Description
Drew Hayden Taylor is an award-winning playwright, novelist, filmmaker, and journalist. Born and living on the Curve Lake First Nation in Ontario, he has done everything from performing stand-upcomedy at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, to serving as artistic director of Canada’s premiere Indigenous theatre company, NativeEarth Performing Arts. He is also known for his popular documentary series on APTN, Going Native.
Sir John A is an uproariously funny and sharply inquisitive new play from one of Canada’s leading Indigenous playwrights.
Bobby Rabbit, the play’s Anishnawbe main character, convinces his friend Hugh to accompany him on a “sojourn of justice” to dig up the bones of Canada’s infamous first prime minister and hold them for ransom. Decades before, a medicine pouch belonging to Bobby’s grandfather was taken away by the staff of the residential school where he was detained. The precious object was sent to a British Museum exhibition room for conservation – and now Bobby wants it repatriated. Along the way the pair pick up Anya, a bright, opinionated young woman who is fleeing a bad breakup and holds conflicting ideas about Sir John A.’s place in Canadian history. Not to be left out of the argument, Sir John A. himself, broadcasting live from nineteenth-century Ottawa and full of patriarchal contempt for those “strange and perplexing Indians,” shows up with opinions of his own.
Taylor’s twenty-seventh play, Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion explores the possibility of reconciliation and urgently questions past and contemporary forms of Canadian colonialism. A contemporary classic!