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Drama
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 28 results
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Almighty Voice and His Wife
$15.95A young couple woo and wed, but they’re Cree and it’s 1895, the first generation after the Riel Rebellion, and it’s suddenly hard for the people who followed the buffalo to live happily ever after. What are they going to do? It’s still a bit early to go into show business.
Almighty Voice and His Wife shakes up a familiar story from the Saskatchewan frontier, reimagining it from the postmodern late twentieth century. The “renegade Indian story” transforms into both an eloquent tale of tragic love and an often hilarious, fully theatrical exorcism of the hurts of history. A modern classic about the place of First Nations people in Canada.
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Annie Mae’s Movement
$16.95Annie Mae’s Movement explores what it must have been like to be Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a woman in a man’s movement, a Canadian in America, an Aboriginal in a white-dominant culture at a time when it felt like we could really change the world.
Dying under mysterious circumstances, it is still unclear what really happened to Anna Mae back in the late 70s. Instead of recounting cold facts, this play looks for the truth in examining the life and death of this remarkable Aboriginal woman; that we cannot know the consequences of our actions; that we live on in the work that we do and the people we affect long after we have passed from this world.
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Bears
$17.95As the prime suspect in a workplace accident, Floyd has to get out of town fast. Pursued by the RCMP, he heads through the Rockies for Burnaby, BC, along the route of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. By the time he reaches the Pacific, Floyd has experienced changes: his gait widening, muscles bulging, sense of smell heightening…
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Beyond the Pale, revised edition
$19.95Includes excerpts from:
Drew Hayden Taylor – The Buz’Gem Blues
Sunil Kuruvilla – Rice Boy
Terrie A. Hamazaki – Furasato Tasha
Faye Evans – She Stands Still
Joy Russell – Hogan’s Alley
Walter Borden – Tightrope Time
Lisa Codrington – Cast Iron
Penny Gummerson – Wawatay
M.J. Kang – dreams of blonde and blue
Nina Aquino / Nadine Villasin – Miss Orient(ed)
trey anthony – ‘da Kink in my hair
Darrell Dennis – Tales of an Urban Indian
naila belvett / d’bi.young – yagayah
Primrose Madayag Knazan – Shades of Brown
Terry Ivins – Time Stands Still
Joseph Pierre – Beatdown a.k.a Life
Marie-Leofeli Romero Barlizo – The Prophecies of a Prince of Barotac
Diane Roberts – Bone Bred
Floyd Favel – The House of Sonya
Laura Cranmer / Sandy Scofield – DP’s Colonial Cabaret
Rahul Varma – Bhopal
George Elliott Clarke – Whylah Falls
Marty Chan – The Forbidden Phoenix
Jean Yoon – The Yoko Ono Project
Mitch Miyagawa – The Plum Tree
Hiro Kanagawa – Tiger of Malaya
Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble – The Scrubbing Project
Marie Clements – The Burning Vision
Djanet Sears – The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God
Tomson Highway – Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout
Drew Hayden Taylor – alterNatives -
Burning Vision
$17.95Marie Clements’s acclaimed play sears a dramatic swath through the reactionary identity politics of race, gender and class, using the penetrating yellow-white light, the false sun of uranium and radium, derived from a coal black rock known as pitchblende, as a metaphor for the invisible, malignant evils everywhere poisoning our relationship to the earth and to each other.
Burning Vision unmasks both the great lies of the imperialist power-elite (telling the miners they are digging for a substance to “cure cancer” while secretly using it to build the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki); and the seemingly small rationalizations and accommodations people of all cultures construct to make their personal circumstances yield the greatest benefit to themselves for the least amount of effort or change on their part. It is also a scathing attack on the “public apology” as yet another mask, as a manipulative device, which always seeks to conceal the maintenance and furtherance of the self-interest of its wearer.
Clements’s powerful visual sets and soundscapes contain curtains of flames which at times assume the bodies of a chorus passing its remote judgment, devoid of both pity and fear, on the action: a merciless indictment of the cross-cultural, buried worm of avarice and self-interest hidden within the terrorism of the push to “go with the times,” to accept the iconography of a reality defined, contextualized and illuminated by others.
Marie Clements writes, or, perhaps more accurately, composes, with an urbane, incisive and sophisticated intellect deeply rooted in the particulars of her place, time and history.
Cast of five women and 12 men.
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Cerulean Blue
$18.95Cerulean Blue is a comedic play about a struggling blues band invited to participate in a benefit concert for a First Nation community in conflict with governmental authorities. Upon arriving, the band discovers the entire lineup of musical acts has cancelled and they’re left trapped behind barricades. Complicating the matter, there is conflict within the band and the sudden appearance of an old girlfriend makes the event even more perilous.
This play is an homage to fast-moving farces while also addressing Aboriginal issues. Cerulean Blue deals with relationships, perceptions, politics, and what to do when you discover you’ve been dating your first cousin. Add a few spoonfuls of original blues music, and you’ve got a fun-filled evening.
The play was written for a large ensemble cast, which makes it ideal for musical theatre departments in high schools and colleges – every student can play a part. An original musical score by Andrew Clemens will be available for download from Talonbooks.com.
Cast of ten women and ten men.
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Copper Thunderbird
$16.95Copper Thunderbird is a play on canvases based on the life of Norval Morrisseau. Inside the power-lines which Morrisseau boldly defined in his art were the colours he experienced between his Ojibwa cosmology, his life on the street, and his spiritual and philosophical transformations to become the Father of Contemporary Native Art and a Grand Shaman. Appearing simultaneously in this multi-layered drama as a small boy, a young warrior and an old man, Morrisseau confronts his many selves over the Faustian destiny he encountered during his vision quest—a momentary terror that led to a life wracked by both triumph and ordeal, drawing his vibrant colours, both luminous and dark, from the life-force within him.
Norval Morrisseau is notorious for the life he has led, the company he has kept, the wives, lovers, parasitic drinking buddies and abusive family members he has had and passed through as if they were merely insubstantial phantoms. The paintings he has sold to buy another bottle of alcohol, to get through another brutal day, hang in galleries around the world, a phenomenon Morrisseau himself simply took for granted. Framed variously with the identities of Indian, Artist and Shaman, Copper Thunderbird interrogates both the stereotypes and the politically correct judgments that have manufactured Morrisseau’s public personae, creating a power-figure that transcends culture and morality, earth and water, fire and air.
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Darrell Dennis: Two Plays
$17.95Tales of an Urban Indian is a one-person play that follows the trials and tribulations of Simon Douglas, a young First Nations man who moves from his rural reservation to the big city of Vancouver. This dark comedy examines the issues of race, identity, and assimilation that drive young Indigenous men to self-destruction.
In The Trickster of Third Avenue East, Roger and Mary are spiralling out of control but are too scared to let each other go. Enter J.C., a mysterious visitor who turns their lives upside down and forces them to confront their darkest secrets. J.C. pushes Roger and Mary into the realm of the supernatural and past the brink of sanity.
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Dreary and Izzy
$17.951975, Lethbridge Alberta. When the Monoghan sisters lose their parents in a car accident, Deirdre remains as the sole caregiver to her older sister, Isabelle. Just as Deirdre is poised to enter university and begin exploring, for the first time, her own future and independence, she must choose how much of her own life she will sacrifice for the love of Isabelle. Deirdre is barely staying afloat under the strain of this reality when hope arrives in the form of gorgeous vacuum cleaner salesman Freddie Seven Horses. Both sisters find in Freddie a new world of unexplored emotions and ideas, where Freddie is a port in a storm.
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Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout
$16.95Based on a deposition signed by 14 Chiefs of the Thompson River basin on the occasion of a visit to their lands by Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1910, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout is a ritualized retelling of how the Native Peoples of British Columbia lost their fishing, hunting and grazing rights, their lands, and finally their language without their agreement or consent, and without any treaties ever having been signed. It is one of the most compellingly tragic cases of cultural genocide to emerge from the history of colonialism, enacted by four women whose stories follow each other like the cyclical seasons they represent.
Written in the spirit of Shuswap, a “Trickster language” within which the hysterically comic spills over into the unutterably tragic and back, this play is haunted by the blood of the dead spreading over the landscape like a red mist of mourning.
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Huff & Stitch
$18.95In huff, brothers Wind, Huff, and Charles are trying to cope with their father’s abusive whims and their mother’s recent suicide. In a brutal reality of death and addiction, they huff gas and pull destructive pranks. Preyed upon by Trickster and his own fragile psyche, Wind looks for a way out, one that might lead him into his mother’s shadow.
In Stitch, Kylie Grandview is a single mom struggling to make a living as a porn star while dreaming of being on the big screen. She’s painfully aware that she is among the many nameless faces on the Internet, the ones that blip across cyberspace, as her yeast infection, Itchia, reminds her at every turn. But when Kylie is offered the chance at a big break, a series of twisted events lead her down a destructive path, revealing a face no one will forget.
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In Spirit
$17.95Twelve-year-old Molly was riding her new bicycle on a deserted road when a man in a truck pulled up next to her, saying he was lost. He asked if she could get in and help him back to the highway, and said he could bring her back to her bike after. Molly declined, out of interest for her own safety. The next things Molly remembers are dirt, branches, trees, pain, and darkness.
Molly is now a spirit.
Mustering up some courage, she pieces together her short life for herself and her family while she reassembles her bicycle—the same one that was found thrown into the trees on the side of the road. Juxtaposed with flashes of news, sounds, and videos, Molly’s chilling tale becomes more and more vivid, challenging humanity not to forget her presence and importance.
In an intimate, loving approach to the tragic subject of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the acclaimed author of Dreary and Izzy shines a light on the haunting tale of a preteen’s last moments.
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Indian Act
$29.95Indian Act is a tribute and thank you to those who survived the Indian Residential School system so that future generations could be free to pursue their lives unhindered by educationally enforced lowered expectations and institutionalized abuse. Seven plays by contemporary First Nations and Metis playwrights cover the broad scope of residential school experiences, all kinds of characters, and no stereotypes, giving voice to those who could not be heard.
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Kamloopa
$16.95TIME: All.
SPACE: The Multiverse.
Come along for the ride to Kamloopa, the largest Powwow on the West Coast. This high-energy Indigenous matriarchal story follows two urban Indigenous sisters and a lawless Trickster who face our world head-on as they come to terms with what it means to honour who they are and where they come from. But how to go about discovering yourself when Christopher Columbus allegedly already did that? Bear witness to the courage of these women as they turn to their Ancestors for help in reclaiming their power in this ultimate transformation story.In developing matriarchal relationships and shared Indigenous values, Kamloopa explores the fearless love and passion of two Indigenous women reconnecting with their homelands, Ancestors, and stories. Kim Senklip Harvey’s play is a boundary-blurring adventure that will remind you to always dance like the Ancestors are watching.
Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story is the work of Kim Senklip Harvey, a proud Indigenous woman from the Syilx, Tsilhqot’in, Ktunaxa, and Dakelh First Nations, listed for the Gina Wilkinson Prize for her work as an emerging director and widely considered to be one of this land’s most original voices among the next generation of Indigenous artists.
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Medicine Shows
$19.95Contemporary Indigenous theatre in Canada is only thirty-three years old, if one begins counting from the premiere of Maria Campbell’s Jessica in Saskatoon and the establishment of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto. Since those contemporaneous events in 1982, the Canadian community of Indigenous theatre artists has grown and inspired one another.Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture traces the work of a host of these artists over the past three decades, illuminating the connections, the artistic genealogy, and the development of a contemporary Indigenous theatre practice. Neither a history nor a chronicle,Medicine Shows examines how theatre has been used to make medicine, reconnecting individuals and communities, giving voice to the silenced and disappeared, staging ceremony, and honouring the ancestors.
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Sila
$17.95In Inuit mythology, “sila” means air, climate, or breath. Bilodeau’s play of the same name examines the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and local Inuit population. Equal parts Inuit myth and contemporary Arctic policy, the play Sila features puppetry, spoken word poetry, and three different languages (English, French, and Inuktitut).
There is more afoot in the Arctic than one might think. On Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut, eight characters – including a climatologist, an Inuit activist and her son, and two polar bears – find their values challenged as they grapple with a rapidly changing environment and world. Sila captures the fragility of life and the interconnectedness of lives, both human and animal, and reveals in gleaming tones that telling the stories of everyday challenges – especially raising children and maintaining family ties – is always more powerful than reciting facts
and figures.Our changing climate will have a significant impact on how we organize ourselves. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Arctic, where warming temperatures are displacing entire ecosystems. The Arctic Cycle – eight plays that examine the impact of climate change on the eight countries of the Arctic – poignantly addresses this issue. Sila is the first play of The Arctic Cycle. With its large-as-life polar bear puppets, the play is evocative and mesmerizing, beautifully blurring the boundaries between folklore and science.