Cowboys and east indians
By Nina McConigley and Matthew Spangler
Directed by Chris Coleman
Performances
Sunday, may 18 at 2pm–crystal bridges
Saturday, may 24 at 5pm–TheatreSquared
About the play
Based on McConigley’s short story collection of the same name and adapted in collaboration with Spangler, Cowboys and East Indians weaves together threads of culture clash, grief, and intergenerational assimilation to tell the story of the Sen family, immigrants who settle in mostly-white Casper, Wyoming and learn what it means to be “the wrong kind of Indian” in the American West.
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTs
Matthew Spangler’s plays have been produced on Broadway, in London’s West End, off-Broadway, and at theatres throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Titles include: The Kite Runner, from the novel by Khaled Hosseini; The Beekeeper of Aleppo, co-written with Nesrin Alrefaai, from the novel by Christy Lefteri; Cowboys and East Indians, co-written with Nina McConigley; Operation Ajax, co-written with Farshad Farahat; Tortilla Curtain, from the novel by T.C. Boyle; The Forgotten Empress, co-written with Farah Yasmeen Shaikh; Striking Back, co-written with Kelly Hughes; and Albatross, co-written with Benjamin Evett. Matthew is Professor of performance studies and chair of the Department of Film, Theatre, and Dance at San José State University in California, where he teaches courses on the representation of refugees and asylum-seekers through the literary and performing arts.
Nina McConigley is the author of the short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians, which won the PEN Open Book Award and High Plains Book Award, and from which this play is adapted. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and Ploughshares, among others. In 2019-2020, she was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. Her novel How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is forthcoming in 2026. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston and teaches at Colorado State University.