Dead White Writer on the Floor

Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 2011. Soft cover. As New. As New; This play uses two literary conventions--theatre of the absurd and mystery novels--to create one of the funniest and most thought-provoking plays ever about identity politics. In Act One, Billy Jack, Injun Joe, Kills Many Enemies, Old Lodge Skins, Pocahontas, and Tonto find themselves in a locked room with a body of a white writer, which they stash in a closet. None of them can figure out how he died or which of them might have killed him. They realize as they point fingers at each other, however, that they are all profoundly unhappy with their lives as they've been constructed over the past 400 years. Gradually, they discover the computer on the writer's desk is a dream-catcher, which they can use to rewrite their stereotyped lives in the image of their own inner beings. Imagine their surprise when they reappear in the same locked room in Act Two as Mike, Jim, Bill, John, Sally, and Fred attending an AA meeting and realize that the white writer is still very much alive among them--his body in the closet is still warm! While the literary allusions to Pirandello and Agatha Christie are obvious, the side-splitting comedy is vintage Drew Hayden Taylor.