ABSTRACT
The extraordinary success of Tomson Highway’s first major play, The Rez Sisters (1986), constituted a turning point in the development of Native Canadian theatre. Prior efforts in the field had largely been confined to fringe and community venues, whereas Highway’s earthy comedy about the lives of seven reservation women entered the mainstream in spectacular style. After its warmly received premiere in Toronto in November 1986, where it won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new play, The Rez Sisters had a sell-out tour of Canada, a season at the 1988 Edinburgh Festival, and a workshop production in New York. This is an impressive achievement by any standards, but perhaps the play’s greatest significance stems from its insistence on the inherent theatricality of everyday Native life. By staging ‘ordinary’ but complex indigenous characters that moved beyond the well-established stereotypes circulated in various white discourses, including drama, Highway had claimed a space in Canadian theatre for Native peoples and Native performance styles. His play initiated a surge of theatrical activity, which has expanded over the 1990s into a substantial corpus of indigenous work that includes contributions by Daniel David Moses, Monique Mojica, Drew Hayden Taylor, Marie Clements and Margo Kane, among others.
