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Drama Canadian

400 Kilometres

by (author) Drew Hayden Taylor

Publisher
Talonbooks
Initial publish date
Sep 2005
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780889225176
    Publish Date
    Sep 2005
    List Price
    $17.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781772015294
    Publish Date
    Dec 2022
    List Price
    $16.95

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Description

400 Kilometres is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor’s hilarious and heart-wrenching identity-politics trilogy. Janice Wirth, a thirty-something urban professional, having discovered her roots as the Ojibway orphan Grace Wabung in Someday, and having visited her birth family on the Otter Lake Reserve in Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, is pregnant, and must now come to grips with the question of her “true identity.” Her adoptive parents have just retired, and are about to sell their house to embark on a quest for their own identity by “returning” to England. Meanwhile, the Native father of her child-to-be is attempting to convince Janice/Grace that their new generation’s future lies with their “own people” at Otter Lake.
Which path for the future is Janice/Grace to choose, for herself, her families and her child, having spent a lifetime caught between the questions of “what I am” and “who I am”?
Cast of 3 women and 2 men.

About the author

Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor is from the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario. Hailed by the Montreal Gazette as one of Canada’s leading Native dramatists, he writes for the screen as well as the stage and contributes regularly to North American Native periodicals and national NEWSpapers. His plays have garnered many prestigious awards, and his beguiling and perceptive storytelling style has enthralled audiences in Canada, the United States and Germany. His 1998 play Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth has been anthologized in Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays, published by the Theatre Communications Group. Although based in Toronto, Taylor has travelled extensively throughout North America, honouring requests to read from his work and to attend arts festivals, workshops and productions of his plays. He was also invited to Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in California, where he taught a series of seminars on the depiction of Native characters in fiction, drama and film. One of his most established bodies of work includes what he calls the Blues Quartet, an ongoing, outrageous and often farcical examination of Native and non-Native stereotypes.

Drew Hayden Taylor's profile page

Editorial Reviews

"Drew Hayden Taylor is not only one of the funniest writers in Canada today, he’s one of the most astute as well. He’s got both common sense and a sense of humour. What a winning combination!"
—CBC Radio

“Sharply written. Warm and funny."
Halifax Daily News

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