About the Play:

The Bootlegger Blues is a full-length comedy by Drew Hayden Taylor. A church-going, teetotaling Ojibway woman bootlegs a considerable amount of beer in order to raise money for the church. There's a small catch or two, her son is home from police college, and her daughter and son-in-law work for the band council. One-liners, hilarious dialogues, marriage problems, everything is there.

The Bootlegger Blues is about love, family, and what to do with too much beer. Set on a reserve, it follows the plight of Martha Kakina, a church-going Ojibway elder who followed the advice of a fellow committee member regarding the amount of beverages to order for the church fundraiser. Now she is stuck with 143 cases of beer she can't return. What is a teetotaling woman to do? She decides to bootleg the beer, to the horror of her son Andrew, nicknamed Blue, who is soon to become a special constable on the reserve. Meanwhile, Andrew has fallen for a young woman he thinks is his cousin, and his sister Marianne hates her humdrum job at the band office and is bored with her "Indian Yuppie" husband and finds herself attracted to a handsome dancer at the powwow. The pace is fast and vigorous in this romantic situation comedy.

The Bootlegger Blues premiered in 1990 by De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig Theatre Group in Manitowaning, Ontario and won the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award. Since then the play has been successfully staged at several professional theatres in Canada and the US. Though it stands on it's own, The Bootlegger Blues is the first play in what Drew Hayden Taylor calls his Blues Quartet.

Cast: 3 female, 3 male

What people say:

"It's sole purpose is to make us laugh and it succeeds…It should be no surprise that this is a comedy of character and situations. Herein lies…the strength of Taylor's writing… He has vividly created some of the characters….We know from the first moment that we are going to be entertained. Taylor has invited us into his home an offered us a glimpse of Reserve life through a uniquely comic eye." — The Canadian Journal of Native Studies

"There was an elder from the Blood Reserve who once told me that in his opinion, for Native people, humour is the WD-40 of healing. So I try and use that in all my work. I try to be a healer." — Drew Hayden Taylor

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

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.