About the Play:

400 Kilometres is a full-length comedy by Drew Hayden Taylor. With his usual flair for mixing comedy and drama, Drew Hayden Taylor tells the story of Janice Wirth, a thirty-something urban professional. Having discovered her roots as the Ojibway orphan Grace Wabung, Janice discovers she is pregnant, and must now come to grips with the question of her 'true' identity.

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"?

400 Kilometres premiered in 1999 by Two Planks and a Passion Theatre in Wolfville, Nova Scotia as part of the Atlantic Theatre Festival. Since then the play has been successfully staged at several professional theatres across Canada and in the US.

Cast: 3 female, 2 male

What people say:

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

"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

"Drew Hayden Taylor has a deft touch for mixing comedy and commentary in an entertaining and all-Canadian form of social satire." — Vancouver Sun

"Very tender scenes, very loving scenes… its very well done… I think its a very clever idea that Taylor had here in that instead of going to the 'scoop up' and giving us a play about a child who had a horrible life, he gives us instead a story about a child who had a very, very good life. And shows that despite the wonderful life this girl had, she still wants to know who she is and that's the drama!" — CBC Radio Saskatoon

"Taylor uses a light touch to open up painful subject in his entertaining new play… delivers some great one liners, sets up a juicy conflict and quickly and credibly captures the white parents in their amusing, affectionate, assured banter… he has allowed something painful to be examined and easily entered into by a laughing native or white viewer." — Halifax Chronicle-Herald

About the Playwright:

Drew Hayden Taylor one of Canada's best known and most prolific Indigenous writers. An Ojibway born on Curve Lake First Nation near Peterborough, Ontario, he has worn many hats in his literary career, from performing stand-up comedy at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., to being Artistic Director of Canada's premiere Aboriginal theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts. He has been an award-winning playwright (with productions of his work in Canada, the US, and Europe), a journalist/columnist (appearing regularly in several Canadian newspapers and magazines), short-story writer, novelist, television scriptwriter, and documentary filmmaker.