Read more
The third play in Taylor's farcical examination of Native and non-Native stereotypes. Cast of 3 women and 3 men.
About the author
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.
Summary
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.”
Marianne has talked her mother, Martha, into attending an Elders conference with her, where she is to be used as a resource person, even though Martha doesn’t believe she has anything to offer anyone. Held in a college setting, the keynote paper of the conference is a dissertation on “the courting, love, and sexual habits of contemporary First Nations people as perceived by Western Society,” delivered by none other than a “Professor Savage.” Just to keep the caricatures in balance, Savage’s nemesis throughout the action is a young Native man, replete with dark sunglasses and a Mountie coat, who goes by the name “The Warrior Who Never Sleeps.”
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.
