Historical recounting of the settlement of the Canadian West hits the stage tonight

By Rick Garrick

MONTREAL—Curve Lake writer Drew Hayden Taylor is looking forward to seeing his “ironic, iconic and sardonic” comments during the upcoming production of Guy Sprung’s Fight On! Part 1.

“Basically, I am there to provide, as he [Sprung] likes to put it, ironic, iconic and sardonic comments on the development of Canadian history in the play,” Taylor says. “Comments I’ve made on either history or colonization or the character will suddenly pop-up on screens scattered around the stage, sort of humorous, realistic or just sort of comments on what is happening in the play.”

Taylor says this is the first time he has ever provided commentary for the production of a play. He sat through the first few workshops of the play over the past year-and-a-half and then again during the rehearsals of the play in late March to get the feel of the script and the actors.

“So based on sitting there at the table and watching some of the rehearsals, I came up with ideas for the comments,” Taylor says. “I gave him about 60 or 70 comments, of which I was expecting him to use maybe two-thirds of them for the actual production. I’m going back on Sunday to see which ones they picked and exactly where and how they are going to incorporate them into the production.”

Sprung, playwright/director of Fight On! Part 1, says the story is being told with video and maps in addition to Taylor’s commentary. The play runs from April 10-22 in Montreal at Espace Knox. It is performed mainly in English with some French, Cree and Mohawk.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Sprung says. “The idea is that it’s a learning experience and hopefully it will be one for the audience.”

Sprung says the story is about Francis Jeffrey Dickens, one of Charles Dickens’ sons, who served with the North West Mounted Police for 11 years in Canada.

“It’s a big epic story and we do Part 1 in a workshop production,” Sprung says. “There may be some scenes that we’ve written just the day before, so the actors may have scripts in hand and so on. And then we have a discussion with the audience afterwards and on the basis of these discussions over the next two weeks, I will then rework the script and prepare it for a full production in 2020.”

Sprung says the production of Fight On! is front and centre of what Canadians are trying to figure out about the country’s original inhabitants.

“If we’re going to share this land, then we’ve got to have this discussion,” Sprung says. “It’s clearly the major discussion.”

Brefny Caribou-Curtin, an Indigenous actor who plays many of the 70 characters in Fight On! Part 1, says the beauty of the play is how humour is used to bring home Sprung’s message for Canadians to seek out information about the real history and story behind the country.

“I think that is the strongest part of the piece — using humour in order to come to these harsher, uncomfortable truths and sit with them in a way that is truthful,” Caribou-Curtin says. “To be able to sit in that truth together as audience and as settler performers and Indigenous performers, it’s quite the unique situation we have here.”

Caribou-Curtin says the play is interesting and “lots of fun.”

“We need to be having conversations,” Caribou-Curtin says. “We need to be just dialoguing and talking with one another and learning and unlearning at the same time.”