On stage: AlterNatives serves up cross-cultural confection

SARA MINOGUE

Two white girls and a Métis from the South are bringing some cultural fusion to Iqaluit.

Erin Brubacher, who, with Odile Nelson, is co-directing and acting in the play in Iqaluit this weekend, says this is a play that “fits with the community.”

AlterNatives is written by an Ojibway from Ontario, Drew Hayden Taylor. Its cast includes a Jewish academic, an Ojibway writer, two middle-class white people and two young “AlterNative warriors,” but race is almost irrelevant.

When Jonathan Dewar of the Qaggiq theatre company loaned Brubacher a copy of the play she’d been thinking about, it quickly became the top choice. Qaggiq later backed the efforts of Brubacher and Nelson.

Taylor, one of Canada’s most prominent young aboriginal talents, says, with this play, he’s using the specifics from his life to get at issues that everyone can relate to.

“The issues involved are universal: interracial marriage, the concept of cultural appropriation, political correctness…,” Taylor says. “Many Native issues are cross-cultural.”

In this performance, race is also very confused, since not one of the characters is cast to represent his or her actual background. An Irish Catholic plays the Jewish academic. A white girl plays one of the AlterNative warriors. An Inuk plays a white girl. A Chinese guy from Saskatchewan plays an Ojibway. And Lori Idlout plays a man.

The play takes place at a very awkward dinner party – the only setting, Taylor says, where he could imagine packing in all of the odds and ends and incidents that he’d been collecting, but that didn’t fit anywhere else.

One of the themes in the play involves a group of kids on a reserve who are visited by a group of anthropologists researching traditional legends. None of the elders will talk to the anthropologists, so instead, the kids told them the legends their grandparents had told them, in some cases making them up for 50 cents a legend.

The play not only makes fun of the anthropologists, but also the kids who made up the stories, and “how a trick can come back and trick you,” as Taylor puts it.

One character in the play is working on a fictional master’s thesis called “Selective Traditionalism and the Emergence of the Narrow-Focused Cultural Revival,” an essay on native cultural revival in a politically correct era.

This is an idea Taylor says that he sees everywhere, even in food.

“My mother would tell me that when she was growing up, one of her favourite foods was muskrat brains. Today, she says she hasn’t had them in a long time and doesn’t think she’ll have them anymore because she’s been taught that eating brains is icky. It’s being weaned out of us by society. Even my mother, who is 72.”

Another character is a native writer who wants to write sci-fi, which brings up a host of issues for young native artists, like, “should native people only write about native topics?”

The play, first performed in 1999, has already sparked some controversy. One theatre company in Vancouver received a bomb threat from an outraged theatre-goer who didn’t like “plays that are racist against white people.”

“I got a bomb threat and I thought that was so cool,” Taylor says.

The reaction varies, depending on the viewer, but ultimately, everyone takes a beating in this play.

“The white characters take a lot of abuse and the native characters give a lot of abuse,” Taylor says. “I’ve had at least two native people come up to me after seeing this play and say ‘is that what you really think about native people?’ It’s really interesting to see who picks up on what.”

The saving grace for Taylor is that all of these themes are dramatized through very specific characters, all with their own “attitudinal dysfunctions.”

The other saving grace is that “95 per cent of everything in this particular play is true,” Taylor says. “I’ve just created the environment in which to discuss all these things.”

Fortunately, the entire thing is also very funny. Taylor declares himself a “closet expert in native humour,” and says he firmly believes that God is the one with the sense of humour, his job is just to notice it.

Taylor is a noted playwright with 13 published books and a weekly column syndicated in five southern newspapers. He is now working on a non-fiction book tentatively called Whacking the Indigenous Funnybone.

This is the first time one of Taylor’s plays has been played above the tree-line and Taylor is thrilled that his play has made it to the North, and very curious about how it will be received. “I’m sure there are stories up there of Inuk kids telling an anthropologist stories for money.”

Showtime is 8 p.m. tonight, Saturday and Sunday at the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation building. Tickets are $10, or pay-what-you-can at the Sunday afternoon matinee at 2 p.m. when tickets will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis. For reservations, call Odile Nelson at 979-6533.