About the Play:

The Buz'Gem Blues is a full-length comedy by Drew Hayden Taylor. Buz'Gem is an Ojibway word meaning boyfriend or girlfriend, and The Buz'gem Blues is a romantic comedy about mismatches in which generational gaps are compounded by the gaps between cultures.

The Buz'Gem Blues brings back the mother and daughter team of Ojibway elder Martha and Marianne Kakina, a recently divorced Rez sister (that's rez as in reservation) from The Bootlegger Blues, as well as with the intergenerational and crosscultural couple Mohawk elder Amos and Summer, a young student obsessed by the fact she's 1/64th Ojibway, from The Baby Blues. These characters clearly have a history, but they are quickly thrown into a romantic tailspin by surprisingly new and compelling entanglements. Marianne has talked Martha into attending an Elders conference with her, where she is to be used as a resource person, even though Martha doesn't believe she has anything to offer anyone. Held in a college setting, the keynote paper of the conference is a dissertation on “the courting, love, and sexual habits of contemporary First Nations people as perceived by Western Society,” delivered by none other than a white cultural anthropologist "Professor Savage." Just to keep the caricatures in balance, Savage's nemesis throughout the action is a young Indigenous man, replete with dark sunglasses and a in fire-red Mountie coat, who goes by the name "The Warrior Who Never Sleeps." The Buz'Gem Blues is not a play about clichés with which we have become so familiar that we recognize them as stereotypes instantly, but rather about how our ritualized and institutionalized systems of maintaining and policing those clichés prevent us from recognizing our common humanity within each other.

The Buz'Gem Blues premiered in 2001 at Lighthouse Theatre in Port Dover, Ontario. 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 Buz'Gem Blues is the third play (following Bootlegger Blues and The Baby Blues) in what Drew Hayden Taylor calls his Blues Quartet.

Cast: 3 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Like the best black writers of the late 1950s, Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin, Taylor's plays are about ordinary people living ordinary lives. He skewers liberal and native stereotypes, preferring to deal on a more human level." — Hamilton Examiner

"Taylor breaks down cliched binaries of Native and White, Age and Youth, Experience and Education, the Elder and the Academic, the Activist and Wannabe to reveal people dealing with age, sexuality, loneliness, and ultimately, with their own individuality. The Buz'Gem Blues explores how individuals need to learn to see how they see each other, before they can begin to see themselves." — John Moffat, Canadian Literature

"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.