The Toronto Theatre Review: TIFT’s Tales of an Urban Indian
By Ross
He stands and grins, that kind of grin that makes you lean in with mischievous pleasure, while also holding back a little. Not because you fear him, in any way, but we can sense that there’s something in that smile that is a bit deliciously devious, in all the ways we like, and all the ways that can get us into some kind of trouble. Maybe the kind of trouble we like, but rarely indulge in, because we know the slippery slope that lives in that grin. There’s a mystical indigenous signature piece of music layering itself over the open space inside Toronto’s Hope United Church (2550 Danforth Ave at Main) where Tales of an Urban Indian is being presented quite passionately by Talk is Free Theatre, setting us up for a punchline which our man, Simon, played with a charmingly energetic and engaging demeanor by Nolan Moberly (“My Lupine Life“), delivers with that same devilish sideways smile. “I never heard the owl call my name,” he tells us, and we get the framing instantly. Creating that perfectly formed playing field, the brilliantly defined Tales of an Urban Indian, written with a strong sense of self by Darrell Dennis (NEPA’s Trickster of Third Avenue East), and as directed by Herbie Barnes (YPT’s It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play), runs fast and furious at and before us, gifting us with the pleasure of this man’s captivating company and his engaging roguish ways and means.
Tales of an Urban Indian, as conjured up by Talk is Free Theatre, is the powerfully clever semi-autobiographical story of Simon Douglas, an Indigenous young man who grew up navigating both the reserve and the big urban city of Vancouver. As played by Moberly, all the sorted characters come alive and swinging, with their framing based on the cloudy memory of this young man and his attempt to drunkenly tightrope his way through both worlds. It’s a fascinatingly engaging conjuring, one that triggers complex issues around assimilation and personal disappointment and rage. It hits hard and true, especially for this card-carrying Indigenous man, who lived somewhat on the opposite side of Simon’s two land survival technique. I grew up in middle-class suburbia (unlike my mom, who was born and raised, for a time, on a reservation in southwestern Ontario), knowing little of my background and heritage until I got older. I remember watching the Res kids get off the school bus in front of our high school, at first not knowing anything about my own Indigenous status. There definitely was a divide; in the way they dressed, the way they talked, and the way they interacted. We were those other kids, the ones described in these Tales who would keep our eyes down if we had to sit beside them on a bus, or politely turn down a date proposal. We kept to ourselves, and they kept to their own.
It all seemed somewhat fine to this blue-eyed blond boy (who was dealing with his own internal sexual struggle), but once I was informed of my own personal blood roots by my Mohawk grandmother and my Iroquois grandfather, who lived on a reservation that I had never been to, a shift occurred inside me. I could never look at that chasm in the same way ever again. Nor did I want to. My mother, I am told, had to deal with all the negative racist stereotypes that Moberly’s Simon talks about during her time as an emergency ward nurse, but I never really had to, at least not in the same insulting manner. I didn’t look the part, as was (literally) pointed out by many a U.S. Immigration Officer, dismissively laughing at me. And as I took in all that Simon had to go through in this “wonderbreadland” of supposed “civilized” Canada outside of the reservation, I shuffled in my seat of privilege, contemplating a different plane of existence if my deliverence into the world had come about differently, and without the safety of my perceived whiteness.
The dark comedic Tales of addiction and death, delivered across the floor with stone-cold assurance by Moberly in a sensationally energetic and captivating storytelling manner, play with the character’s restlessness and discomfort. His sweat and internalized resistance resonate, where his words and actions continually get him into trouble, as well as all that bad medicine he ingests to supposedly escape those feelings. Moberly expertly runs laps around the long corridor, created with a strong sense of purpose by production designer Kathleen Black (TIFT’s Sweeney Todd), rapidly pulling us along beside him as he attempts to navigate and survive the tree planter Alister, his mother’s East Vancouver boyfriend who tries with all his might to both showoff his ‘native’ girlfriend to his friends, and to “civilize” them into become “slaves of the white man’s dollar“, sliced in with the numerous returns to reservation life that is both connectively good but also almost deadly for him. Like a three-times-over stone-moving car crash just waiting to happen.
Expertly exploring all the complicated and chaotic themes of growing up as an Indigenous First Nations young man straddling two worlds with little guidance, Tales of an Urban Indian strongly strides forward with clever confidence and clarity, thanks to the pointed writing of Dennis and the strong connective performance by Moberly. The play itself has been nominated for two Dora Awards (Best Original Play and Best Performance by an actor), been produced for multiple tours across Canada and the United States, including a French translation that was performed in Montreal, and was also performed at the Autry Theater in Los Angeles and the legendary Public Theater in New York in March 2009. Most fascinatingly, it was also performed by the playwright himself on a city bus while driving on the streets of Barrie, Ontario, in 2009. Now that’s one bus ride I would have liked to have been on.
And here, in a small corridor of space in the basement of a church near Main Street subway station in East Toronto, Tales of an Urban Indian, as performed beautifully by Moberly, finds perfectly crafted depth and meaning in the complex creation that is 90s native pride and anger. It dynamically hashes out the brooding, broken wings of liberation and limitation, and snorts it up with force inside a WASP nest of disappointment and discomfort. The word of God is proclaimed, not in the traditional Anglo-sense, yet we feel the pride and power that lives inside all these Tales of an Urban Indian. It’s completely engaging and relatable, especially for this two-spirited Mohawk man who watched with wide-eyed wonder of the portrait that was created with such love and care by this Talk is Free Theatre team.
