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Drama Canadian

The Baby Blues

by (author) Drew Hayden Taylor

Publisher
Talonbooks
Initial publish date
Jan 1999
Category
Canadian

  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780889224063
    Publish Date
    Jan 1999
    List Price
    $16.95

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Recommended Age, Grade, and Reading Levels

  • Age: 15
  • Grade: 10

Description

The Baby Blues is Drew Hayden Taylor’s highly wrought farce of patrimony in a stifling, politically correct, post-colonial milieu of “fancy dancers” of every stripe on the powwow trail. In juxtaposing three generations of careless wandering hedonists, progenitors of a string of offspring from their six-night stands, with their erstwhile naïve women partners who are always left holding the bag, the “big questions” of heritage, family, cultural context and personal identity are ruthlessly stripped of their conventional meanings and become so much useless, embarrassing roadkill on the highway of life.

Cast of 3 women and 3 men.

About the author

Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor is from the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario. Hailed by the Montreal Gazette as one of Canada’s leading Native dramatists, he writes for the screen as well as the stage and contributes regularly to North American Native periodicals and national NEWSpapers. His plays have garnered many prestigious awards, and his beguiling and perceptive storytelling style has enthralled audiences in Canada, the United States and Germany. His 1998 play Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth has been anthologized in Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays, published by the Theatre Communications Group. Although based in Toronto, Taylor has travelled extensively throughout North America, honouring requests to read from his work and to attend arts festivals, workshops and productions of his plays. He was also invited to Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in California, where he taught a series of seminars on the depiction of Native characters in fiction, drama and film. One of his most established bodies of work includes what he calls the Blues Quartet, an ongoing, outrageous and often farcical examination of Native and non-Native stereotypes.

Drew Hayden Taylor's profile page

Awards

  • Winner, Native Playwrights Award, sponsored by the University of Alaska Anchorage

Librarian Reviews

The Baby Blues

In the foreword to this play, Taylor says, “I wrote what some have called a Native version of a British sex farce, as a celebration of the Aboriginal sense of humour.” Taylor uses a pow-wow setting and focuses on three males and three females, ranging in age from sixteen through sixty to deliver the humour of The Baby Blues. Taylor’s script is fast-paces, has an interesting plot, and an exceptional ending.

Caution: Some coarse language is included.

Source: The Association of Book Publishers of BC. Canadian Aboriginal Books for Schools. 2008-2009.

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