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Plays in print by Drew Hayden Taylor
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TORONTO AT DREAMER'S ROCK/EDUCATION IS OUR RIGHT
Fifth House Publishers 1990
In these two plays, Drew Taylor delves into the past and speculates about the future as he examines the dilemmas facing young Native Canadians today. TORONTO AT DREAMER'S ROCK is a moving portrayal of a teenage boy who is torn between the traditions of his people, which he only vaguely understands, and the lure of modern life. His magical encounters with two members of his tribe - one from 400 years in the past and one from the future - make him aware of how little he has thought about what it means to be an Indian. EDUCATION IS OUR RIGHT borrows from the familiar story of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, but in this version the spirits of Education Past, Present and Future attempt to show the Minister of Indian Affairs the error of his ways.
Drew Taylor combines humour, passion, spirituality, and tough realism to create a hopeful vision of the future that will appeal especially to young adult readers. Both plays have toured extensively to schools in Ontario and Quebec.
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THE BOOTLEGGER BLUES
Fifth House Publishers 1991
This comedy is about love, family, and what to do with too much beer. Set on a reserve, it follows the plight of Martha, a church-going, teetotaling woman who finds herself stuck with 143 cases of beer after a church fundraiser fails. She decides to bootleg the beer, to the horror of her son Andrew, nicknamed Blue, who is a special constable on the reserve. Meanwhile, Andrew has fallen for a young woman he thinks is his cousin, and his sister Marianne is bored with her "Indian Yuppie" husband and finds herself attracted to a handsome dancer at the powwow. The pace is fast and vigorous in this romantic situation comedy.
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SOMEDAY
Fifth House Publishers 1993
The story in SOMEDAY, though told through fictional characters and full of Taylor's distinctive wit and humour, is based on the real-life tragedies suffered by many Native Canadian families. Anne Wabung's daughter was taken away by children's aid workers when the girl was only a toddler. It is Christmastime 35 years later, and Anne's yearning to see her now-grown daughter is stronger than ever. When the family is finally reunited, however, the dreams of neither women are fulfilled. The setting for the play is a fictional Ojibway community, but could be any reserve in Canada, where thousands of Native children were removed from their families in what is known among Native people as the "scoop-up" of the 1950s and 1960s. SOMEDAY is an entertaining, humourous, and spirited play that packs an intense emotional wallop.
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ONLY DRUNKS AND CHILDREN TELL THE TRUTH
Talon Books 1998
A sequel to SOMEDAY, this is the emotional story of a woman's struggle to acknowledge her birth family. Grace, a Native girl adopted by a White family, is asked by her birth sister to return to the Reserve for their mother's funeral. Afraid of opening old wounds, Grace must find a place where the culture of her past can feed the truth of her present. "I felt Janice wasn't as sympathetic in Someday as she could have been," says Hayden Taylor, who wrote the first draft of Only Drunks during a four-and-half-day writing spree. "It was time for Janice to have her day and face her demons."
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THE BABY BLUES
Talon Books 1999
The Baby Blues is Drew Hayden Taylor's highly wrought farce of patrimony in a stifling, politically correct, post-colonial milieu of 'fancy dancers' of every stripe on the pow wow trail. In juxtaposing three generations of careless wandering hedonists, progenitors of a string of offspring from their six-night stands, with their erstwhile naïve women partners who are always left holding the bag, the 'big questions' of heritage, family, cultural context and personal identity are ruthlessly stripped of their conventional meanings and become so much useless, embarrassing roadkill on the highway of life.
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alterNATIVES
Talon Books 2000
A very liberal contemporary couple — Angel, an urban Native science fiction writer, and Colleen, a “non-practising” Jewish intellectual who teaches Native literature — hosts a dinner party. The guests at this little "sitcom" soirée are couples that represent what by now have become the clichéd extremes of both societies: Angel’s former radical Native activist buddies and Colleen’s environmentally concerned vegetarian / veterinarian friends. The menu is, of course, the hosts' respectful attempt at shorthand for the irreconcilable cultural differences about to come to a head during the evening: moose roast and vegetarian lasagna.
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GIRL WHO LOVED HER HORSES/THE BOY IN THE TREEHOUSE
Talon Books 2000
In this collection of two plays about the process of children becoming adults, Drew Hayden Taylor works his delightfully comic and bitter-sweet magic on the denials, misunderstandings and preconceptions which persist between Native and Colonial culture in North America. With these two plays, Taylor rediscovers an issue long forgotten in our "post-historical" age: the nature of, and the necessity for, these rites of passage in all cultures.
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THE BUZ’GEM BLUES
Talon Books 2002
The Buz’Gem Blues is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor’s ongoing zany, outrageous, often farcical examination of both Native and non-Native stereotypes in what is to become what he calls his "Blues Quartet." The Buz’Gem Blues is not a play about clichés with which we have become so familiar that we recognize them as stereotypes instantly, but rather about how our ritualized and institutionalized systems of maintaining and policing those clichés prevent us from recognizing our common humanity within each other.
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400 KILOMETRES
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Talon Books 2005
400 Kilometres is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor’s hilarious and heart-wrenching identity-politics trilogy. Janice Wirth, a thirty-something urban professional, having discovered her roots as the Ojibway orphan Grace Wabung in SOMEDAY, and having visited her birth family on the Otter Lake Reserve in ONLY DRUNKS AND CHILDREN TELL THE TRUTH, is pregnant, and must now come to grips with the question of her "true identity." Her adoptive parents have just retired, and are about to sell their house to embark on a quest for their own identity by “returning” to England. Meanwhile, the Native father of her child-to-be is attempting to convince Janice/Grace that their new generation’s future lies with their "own people" at Otter Lake. Which path for the future is Janice/Grace to choose, for herself, her families and her child, having spent a lifetime caught between the questions of "what I am" and "who I am"?
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IN A WORLD CREATED BY A DRUNKEN GOD
Talon Books 2006
Nominated for the 2006 Governor General's Award
Jason Pierce, a 31-year-old Canadian half-Native man, is paid an unexpected visit by a 34-year-old American man, Harry Deiter, who awkwardly introduces himself as Jason's half-brother. What Harry wants from Jason is bizarre: to be compatibility-tested for a possible kidney donation to their dying non-Native father--a man Jason has no memory of ever meeting and who, after a brief and secret affair, abandoned his Canadian Native mother when he was two months old. This play raises powerful questions that transcend issues of culture, morality and history - they cut to the ethical quick of what it means to be human in a chaotic world stripped of the comfortable security of identity politics.
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THE BERLIN BLUES
Talon Books 2007
A consortium of German developers shows up on the fictional Otter Lake Reserve with a seemingly irresistible offer to improve the local economy: the creation of "OjibwayWorld," a Native theme park designed to attract European tourists to this new destination resort, causing hilarious personal and political divisions within the local community. The Berlin Blues concludes Drew Hayden Taylor’s Blues quartet, showcasing contemporary stereotypes of First Nations people, including a fair number of these that originate from Indigenous communities themselves, to the often outraged delight of his international audiences. "This play displays a healthy sense of humor ... If one needs an innocuous night of theatre, this can be taken as a series of funny events. Those hoping for something deeper can find allegories and metaphors pointing through history." —Michael Kowrach, LA Splash
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