"Cowboys And East Indians" Play To Premiere At Denver Center For Performing Arts

In a little office above Windy City Books in Casper, Nina McConigley started to examine her experience growing up as a biracial East Indian in the middle of Wyoming. It was 2006 and McConigley worked as a barista at the Metro Coffee Company. 

This experience reappears in McConigley’s 2013 short story collection “Cowboys and East Indians,” as a young barista grapples with preparations for her sister’s wedding and the memory of her Indian mother. 

When McConigley’s high school classmate Matthew Spangler read “Cowboys and East Indians,” he started imagining the characters and storylines as building blocks for a play. Transforming short stories and novels into stage plays is Spangler’s specialty. 

Spangler appeared in a play with McConigley’s older sister in high school but wasn’t close with Nina until they reunited years later during a visit to the University of Wyoming. 

Over dinner in Laramie with McConigley, Spangler asked Nina if she’d consider a collaboration. 

“You had no idea that was like a business meeting,” said Spangler to McConigley in a video conversation posted by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA). That’s where another Natrona County High graduate took over, DCPA Director of Literary Programs Leean Kim Torske. 

“And Leean had mentioned my book during her job interview,” said McConigley. “Sure enough, soon after she got the job she had Matthew and I both come down and said, ‘Are you both interested in having a commission from the Denver Center to write the play?’”

McConigley and Spangler posted up in a conference room at Casper College and went to work blending two of McConigley’s short stories into a single dramatic narrative for the stage. 

“My most produced play is an adaptation of ‘The Kite Runner,’” said Spangler, now a professor at San Jose State University. “A lot of my plays are adaptations of books about immigrant experiences, and this is the first time though where one of my plays is set in the town where I grew up.”

Friends and neighbors from Casper made the trip down to Denver in 2024 to experience a stage reading of “Cowboys and East Indians.”

Then on March 1 the DCPA announced it plans to stage a full production of the play in 2026 in Denver. 

It’s a huge opportunity for the pair. Another play that began at DCPA went onto become “The Whale,” an Academy Award-winning film starring Brendan Fraser. 

It all makes McConigley, who now teaches creative writing at Colorado State University, chuckle with disbelief. 

She’s gone from wanna-be writer with a little office in Casper to one of the main stages of contemporary American theater.

For a collection of short stories about not fitting in, it appears many pieces came together to produce a play about what it’s like growing up in Wyoming as “the wrong kind of Indian.”

What Tribe Are You? 

“I always say the book is about being the wrong kind of Indian in Wyoming,” quipped McConigley in an interview with BBC News after her collection of short stories won the PEN Open Book Award.

Born in Singapore to an Irish father and Indian mother, McConigley describes a sense of isolation she felt growing up in Casper. 

Her father Patrick was a petroleum geologist and her mother Nimi McConigley was a journalist who worked for the Casper Star Tribune and was the news director at CBS affiliate KGWC. 

Nimi was born in Madras, and in 1994 she ran successfully for the Wyoming House of Representatives, becoming the first Indian-born person and the first Indian American woman to serve in any state legislature. 

Nimi remembered her colleagues in Cheyenne criticizing her for wearing a sari when speaking to a group of local high school students, according to a 2020 story by Wyoming Public Media. 

Friction from these types of culture clashes comes through in the “Cowboys and East Indians” story collection. 

McConigley fictionalizes her mother in the story “Pomp and Circumstance,” describing how she tried to assimilate by showing up to parties in Casper with store-bought donuts and “cookies with frosting the color of Gods.”

In the story “White Wedding,” an autobiographically inspired young Indian American woman named Lucky deals with her sister’s matrimony and what it means to be “marrying white.”

“Since I was biracial, I had been asked from time-to-time what tribe I was from,” states Lucky, reflecting McConigley’s lived experience in 1980s Casper. 

To buy Indian groceries and see other Indian Americans, McConigley’s family made trips to Denver. Casper at the time was a white-flour world of mall shopping and dinners at Red Lobster.

“There was a persistent rumor that an Olive Garden was opening, but we watched for years and never saw so much as a foundation being poured,” writes McConigley in “White Wedding.” 

Spangler and McConigley combine the stories “White Wedding” and “Pomp and Circumstance” into the play “Cowboys and East Indians.” 

Name dropping real places demonstrates the real joy Wyoming brings McConigley. She has a tattoo of a covered wagon and a jackalope. 

“The play opens on Casper Mountain, in Beartrap Meadow, so that's kind of nice,” McConigley told Cowboy State Daily. She and Spangler peppered the script with so many jokes about the wind in Wyoming, McConigley said Torske at DCPA finally declared enough is enough while they were workshopping the script. 

For Spangler, it was challenging to translate Wyoming’s wide-open horizons to the confined space of a stage play. 

“There is a scene where they're driving on the highway and there's some lines in which they describe what they see out the window,” Spangler told Cowboy State Daily. “The landscape, the loneliness, the emptiness of the landscape. They're driving from Casper to Laramie, which goes across the Shirley Basin.”

In her short story “Pomp and Circumstance,” McConigley describes the sight of windmills near Medicine Bow. 

“They look like cartwheeling crosses marking some sacred space,” writes McConigley, who suspends what she finds sacred about Wyoming in her imagination alongside the material she finds most shocking. 

Of Mountains And Masculinity

“Cowboys and East Indians” the play follows the Sen family as they endure the cultural friction of moving from India to Wyoming.

A DPCA write up on the play describes how McConigley’s character Lucky feels pulled in different directions as the characters examine “the question of how one understands their identity when they don’t see a reflection of it in their community.”

It also takes on cowboy culture and a kind of masculinity that McConigley finds unsettling. She traces some of this uneasiness back to her friend Matthew Shepard. 

During her interview with DCPA, McConigley said, “Matthew Shepard was a gay University of Wyoming college student when he was beaten to death. We were in youth group together and he was a very real person to me when I was thinking about the end of the book.”

“We hear this expression ‘cowboy up’ all the time,” continued McConigley. “In Wyoming, I think being an immigrant is hard and I think being in a certain performance of masculinity is hard.” 

McConigley went on to describe the essence of her new play, saying, “People always have a narrative of what Wyoming and the West is and it's usually a kind of cowboy masculine narrative and I think it's been really fun to subvert that.”

“Cowboys and East Indians” debuts as a performance by the Denver Center Theatre Company in January 2026, around the same time McConigley’s next book, a novel also inspired by Casper, hits shelves.

David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.