Tomson Highway is a multi-talented artist who began his performance career as a classically trained musician. Born in Northern Manitoba, Tomson first learned English (Cree is his native tongue) when he was sent to boarding school in the Pas (Manitoba). His formal education continued at the University of Manitoba and the University of Western Ontario, from which he graduated in 1975. After excelling in piano and studying briefly in England, Tomson returned to Canada to become a social worker and organizer. For seven years he worked with native political and cultural organizations across the country, acting as Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts from 1986 until he stepped down in 1992. His writing credits include The Sage, The Dancer and the Fool, A Ridiculous Spectacle in One Act, and his trilogy: The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, and Rose. At present, he is working on a novel set for publication in the fall of 1998.

Tomson spoke with Susannah Schmidt in May 1998 from his home in Toronto.

So we're interested in play development here. Tell me how a piece as sprawling as Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing came to be.

It was hilarious. Actually we were in Vancouver, and had to stop over in Winnipeg. Kim McKaw gave me a call, he was the Artistic Director of Prairie Theatre Exchange. He said he'd like to commission a show from me and I said sure, so he said there's a $1000 cheque waiting for you, you can pop by and pick it up. I was broke, and I got it . . . and then awhile after I realised I had to write a play. That was in late June of 1987. I didn't do it for the longest time.

I was the Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, and I started a new play development program, out of that came The Rez Sisters. It was a raging hit; it was travelling across the country. I was at my brother's house, Rene, a bunch of us were hanging out. The phone rang and my brother answered, and I said to my lover, something's wrong. [My brother] was speaking in Cree, so I knew it was someone from our family (I come from a huge family). My brother said my father had a collapsed lung, he had cancer, it didn't look good. He was 79. The next day we had to go back to touring, and it seemed that every free day, my dad's condition worsened. Well, as I said, we were in the midst of touring The Rez Sisters . . . and every time we had a three day break there was just enough time to fly off and be with my dad. So here it was, this raging hit, I mean mega box office seller . . . and at the same time, dad was dying.

So he was dying, right, fading fast. I said, I can't go to Vancouver [with the tour]. [My dad] was in the hospital by then, 30 kms away from our home, by Leaf Rapids. He was a beautiful man, a powerful man. Magnificent. He had the golden touch, whatever he touched turned to gold.... When I got to my parents' house, I was there for the night and I was sleeping in his bed. My parents were old and they had their own beds, and I had the most powerful dreams. My mind tells me I was dreaming his dreams. Someone asked my father earlier, "Do you think your people will find their way out of their current despair?", and he said "Yes".... The way my parents trained us, and they were incredible people, it was to serve our people. So whatever I do, whatever my family does, it's for my dad's vision, to fulfill it.

But these dreams I had in his bed: it was a hockey game with this young man who was about 17 years old, and the women were playing. Something happened on the ice, and the man had an epileptic fit, started speaking in tongues, you know, freaking out. It was a desperate thing. So that's where the play started, that was [the character] Dickie Bird.

Dad got transferred to Thompson Hospital, so mom and some of my family stayed at my cousins' house. So I started writing the play in his hospital room, with my feet on his bed. So that's when I did the first draft. And while I was there I went into town in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon and ran into these beautiful young men, many of whom I knew, I mean physically beautiful. There were ten tables put together [in the bar there] and people were having a riot: laughing and telling stories around these tables. But this day all these men were crowded into the bar, and there was a story about women playing baseball, and someone did a fly-ball and the ball was stuck down a woman's cleavage, and she was so embarrassed that she walked right off the field. And this was all in Cree, and it's a hilarious language, and everybody was laughing so hard. Then a light went on, and there was a mini stage, and I turned around and the stripper was right above me, just twirling her tits. And the perspective I had from that angle was seeing fifteen to twenty men staring at the stage, like they were seeing God . . . God as a woman, God as a stripper, which is some of what I was looking at in the play [Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing].

And all this time my father was dying. The Vancouver tour ended and I flew to Toronto, to Regina, and all this time I was writing, writing in airport waiting lounges, everywhere. The first draft blew out of me as a cry of despair. Two nights before the end of the tour, he died, which was the perfect time, like he knew. So the play came from the heart, it was a cry, it came from such a deep place.

That was your first draft, which you brought to Playwrights' Workshop?

Yeah, that's right. Kim [McKaw] organized with you people for us to workshop it there. A bunch of us [Larry Lewis, Graham Greene, Gary Farmer, Billy Merasty, Doris Linklater] came up from Toronto and had a ball. I tell you, from the moment we left Toronto we laughed uncontrollably. We laughed all the way to Montréal. We laughed for a solid week and by the end I was laughing so hard that I was farting. So I was laughing from both ends.

That's a lot of laughter.

I see that there's lots of changes from the second workshop draft to the final draft. Some incidents seem to be explained less and there's more Cree. How did the first draft evolve during the workshop?

I wrote a lot during the week, a lot about religion. A lot of the things I was wrestling with were really taking shape in that forum [in the workshop]. But it was changing all the way through.

Most of your actors [Graham Greene, Gary Farmer, Kennetch Charlette, Doris Linklater, Ron Cook, Billy Merasty] and the director [Larry Lewis] came with you for the workshop from Toronto, but you picked up the dramaturg, Alun Hibbert, and a couple more actors in Montréal. How did you integrate them into the process?

Alun we met up there, and he was great. I haven't seen him for years, really, he was great. The main thing, and this is what I said to him, was that I just really wanted to hear the voices out loud. And that's what we all did. We had a blast.

Alun said that at times it was difficult because you were working with professional actors and also with two people who you found through the Native Friendship Centre. Is it an important part of your process to work exclusively with native actors for these pieces?

At that point, yeah. I have questions about casting to this day. Myself, it has been important, but there's some things that aren't obvious. The two non-actors were kind of a damper at times: they didn't get what was going on. But they were catching on, and having them work on the piece was very important for me. We really did have a blast, even with those problems.

Many of the actors who did the workshop also performed in the production at the Passe Muraille and on the remounted tour. What was it like to work with the same people from the play's inception through to performance?

It was extraordinary. When we went into rehearsal at the Passe Muraille, we always bring a medicine man for a ceremony at the beginning, we had an elder come in, Max Ireland, an Onaida man. He said this extraordinary prayer, he said "today . . .we must take care of Tomson because he's going to be exposed, he's going to need our protection". I felt so held, just cradled. I stood there with tears streaming down my face, it was extraordinary.

How much did the play change from the workshop through to the production?

I did a lot of rewriting as we went along, tons of rewriting. We were changing stuff right up to opening night. Like before opening night a line came, a great line. I whispered it to Doris [Linklater] and that line came at the very end. As I was passing through the dressing room, without even the director knowing, I just said, say this line. And so as [the character] Zachary is handing [Hera] the baby she says, "Boy, that full moon last night. Ever look like a giant puck." I loved that, and we had really gorgeous light that made a huge moon. And I love the idea of goddesses playing hockey in the sky.

[Dakota playwright/poet] Daniel David Moses said that nobody looks at Margaret Atwood as quintessentially Caucasian, but every time a native writer picks up a pen it's seen as the definitive "native" stance, as if there could only be one stance for all native people in one piece of writing. You've said that you write as a way of healing, as a way of furthering your father's vision of transformation. How do you then cope with criticisms that your writing represents native people in a negative way, or that it is misogynist?

I think that's partly why I stepped back [from playwriting]. I did seven years of social work. I went into the Artistic Director position as an artistic favour; it was a new experience. I thought I'd step in and help with a social conscience, to put it back on its feet. We had to try just to fill seasons. And then we started this play development program. One of the reasons the experience was the best was that I was so present, because it was my investment, and also my money. I care deeply, I care every step of the way. So one of the consequences was that it came out strong. And accidentally, the first [The Rez Sisters] and then the second [Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing] were raging hits. At one time there were three of my plays going on, that was unbelievable. So one of the consequences of the successes was my name became very much a public name. There are perks, you get preferential treatment. But being so exposed, being a public piece of property . . . I'd get attacked by some people. So I have stepped back. I just really don't want to live my life in that way. There's part of me that enjoys it, but sometimes it's awful. Imagine being an Elvis Presley. Wouldn't that be awful?

Yeah.

What you said about healing is right. But in order to do that you have to expose the poison, that's what Lyle Longclaws said, the quotation at the beginning of the play. When you want healing you have to talk about men talking about women. Most heterosexual men, most straight men do talk about tits and ass, and that's what I was portraying. What is the real source of misogyny? How do we explain the origin? To me, I see [misogyny] as directly related to the origin of God as a man. That's where misogyny comes from. I remember hearing about the fourteen women who were killed in Montréal. December 6th, that's my birthday, I'll never be able to forget it. All my plays are about that in some way, the terrible way misogyny has split the world . . . why are women treated like this? God is a man, Jesus was a man. Until we conceive of God as female, women will not have that power to be treated with respect. And that's why . . . [in Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing] you see the birth of the goddess as a little girl. The difference between Indian people and white people is that one is patriarchal in structure.... In the Cree language, there's no gender. The world isn't divided into that kind of gendered hierarchy. But along the road in history, God as man met God as woman and raped her. And that's where that line comes from [in Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing], the one that so many people reacted so strongly against, that they couldn't stomach: "Because I hate them, them fucking bitches. They took the power the ones with the power." That's Big Joey's line. He can't stand being impotent in the face of women, and he blames women. But people don't want to hear what's true all the time. I think that's where a lot of writers get in trouble. What the writer is doing is using characters to express a whole range of perspectives, that you might not agree with.

It's also a special place fro me to be gay: that's very important in my outlook. In traditional native societies there was a special place for people who are gay. We were seen as part of some kind of buffer zone . . . like mediators and peace makers. What's outrageous is now for a lot of gay native guys, [the character] Giselle Nataways is this famous queen. I love it; it's just a riot. Giselle Nataways, she's such a famous bitch! It's wonderful, this gorgeous goddess native drag queen!