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KRISZTINA Kopó the mind, the imagination, and transposing it — using words, actors, lights, sound — onto the stage in a theater. For me, it is really a matter of taking a mythology as extraordinary and as powerful as the human imagination itself and re-working it to fit, snugly and comfortably, the medium of the stage." The theater has become an important medium for Native writers, because drama is ultimately the closest to storytelling and within its scope humor is an essential factor with a major driving force. This serves as a basis for maintaining the oral tradition, the ritual practices and for the formulation of a new form of expression. As mentioned above, Native theater is a relatively recent development which considers the works written and performed by Native people. These plays discuss and portray the culture and everyday lives of the Native Peoples in Canada. Like all theater, Native theater also “provides the possibility of direct confrontation, brings people together, introduces thought-provoking ideas and fosters an openness to dialogue and change.”'? Within a multicultural Anglophone society, how effective is Native drama in its portrayal of the contemporary Indian with an oral culture based on storytelling, vibrant and full of symbolism, which reaches back to an oral tradition of thousands of years? Native heritage inherent in contemporary Native theater and drama is an experimental platform that combines Native symbolism, ritual, belief and heritage with contemporary cultural trends and genres. Furthermore, with the use of the trickster figure or tricksterish spirit — the figure that traditionally links the spiritual world with the physical world — the audiences are introduced to the concept of magic and the absurd. This allows for the dramatic demonstration of the constant opposing entities of fantasy and reality on stage on the one hand, and the projection of identities and stereotypical images as they accommodate themselves to the English language and non-Native culture, on the other. The function of Native humor, therefore, aided by the trickster is to hold up a mirror to humanity in which we, as Natives and non-Natives, see ourselves.”° The above features can be further expanded by exploring the blues and the Gothic as diverse genres that highlight the grotesque and absurd factors that support Native humor. These elements will be examined within the framework of the article. One of the most well-known and active figures within the Native theatrical scene is Drew Hayden Taylor, whose plays focus 8 Tomson Highway: On Native Mythology, in Don Rubin (ed.), Canadian Theatre History, Selected Readings, Toronto, Playwrights Canada, 2006, 405. Mirjam Hirch: Subversive Humour: Canadian Native Playwrights’ Winning Weapon of Resistance, in Drew Hayden Taylor (ed.) Me Funny, British Columbia, Douglas and McIntyre Ltd., 2005, 102. Hirch, Subversive Humour, 114. + 294 +
