Blyth Festival 2025: History and humour clash for Drew Hayden Taylor

BY SCOTT STEPHENSON

As part of its 2025 season, the Blyth Festival has chosen to tackle the notion of our nation’s shared heritage head-on with by staging Drew Hayden Taylor’s 2017 satire, Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion. Previous mountings of Taylor’s plays, like The Berlin Blues and Cottagers and Indians, have been big hits for the Blyth Festival, and there’s already a lot of buzz about town about this year’s production, which features Randy Hughson and Richard Comeau. Taylor kindly accepted a call from The Citizen to field a few questions about how Sir John A came to be.

 

Beyond contributing his scripts to the Festival, Taylor has also been the Blyth Festival’s playwright-in-residence - a time he remembers fondly. “It’s a lovely town! I grew up in a small town, and I live in a small town right now. I have a great affection for a small town - going in there, being part of the community, going to the local restaurant, and not having to worry about the rush of things.”

 

Like much of Taylor’s writing, Sir John A approaches life as an Indigenous Canadian with a sense of humour. “It’s always been at the heart of a lot of my work,” he explained. “I explore the world and the relationship between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people through humour… I find it is one of the best ways to explore, to share, and to create bridges between cultures. The vast majority of my work explores the world of being Indigenous, but we all have a sense of humour, and I think that, in many ways, it’s what can connect us.”

 

Sir John A was commissioned by the National Art Centre (NAC) in Ottawa, as part of Canada’s 150th anniversary celebration. The seed of the idea was to commemorate the nation’s sesquicentennial by producing a new Canadian play about Sir John A. Macdonald. The thought was brought by the NAC’s board of directors to Jillian Keiley, the artistic director of the NAC’s English Theatre Division at the time. “Jillian, to her benefit, or to her wisdom, didn’t want to do another mouldy bio of Sir John A.,” Taylor recalled. “And she came up with an interesting idea - doing a bio of Sir John from the Indigenous perspective. Then, she contacted me, and asked me if I’d be interested in doing it - and of course I was!”

 

He looks at live theatre as an extension of the earliest storytelling techniques. “Theatre is just the next logical progression of oral storytelling,” he pointed out. “It’s the ability to take the audience on a journey using your imagination, your body, your voice. Its original function was to tell stories. The original function of stories is to entertain, to educate, to pass on lore, and tales, and explain elements of nature. Theatre’s job is the same - it takes the audience on a journey to places that it hadn’t been before.”
Sometimes, even Taylor himself is surprised at where his writing takes him. “I don’t just sit down and suddenly write from the top of my head,” he explained. “Usually, I don’t start writing until I’ve researched it, and I know what I want to say, and how I want to say it, so that, when I do sit down and begin, I’m fairly confident of the direction I’m going,” he explained. “Obviously, that’s not totally set in stone - I find that when I finish a project, and I hold it up in my hand, it’s 60 per cent where I wanted to go, and then 40 per cent of it I discovered on the journey… sometimes, some of the characters are wittier, or angrier, or smarter than I had expected - sometimes, I’m actually quite surprised at how the characters have developed on their own, and taken on their own personality.”

 

Taylor isn’t just a playwright - he’s a filmmaker, a humourist, a journalist, a philosopher, and a screenwriter. In fact, the first commission this prolific writer ever took on was writing an episode of an iconic Canadian television show: The Beachcomers. The program was both wildly popular and also brought national attention to many aspects of modern Indigenous life for the first time. “I was 25 when that came out,” he recalled. “I look back and, like anybody else, all I see are the flaws - it was the very first thing I ever wrote, and it was the first thing I was commissioned for. I was very excited, I wrote it, they shot it! All with me never having been to British Columbia, I should add. And then, I saw it, about two years ago… and I’m looking at it, and I think it holds up quite well for a first effort!”

 

He’s also written plays that ended up expanding into a different form than he originally intended, like a documentary or a full-length novel. “Sometimes the story grows, and it takes on new forms,” Taylor mused. “I think it was Tolkien who once said, ‘the tale grew in the telling’. He started writing, and he wrote The Hobbit at first, and then Lord of the Rings. And The Hobbit was actually a very small book, And then when he began to do Lord of the Rings, the story grew, and it grew, and it grew, and became huge books. Sometimes, that’s just what happens.”

 

But how does a writer become as prolific as Taylor? “All good writers are good readers, and all great writers are great readers. Read, read, read,” he advised. “You’ll learn more from reading than you think you will. It’s an enjoyable pastime, and at the same time, you’re learning a lot. I’ve written for television, I’ve written a lot of nonfiction, I’ve written fiction, I’ve written documentaries, newspaper articles, et cetera, and I’ve never taken a writing course in my life - everything I am, I owe to reading.”

 

While Sir John A is a comedy, it’s also meant to get people talking. The play’s central conflict concerns Bobby Rabbit - a man who’s just trying to regain possession of an invaluable family heirloom that was taken by someone without permission. Complicating matters is the fact that the thief in question is a well-respected museum with no intention of returning the artifact. Rabbit is forced to take matters into his own hands, with hilarious results. The play uses unflinching humour to draw attention to the long shadows cast by the dark clouds obscuring the truth about Canada’s founding. It also asks questions about what the phrase “truth and reconciliation" really means. “I have to admit, I don’t exactly know what ‘reconciliation’ is,” Taylor pointed out. “To me, reconciliation is like a Rorschach test - it means different things to different people. Some say reconciliation can’t begin until all the land is returned, and I severely doubt that will ever happen. I think everybody has their own judgment on reconciliation, on what reconciliation is…. What most Canadians don’t understand is - Native people aren’t the only ones who are Treaty people - all Canadians are Treaty people, because the government signed these Treaties in their name, like most governments do. So every single person in Blyth, every single person in Toronto, every single person all across Canada is a Treaty person. So I think it’s important that people of all walks of life, and in all towns across Canada, sort of know what is important to Indigenous people, and what motivates them. I think, in the end, they’ll find that it’s not that different from what motivates them. Or what makes them wonder about the sanity of the government.”

 

Taylor wants audiences to know they won’t regret taking a chance on Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion. “There used to be a phase when the vast majority of Indigenous plays and literature were dark, depressing, bleak, sad, and angry,” he pointed out. “And my journey has been to sort of soften that perspective on Native people - to show how much we laugh, how much we enjoy life, and that we want everybody to come in and join in on the party. So, I want people to come to my play, and know that they’re there for a good time. There’s going to be music, there’s going to be jokes, there’s going to be a fun road trip with Sir John A. Macdonald!”