by Lee Maracle
There have been a number of Native playwrights plying their craft since Drew Hayden Taylor’s first play hit the market, but Mr. Taylor was one of the first modern Native playwrights to meet with success. Being first gets you in front of an audience. What keeps you there is continuous growth – each work has to be better than the last. Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth is the second play in a planned trilogy focused on the “scoop-up” phenomenon, continuing in some form to this day, in which a large number of Native children were removed from their homes, their communities, their culture, never to return. It is his finest piece of work to date.
Characters like those in Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth can be found on any reserve: the sage, in the form of the not-so-old Tonto, full of understated humour; the clown, Rodney; the modern woman with strong historical roots, Barb; and her sister, the not-quite-as-likely Grace, the lawyer. This play is subtly layered: the conflict between Western values and Native values played out through the sisters, free of the usual didactic preaching; the conflict between Western ideology and Native wisdom, played out through the interaction between Tonto and Grace; and within each are the very specific conflicts that go on within the members of a family that has been torn apart through no fault of its own – the internal conflict of those besieged by external forces and dismembered.
We all face the invisible enemy of circumstance, which has no face, no name.We often refer to this enemy as “the system,” “white society,” “structural racism,” “institutionalized oppression.” It is a sticky, gossamer-thin web of hesitation that wraps itself around each one of us, causing us to constantly question our ordinary lives. It creates a dichotomy within. On one hand, Grace, the sister who was away, is a successful entertainment lawyer. On the other, she is childless, husbandless, living alone in an apartment in Toronto, her work having become her closest friend. Barb, the sister who stayed, works for the band. She is typically connected to her community, tied to her family, and has enjoyed her mother’s upbringing, but something inside keeps her frustrated, unable to appreciate her life fully; the missing sister has never been absent from her mother’s heart, mind, and spirit. The omnipresence of the missing Grace blinded the mother, reshaped Barb, and blocked both mother and daughter from realizing a full relationship. All are strangely innocent in the creation of these many conflicts. All are extremely frustrated and unfulfilled by them.
Barb hesitates to call Grace during their mother’s spiral into death. Grace hesitates to return. Their mother, broken-hearted, has lost her zeal for living, hesitating to really look at her life free of the return of Grace. This failure to appreciate our lives, such as they are, arises from the blocks set in our paths by systemic oppression. Sometimes shit happens. Mr. Taylor speaks to it in a very significant and extraordinary way: without the usual crassness, free of didacticism, proclamations, white-society bashing. Nowhere in this wonderfully amusing, terribly tragic work does the “enemy” find a place on stage. The magic of good writing in my mind is to create the dramas of ordinary peoples’ lives, to unfold them, and to keep the social conditions from which they arise solidly buried underneath in a way that jostles up the characters you have created. Mr. Taylor’s Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth does this very well. He does it in our own language. He does it in a way that is respectful to all the characters, men and women, and in a way that remains tender toward the society that has created the horror of loss.
This great care not to scrape the skin off white society creates an unusual hope for a future in what is otherwise a tragic condition. Hope is what we have so little of in our world. We have become bereft of hope, so bereft thatmany of our children are committing suicide. This play is so full of life, beyond our oppressive conditions, without being at all shy of the necessity of pulling at the ugly knots this oppression creates: unravelling the “big ugly” and reweaving something else. Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth is so rich in character, our characters, so Native in the conjuring, that we can walk away renewed with hope for ourselves. Ourselves, who in the long run are the only people who can change our lives.
The characters in Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth are elegantly crafted, imbued with the sort of strength and flexibility that often is born among underclasses. This strength and flexibility is not conventionalized as heroic because it does not produce the sort of concrete results this product-oriented society expects of such conventions. For a Western society struggling to produce Native works of art on stage, Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth poses the challenge of showcasing the strength of Barb without losing her particular brand of sensitive flexibility.
Likewise with Grace, her strength lies in her knowing her boundary lines and in some sort of unspoken way retaining her understanding of her little sister growing up without her. There is an underlying yearning here, in the centre of an imagined feeling that touches all the characters in one way or another, and Mr. Taylor’s skill consists in never actually articulating this feeling, never directly addressing it, yet somehow holding it there for all to see.
In creating this piece of magic, this feeling, Mr. Taylor’s Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth gives you a glimpse of what it is to be us. You are watching the yearning and the incompletion of all of us. His play does so poignantly, free of preaching, free of judgment about the other, and full of respect for us.