Tomson Highway and The Postmistress

By Barb Nahwegahbow

TORONTO—Cree playwright, Tomson Highway, has come a long way from his birthplace on the trapline in northern Manitoba. He’s received international acclaim for his plays including The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, and The Postmistress. But Highway insists he’s just a community developer.

“Community is extremely important to me,” said Highway. “I’m not doing it for myself, writing music, writing plays. I work for my community.”

In the 1970’s, Highway crisscrossed the province working with friendship centres.

“I got out to the field and met all these people, the workers, the elders, the children, the parents. They became part of my family, my community, part of my blood,” he said passionately.

“So I always think in terms of community,” Highway said. “Our spirit was broken so we need to rebuild that and bring it back to a proud spirit, into a winning spirit. Art can do that the best. I look at art, the creation of art as community development. Art can help a tremendous amount in elevating the spirit.”

Indigenous people are on the cusp of creating a generation of great writers and novelists, people on par with the greats like Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy, said Highway. “We are the first wave,” he said.

Highway was in Toronto for The Postmistress, a one-woman musical that he wrote and was presented by Théâtre français de Toronto and Pleiades Theatre from October 12 to 23 in French and Cree, and October 25 to November 6 in English and Cree. Highway wrote the play in English and Cree, finishing it in 2011. For the recent Toronto production, he did the translation into French, “with a lot of help,” he said. His fluency in French comes from having married into the Francophone community, and his Cree “is in a state of perfect preservation.”

“Normally with musicals, it’s done by three people,” said Highway, a script writer, a lyricist and a composer. Since Highway is the first to say he’s anything but normal, he does all three. He writes the music first, then adds the words and then the story line. Highway has created a brilliant story that contains twelve songs.

Peruvian-Canadian actress and singer Patricia Cano is the star of The Postmistress, a middle-aged Métis woman who runs a post office in a small northern Ontario town. Cano sings and dances with boundless energy for two and a half hours with a short intermission halfway through. She engages with the audience the minute she sets foot on the stage. Her eyes sparkle with mischief as she savours the idea of reading the secrets contained in the letters she’s handling. Can she really read the letters through their envelopes?

Cano is chameleon-like in her ability to inhabit the stories and personalities of the letter-writers. She is sensual and sinewy as she dances a sexy tango, soft and loving as she sings a lullaby. Cano is totally believable as she takes us inside the lives of the letter writers. She is equally believable when she reverts back to the nosy little postmistress. Her voice is strong and beautifully full of passion and humour. She holds the audience in the palm of her hand as she continues to captivate throughout the play. One cannot imagine anyone else in the role after experiencing Patricia Cano.

Highway first met Cano when she was a little six-year old girl. She grew up in Sudbury where Highway’s partner’s family and her family were friends. He lost track of her for many years and encountered her again when he was teaching at the University of Toronto. She was studying drama. The drama department produced another one of Highway’s musicals and, “Patty got the principal role because she had the best voice,” he said. He later toured with her around the world with his first cabaret.

“The Postmistress is achieving success in a way that’s a wonderful surprise,” he said. “It’s living on forever. The Postmistress is basically walking into the pages of Canadian literature. But it certainly helps to have incredible performers.”

Sharing the stage with Cano were saxophonist Marcus Ali and Highway himself on piano.

Highway was inspired to write the play by love that isn’t bound to this reality alone. His father died in 1988 and his mother in 1999 but they visit him regularly in his dreams.

“Over the years, I started thinking of the dream as a visiting room where the dead visit with the living,” he said. “We all have dreams where the ancestors come back and visit with us. Over the years, I transformed that room into a post office through which letters pass from the dead to the living. That’s how The Postmistress came about.” It’s in the second act that the postmistress reveals who and what she is.

As for his community development role, Highway said he’s in “the business of helping to create successful Indians, giving the next generation possibilities of success, to show them that other Native people have overcome obstacles and they can do it too.”