work online and suggested they meet. "We really hit it off, and he was, like, let's make a TV show," although he felt they needed to attach a big name to the project. He proposed Kerry Washington.
When Mr. Earl contacted her production company, he was told they couldn't take on any more projects. Nonetheless, he sent them "The Darker Red Road," a spoken word piece by Ms. Smith that reflects the disconnect between the Hamptons and the Indigenous people of the East End. Busy though she was, Ms. Washington's response was, "I can't stand you, because we have to do this!"
One thing led to another, time passed, but Ms. Smith and Mr. Earl pitched the comedy to ABC in May and the network bought it. Ms. Smith has just submitted the script for the pilot, which is about a Native American cook who works at her family-run business on the reservation. "Crazy hijinks ensue" after she decides to work for a celebrity chef at a high-end Hamptons restaurant.
Finishing the pilot is not the end of a marathon, she said, but "only a pit stop. One of the fun things of writing a pilot is then getting to write more episodes."
A video of "The Darker Red Road," a collaboration with Facebook's Lift Black Voices that can be seen on YouTube, also led to the V.R. project "MLK: Now Is the Time." The producers saw the piece and, after an interview with Limbert Fabian, the director, Ms. Smith was hired to write the script.
"The premise was to take the March on Washington speech that is so frequently isolated to the 'I have a dream' section and expose how the conversations he was having then are still relevant to issues that are being faced today," Ms. Smith said, citing voting, housing discrimination, and policing.
"We wanted to shift away from just the words to the experience, because that's what V.R. can amplify. The experience can build empathy that goes a step further than what TV and film do."
During the policing section, for example, the viewer's hands are on the steering wheel when the car is pulled over by a white policeman. While the confrontation plays out with vivid animation, a voiceover of the driver's parents explains to the child how to behave in that situation.
The section on housing discrimination, or redlining, invites the viewer to play a Monopoly-like game in which all the good cards are drawn by the white player.
Born and raised in Southampton, Ms. Smith attended Our Lady of the Hamptons in Southampton and the Ross School. In "The Darker Red Road," she says, "A lifetime at private schools has given me a pass. I couldn't register for white privilege, but I got to audit the class, and fluency in the oppressor's language has given me the task of speaking my story before it's been asked."
She started performing in plays and musical revues at Our Lady of the Hamptons and with Loreen Enright of Sandcastle Music Productions in Southampton. But what set her on the path of activism through art happened in 10th grade at Ross, when she and a group of classmates protested the Iraq War at East Hampton's Hook Windmill.
"We were holding our signs that say 'No War for Oil,' and people were honking and cheering us on and celebrating us and giving us high fives, and I realized that was as far as it was going to go. I realized that joy and hope were going to be a needed part of it, so I set my sights on a career that could renew hope in people."
In the beginning, she said, that involved sharing her story to show what healing looked like, but "now it's a desire to show community and commonality in a world that increasingly wants to bifurcate us."
She also stressed that although she was attending school with the top 1 percent at Ross, "I was embraced by the people I was hanging out with. It wasn't a situation where I was 'othered.' "
Her experience at Emerson College in Boston "both made me and broke me." While the voice, acting, and improv programs there were "incredible, my musical theater program was a really deleterious experience." It was before "Hamilton," and her voice was not the type to be nurtured in that program.
"What Emerson did teach me was that if I wanted to see the kind of work I wanted in the world, I would have to create it. My entire journey there has been so crucial in everything that has happened since."
Her semester abroad in the Czech Republic also had an impact. "The Czechs like everyone, it didn't matter where you were from. There was this sort of delightful equal playing field that is sometimes omitted in the U.S."
Her time there also "informed the possibility and potential of art in a really big way, because we studied Vaclav Havel, we studied the artists who were in Jewish concentration camps, and really listened to this streamline of artists influencing societal changes through the work they were putting out. That planted a seed in me."
Ms. Smith trained at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York City, which presents shows and offers classes in improv, sketch comedy, TV writing, and character creation. Her work has been seen there, as well as at the Peoples Improv Theater, where her sketch team, Like Butter, had a residency in 2020.
She has also performed at the HERE Arts Center in New York, Guild Hall in East Hampton, and the Watermill Center, where she was a 2019 resident artist, and she was a Snowed-In artist-in-residence at the Kirkland Art Center in Clinton, N.Y. Her writing has appeared in Edible East End and Native Max magazine.
While she now spends most of her time in Brooklyn, she is building what she calls a tiny house on the Shinnecock Reservation. It still lacks electricity, but she spent the last powwow there, sleeping on a blow-up mattress.
"Space is something that is continually eroding on the East End, and to be able to have a patch that is mine is really nice," she said. "I'm excited for this journey to continue whatever my legacy on the East End is because I know so many people who had to move away. And the East End is a huge part of my storytelling, and sharing the journey of what I went through and still being able to be connected to the place that people have called home for so long, really matters."
While there is no substitute for hearing Ms. Smith tell one of her stories, an excerpt from her "One Indian, Two Indian, Red Indian, Blue Indian" that appeared in Native Max offers a taste of her voice and her message:
Reinforced stereotypes trickled down Indian country like honey trickling down fry bread
We swallowed amnesia alongside lies that were spoon fed
Forgetting that in the beginning side by side stood black and red
So we continue to take smallpox blankets with us to bed
and wonder why we wake up feeling feverish.
I am tired.
I'm tired of having to constantly defend
a culture that's a birthright and not a new age trend
Since apparently, a dreamcatcher makes everyone Indians
or at least have great great great grandmother who was a chief's daughter . . .
My ancestors are weeping the salt tears only the "people of the shore" could create.
Shinnecock youth develop chips saltier than Pringles could generate
And I'm feeling so salty let this be my probate
That boldly stands before you and chants, not just states
I am not Indian for you.
