The Wasy Women and "This business of living": Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters

While discussing Highway‟s play, dramatist Carol Bolt observes that watching The Rez Sisters makes the audience feel part of “an extra-ordinary, exuberant, life-affirming family”. It is extra-ordinary because it involves common women with uncommon dreams. It is exuberant because all these women celebrate life and living at every given moment. And it is life affirming because they are essentially optimistic – refusing to accept death and failure as end and also because the play ends with the hope of a new life on its way. Tomson Highway, sometimes referred to as an an exotic figure in Canadian theatre and the most important one in the latter half of 1980s, is a Cree from Northern Manitoba. He is one of the few writers who work in their second language. Very much a man of music and other performing arts, Highway graduated in Honours with Music and English. After graduation, he worked for a number of native support groups. Highway was especially influenced by James Reaney‟s Donnelly trilogy because of its use of its poetic language, imagery and its mythological overtones. His bondage with theatre is apparent when he states, “theatre for me gives the oral tradition a three dimensional context, telling stories by using actors and visual aspects of the stage”. While at Western, during his work with Reaney on The Canadian Brothers and Wacousta, he was highly influenced by the playwright as he felt that Reaney wrote about working class people, grass root people, basic people from many places. Through his plays, Highway set out to combine his knowledge of Indian reality in Canada with classical structure, artistic language. “It amounted to applying sonata form to the spiritual and mental situation of a street drunk…”. In less than three years and only two plays, Canadian audience started considering Highway a member of a select group of playwrights whose plays are treated as significant cultural events by Canadian critics, scholars and audiences. Both these plays i.e The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing were winners of the coveted Dora Mavor Moore award. While analyzing the play in Canadian Fiction Magazine, Daniel David Moses observes “The majority of Native people, forced to inhabit ignored, economically disadvantages areas called reserves, are not encouraged to regard their own lives as important. The accomplishment of the Rez Sisters is that it focuses on a variety of such undervalued lives and brings them up to size” (Moses, 206) . The Rez Sisters : the first in an intended cycle of seven plays, is raucous mix of the comic and the tragic, full of life and dreams. The play spans a summer in 1986, when seven women – all related by birth or marriage – decide to participate in THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD. The plot of the play, though not too thick, is fast moving, at times even frenetic.

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