Classic adapted for modern day Cree

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When I heard that the Regina-based Native theatre ensemble Red Tattoo had plans to stage Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, I wondered why a play written 100 years ago in Russia would be of interest to the Saskatchewan Cree.

I asked Floyd Favel Starr why he chose to direct a classic. He said, "The themes in Chekhov touch childhood memories in me in a way that I can work from my sources." And so, Starr wrote The House of Sonya, a brilliant adaptation that situates Chekhov's classic on a contemporary Cree reserve. But, don't call him the Kenneth Branagh of Native theatre. While many directors have personalized the classics-usually through contemporizing Shakespearean language or innovative staging-few, if any, have rooted them in a culture-specific context.

If Starr is pushing the margins of self-representation to be at the vanguard of Native theatre, it is not intentional. His focus is on making great art that transcends cultural boundaries to speak in a universal language.

Starr left Poundmaker Reserve to work with legendary Polish director Jerzy Grotowski and Japanese Butoh performer Nakajima. Returning to Canada in 1989, he quickly surfaced as a serious theatre artist leaving his mark on Centre for Indigenous Theatre and Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto, before blazing a controversial trail across the Canadian theatre landscape, a journey that led him back to his roots in Saskatchewan where he expresses the specificity of his culture through the performative language of theatre.

Saskatchewan is the perfect place to do this. The substantial Native talent and an affordable lifestyle inspired Starr to form Red Tattoo Ensemble (along with interdisciplinary performance artist Robin Brass and actor Mark Dieter), a creation company that produces experimental Native theatre exploring international themes. House of Sonya is the ensemble's first production.

Edward Poitras, an interdisciplinary artist of international repute who represented Canada at the 1995 Venice Biennal,e was invited to design the sets. Poitras has designed sets for numerous productions, including the 1996 production Welcome Back, Buffalo Bill, but Sonya is his first acting gig.

Robin Poitras, artistic director of New Dance Horizons, joined the team to choreograph postmodern dance sequences that enhance the play's poetic edge.

Not everyone is from Saskatchewan. Doris Linklater (Sonya), an influential figure in Native theatre who won the Dora Award for her performance in Thomson Highway's Dry Lips, followed Starr to Saskatchewan after working for 20 years in Native theatre in Toronto when she finally got frustrated by being cast exclusively in "Native" roles, and by Native playwrights who perpetually deal with culture-specific material. She is still waiting to be cast as Lady MacBeth.

The House of Sonya begins with the line, "Today we buried Uncle Vanya." In a sense, the ensemble has buried Chekhov's original play to tell their own story, but as Sonya walks through the deserted house of her youth the ghosts of his characters come back as memories to haunt the stage. But rather than simply dust off the old masterpiece to resurrect the life of the Russian aristocracy, Starr's interpretation allows him to speak of his culture through the language of Western theatre. To do this he has integrated culture-specific text developed through improvisations into Chekhov's original script in way that personalizes the classic without being too direct, romantic or autobiographical. For the most part, Starr is faithful to Chekhov's script. A few characters have been eliminated and it is condensed into two acts. The major change is that Sonya is now the central character-the narrator-who returns to her reserve to bury Vanya.

A typical Chekhovian domestic occasion unfolds on a set designed by Edward Poitras that looks both like a elegant mansion and a low budget rez home. There is a Russian samovar for drinking tea and a blow torch for hot-kniving hash. A diverse oundscape of Jewish Klesmer music, Haitian torch songs, Andean music and Leonard Cohen mixes it up further. Value Village costumes give the play a retro chic aesthetic. In a leather jacket from the seventies, Vanya (Mark Dieter) looks like he could have walked off the Donnie Brasco film set. He and Sonya sit on tacky vinyl kitchen chairs and play chess-well-to-do Natives with a new set of cultural trappings. Sage encroaches the stage reminding us of the contrast between the freedom outside and oppressive human emotions inside.

In Sonya, Starr has replaced the Russian landscape with Cree reservation life. Chekhov's original dialogue about the squalid conditions in a Russian village affected by an outbreak of typhus is substituted with diabetes and heart problems in the adult Native population. His conservationist position bemoaning the destruction of Russian forests is enhanced to include the loss of Native traditional knowledge and culture. And charts depicting deforested areas in Russia are exchanged with a map of the Peepeekeesis Reserve, an area that has been plowed under by farmland. The underlying theme is "nostalgia," and like the Russians who pine for their homeland, these Cree are nostalgic for a more simplified life.

What transpires is a mix of the original script and new writing that is both humorous and poignant, especially the conflict between outsiders and re(z)idents.

The House of Sonya was produced by Red Tattoo Ensemble in Regina, Dec. 15 and 16 at The Other Side. Cast: Mark Dieter, Robin Brass, Cheryl Dieter, Cecile Brass, Edward Poitras and Doris Linklater. Director: Floyd Favel Starr. Set & Lighting: Edward Poitras. Costume Design: Lois Standing. Choreography: Robin Poitras.