Scan barcode
liralen's review
4.0
This must take a particular type of actress to perform: Heather Rose opens the play from a reasonably comfortable perch in a southern Canadian city, telling her audience about her experience as a health worker in a Native community in the far north. It's a role that calls not just for a gradual shift in emotions—from the naïvété of a young, untried white woman to disillusionment to bitterness—but also for the ability to drop, from time to time, into the roles of other people in the remote north.
This was published in 2008 but written and performed much earlier—there are photos from the first production in 1986. I'd be curious to know just what would change if this were written today, given what is now public knowledge about things like the abuse that went on in residential schools (which don't make it into the play—I just imagine that a contemporary play would have something to say about them). It's already quite a self-aware (and incisive) play—and oh, I've just realised that Lill does have a play about residential schools, published in 1991. Time to see what more I can dig up at the library!
This was published in 2008 but written and performed much earlier—there are photos from the first production in 1986. I'd be curious to know just what would change if this were written today, given what is now public knowledge about things like the abuse that went on in residential schools (which don't make it into the play—I just imagine that a contemporary play would have something to say about them). It's already quite a self-aware (and incisive) play—and oh, I've just realised that Lill does have a play about residential schools, published in 1991. Time to see what more I can dig up at the library!
More...