Culture clubs Trinity Rep’s frantic Buz’Gem Blues BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	The Buz’Gem Blues By Drew Hayden Taylor. Directed by Kennetch Charlette. With Timothy Crowe, Cheri Maracle-Cardinal, Sheila Tousey, Darrell Dennis, Miriam Silverman, Dennis Ambriz, and Eleanor Harris. Set design by Michael McGarty. Costume design by William Lane. Lighting design by Tim Whelan. Sound design by Peter Sasha Hurowitz. At Trinity Repertory Company through June 19.

When are more playwrights going to catch on to theater’s humbling little secret — that theatergoers just wanna have fun? (That’s also true for the intellectual fun of serious plays like Copenhagen and the roller-coaster rush of emotional release in tragedies like Lear, for that matter.)

Storytelling satisfactions abound in the regional premiere of Drew Haden Taylor’s The Buz’Gem Blues, which has had public readings at Trinity Repertory Company in recent years and by now is polished to sparkling.

It’s a flat-out comedy, and much satisfaction comes from appreciating that it’s not just another pack of funny lies. Comedy is a soul-wrenching job, with so many ways to be dishonest just to get a laugh.

The setting is an annual conference on Native elders, held at a Canadian university. Attending are Ojibways Martha (Sheila Tousey), there to talk about her tribal language, and her daughter Marianne (Cheri Maracle-Cardinal), freshly out of an 11-year relationship with an, ultimately, incompatible white guy. Martha is shaking her head over the irony that when she was young "the government tried beating the language out of us" but now she’s getting paid well to speak it. "I just wish them white people would make up their minds." The potential buzz’gem (Ojibway for sweetheart) in widow Martha’s future is Amos (Dennis Ambriz), who is cooking for conference attendees. They are both around 60, but he has a 25-year-old girlfriend/kitchen-helper, Summer (Miriam Silverman). To that, Martha is bemused but disapproving: "I still own my husband’s eight-track player, but I’m smart enough to know that a CD don’t belong in it."

Such wisecrack opportunities fill the air like low-hanging fruit, and sometimes it seems that no one here can take two steps without plucking. That’s the peril of a play like this, that the writer will decorate incongruous situations with laugh lines rather than let the witticisms pop out of discomforts like stubbed-toe yelps.

Being a blue-eyed Native Canadian writer, playwright Taylor shapes each of these entertaining characters around the same flexible armature: baffled self-identity. The most extreme example is the young Cree who calls himself The Warrior Who Never Sleeps (Darrell Dennis). Mysterious in dark glasses and a red Mounties jacket that he took in a coup-counting foray into a white-owned dry-cleaners, the character is over the top and up the next hill. In the beginning, Dennis forces the posturing, though going for intense sincerity would have been affecting as well as funny. But the choreographed sign language that accompanies his lofty talk — "I am the spirit of our ways; I draw strength from our survival and sustenance from our ways" — is inventive, and eventually, subtly, the character segues from annoying to winning.

Under Kennetch Charlette’s direction, Silverman similarly hits the stage running and never gets out of breath as the fast-talking Summer, who yearns to expand her 1/64th-Native identity to fill her world. Both characters start out as somewhat off-putting and end up — as we watch these cardboard cutouts assume rounded contours — getting to us through their momentum of abject innocence. Poor sun-struck Summer strives to merge her two cultures as she does with her ingenious fusion foods: salmon milkshake, a chocolate mousse using real moose.

The final stereotype that this play tries to clarify into an archetype is Prof. Savage, whom Timothy Crowe succeeds at from the opening scene, as he lectures to the audience. The anthropologist is conducting interviews on Native courting rituals, wanting "the words Savage and Native sexuality to become synonymous." Combine that blithe academic obtuseness with Crowe’s masterful attention to the little fiddly-bits of moment-to-moment acting opportunities and you have a comic character you could watch all night.

The ill-conceived downstairs theater set design is distracting, an upper level going to waste with a big sign when what we need is at least a corner of an institutional kitchen, where much slicing and dicing action takes place.

But, more importantly, the roles all fit these actors as though tailor-made, and in fact Tousey and Dennis did the 2001 Trinity Rep reading of this play. In that earlier incarnation, as I recall, the characters already had all of the amiability that makes us want to hang out with them for a couple of hours. The subsequent tightening up of the text and filling out of these people has also fulfilled the greater aim of The Buz’Gem Blues, way past the laughter it prompts. As with these people, whom we see accommodating their inner and outer worlds to two cultures, we get to think about merging this microcosm of Native concerns with our larger world of just plain being human.