About the Play:

Winner of Theatre BC's Canadian National Playwriting Competition for 2005

Stretching Hide is a full-length comedic drama by Dale Lakevold and Darrell Racine. The wardens are looking for a poacher in this play about a contemporary Métis community's attempt to reconcile its past. Stretching Hide takes place in the chaotic home community of a young Métis lawyer, who is showing his fiancée around. His legal practice and his personal life converge when he is accused by the provincial game wardens of poaching a deer for its antlers.

Stretching Hide is about a Métis lawyer accused of poaching. The central couple is Frank Ducharme, a young Métis lawyer introducing his white fiancé Clara to his family's rough-and-tumble home community of The Willows outside Saskatoon one July long weekend. Just about the time she declares, "Everything's going to be perfect," the discovery of a dead deer with its antlers removed on Frank's land has everyone turning on each other. That weekend his law practice and his personal life are threatened. The provincial game wardens are looking to charge someone with poaching and Frank is suddenly in their crosshairs. Stretching Hide heads to the country to present a portrait of a community not often seen on Canadian stages or written into the official histories of Canada – the Métis Nation – a distinct group that traces lineage to both Indigenous nations and European settlers.

Stretching Hide premiered in 2007 by Theatre Projects Manitoba in collaboration with Root Sky Productions in Winnipeg.

Cast: 3 women, 4 men

What people say:

"Stretching Hide presents a very serious story with compelling honesty and humour." — Uptown

"My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back." — Louis Riel

About the Playwright:

Dale Lakevold is a playwright from Brandon, Manitoba, whose background is Norwegian and Hungarian. He has had more than 40 professional, independent, and university productions of his plays since 1996. He teaches creative writing in the Department of English at Brandon University.

Darrell Racine is a Métis fiction writer, screenwriter and playwright from the Turtle Mountains in Manitoba. He is a graduate of Harvard University and Cambridge University, and holds a doctorate from Oxford University. He teaches in the Department of Native Studies at Brandon University.