Coyote City: A Play in Two Acts

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan.

1990 was a great year for Daniel David Moses. He served as president of
the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts
and as director of Native Earth Performing Arts; he saw more
publications of his poetry, made a number of cbc appearances, won the
Theatre Canada/MTA Short Playscript Competition (for a play—as yet
unpublished—that was slated for production in 1991 at an international
festival in Norway), and witnessed the publication of Coyote City.

The play’s title derives from an Orpheus-like legend traditional to
Native North Americans that is, in fact, embroidered into the plot of
this multilayered drama in storytelling style. The story begins and ends
with a character “acting like another drunk Indian” pleading for
another drink: mirror images with a world of irony between them. It
commences with a long-distance telephone call to a young girl on the
reserve from her boyfriend, Johnny, in the city . . . but he has been
killed in a brawl, and the call is really from the other side. The
ending is the desperate plea (“I’m in hell, Martha. I’m in
hell.”) of a “reborn alcoholic,” an Indian man of the cloth named
Thomas (one might easily join the epithet “Doubting” or “Uncle”
to his name) who has been called in to bring the young girl to her
senses but who, in retracing Johnny’s last steps in the city, has
himself fallen off the wagon and stepped into a fate which parallels
that of . . . how many before him? With both lyrical passages and earthy
dialogue, with elements of legend/fantasy and reality conjoined, and
with bold manipulation of time and place, Coyote City is the work of a
confident playwright. The Native Canadian Centre of Toronto first
produced this play in June 1988. It well deserves many more productions
and exposure to a much wider audience.