About the Play:

Finalist for the 1989 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize)

Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing is a full-length comedic drama by Tomson Highway. This Dora and Chalmers Award-winning play looks at the lives of seven men who live on a fictitious modern reserve. The community has a secret that has twisted them in different ways, each of them pursuing his own quest.A fast-paced story of tragedy, comedy, and hope.

Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing is the flip-side of Highway's award-winning The Rez Sisters. Whereas the earlier play centres on the women who inhabit the fictional Wasaychigan Hill Reserve on Manitoulin Island (or as its residents refer to it, "Wasy"), this play focuses on the plight of the reserve's men. Weaving lyrical threads of First Nations mythological symbolism through a gabardine of gritty social realism, the play encompasses familiar Highway territory, where the sacred and the profane intersect through dream vision. The plot, which combines broad brush-strokes of slapstick and ribald humour, traces the trials and tribulations of the men after the women decide to form an all-female hockey team. The comic story-line, however, simply provides the setting for what the play is really about, which is the complex problems – social, political, metaphysical, psychological, emotional and spiritual – contemporary First Nations people face. Tragedy enters here because this involves nothing less than survival of First Nations culture in all its life-enhancing forms.

Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing premiered in 1989 by Native Earth Performing Arts at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille, won four Mavor Moore Awards and the Floyd S. Chalmers Award for outstanding Canadian play. It subsequently took Ottawa's National Arts Centre by storm, and catapulted Tomson Highway into Canadian theatre history, becoming the first play written by a Canadian to ever to receive a full production and extended 6-week run at the venerable Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto's longest-operating commercial theatre.

Cast: 1 woman, 7 men

What people say:

"Irreverent and totally refreshing, Dry Lips was a much needed change-up in Canadian theatre storytelling. It told a tragicomic story of men on the Rez protesting an all-girl hockey team, drawing criticism and controversy for its portrayal of Native men's attitudes towards women. Highway's choice to use humour as his weapon to talk about enduring universal struggles and inequity was brave and inspiring." — The Book of Lists

"A stunning evening of theatre, filled with ritual, magic, grim realism, and the spirit of life." — The Toronto Star

"Dry Lips... is the second award-winning play by native playwright Tomson Highway. The first, his 1986 work The Rez Sisters, revealed a strong talent and a boisterous, frank view of reserve life that audiences hadn't seen before in Canada. Dry Lips continues The Rez Sisters' mix of earthy comedy and dark tragedy in an even more ambitious vein, and leaves a sprawling and disturbing series of themes in its wake." — The Globe and Mail

About the Playwright:

Tomson Highway is a Cree playwright, composer and classical pianist. He is considered one of Canada's foremost First Nations voices, and is best known for his award-winning "rez" cycle of plays: The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, and Rose. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Music and a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Western Ontario. He ran Canada's premiere Indigenous theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts, for many years and impacted a generation of professional playwrights and actors. Born in northern Manitoba to a family of nomadic caribou hunters, he speaks Cree, Dene, English, and French. He has won four Dora Mavor Moore Awards, a Chalmers Award, and a Wang Festival Award. The first Aboriginal writer to be inducted into the Order of Canada, and named one of the 100 most important people in Canadian history by Macleans in 2000, he has shaped the development of Aboriginal theatre in both Canada and around the world.