Native tongue Trinity Rep paints Taylor’s Buz’Gem Blues BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Drew Haden Taylor’s The Buz’Gem Blues is an amiable tale of love. What distinguishes the play is its unrelenting good-humor and its setting far off the usual regional theater track — how many comedies have you seen set behind the scenes at a conference on "the Canadian Aboriginal"?

After giving readings of earlier versions of the play in 2000 and 2001, Trinity Repertory Company is staging a full-blown production May 13 through June 19. Directing is Kennetch Charlette, artistic director of the Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company.

We meet Amos, the 61-year-old cook for the conference whose chirpy assistant and girlfriend, Summer, is 25 and hell-bent on fanning the spark of her faint Ojibway ancestry. Things change when he meets Martha, a feisty tribal elder there to give a language workshop — will she and Amos stop annoying each other long enough to connect? Also up for change are Martha’s spirited daughter, Marianne, and a too-serious young Native who insists on being called the Warrior Who Never Sleeps. The Ojibway word in the title means "sweetheart."

Performing are five Native actors and Trinity company members Timothy Crowe as a stuffy white anthropologist and Miriam Silverman as Summer.

Playwright Taylor notes he likes to say "I’m married to theater but I have many mistresses." Though he has had 18 plays staged in more than 70 productions, he also has published more than a dozen books, has written or directed some 17 film and video documentaries concerning Natives, and has tried his hand at magazine journalism and television, wearing various hats. His prize-winning plays include Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock/Education Is Our Right, The Bootlegger Blues, The Baby Blues, and Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth. No, he’s not a dabbler in theater. For several years in the 1990s he was playwright-in-residence and the artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto. He spoke recently from that city, where he was writing a pilot for a new television show and adapting a play on Irish Tinkers.

Q: On the issue of whether blood trumps culture: The character Summer, who is 1/64th Ojibway, gets put down as a wannabe even though she speaks the language fluently. So you found that no matter how much you are part of a culture, it had difficulties?

A: I get flak from both sides. I get flak from Native people who say I’m just a wannabe or I’m just a mixed blood with pretensions. And then white people who look at me — the blue eyes or whatever — and say, "You’re not Native." I’ve had 16 books published and four of them are volumes of my humorous articles and essays dealing with all kinds of topics. The title of one of them is Funny, You Don’t Look Like One: Observations of a Blue-Eyed Ojibway.

Q: Do you have any assessment of the relative advantages and disadvantages of Native writers in the States and Canada? The Native homeland of Nunavut became a vast Canadian territory in 1999, an indication that attitudes are distinctly different.

A: Well, up here there is much more government support of the arts. And as a result, there’s much more training available for Native artists. I was on the board of directors for the Center for Indigenous Theater, which is a national Native theater school. I was artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts, which was Canada’s premiere theater company and one of six or eight year-round permanent theater companies. We have our own cable television network called Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. There are three or four Native publishers, which publish books by Native authors. The support and the development of Native artists up here is quite lovely.

Q: In 1988 you turned down a gig as playwright-in-residence in Canada before eventually accepting it because, you said, you didn’t like theater. I assume your opinion has changed?

A: Yeah, I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into it. My original reason being I knew nothing about theater. Not a lot of theater came to my reserve, shall we say, when I was in town. I was taught that theater is basically dead white people. When I was offered the opportunity, I thought theater was pretentious — I thought I’d have to spend my days speaking in iambic pentameter, all that sort of stuff. It did not interest me whatsoever. But I didn’t have a career. I was lurching from contract to contract and I needed the money and there was a salary involved. I ended up just gritting my teeth and saying, "Oh, very well, I’ll do it."

Q: What have you discovered in the interim?

A: I love the instantaneous response from the audience. Because I do a lot of comedy, I love the fact that I can hear them laugh. I can be watching the audience and hear and see them turn on a particular word in a phrase, and I love that. When dealing with dramas or more serious plays I love sitting there and seeing the audience cry. That’s such a unique feeling, seeing that I’ve been able to manipulate an audience to the point where there are actually tears being shed.