The Baby Blues

Ian C. Nelson is the former Assistant Director of Libraries (Collection
Management & Budget) at the University of Saskatchewan and Dramaturge
for the Festival de la Dramaturgie des Prairies.

The Baby Blues is the second instalment in a series that began with The
Bootlegger Blues, winner of the 1990 Canadian Authors Association award.

Taylor’s First Nations voice is sardonic, self-referential, and
humorous. His world is the mixed North American society, in this case
the one found on the powwow circuit. The Baby Blues powwow ground
resembles that of a carnival midway, tent doors flapping with the
entrance and exit of a host of colorful characters, each engaged in his
or her own hustle. In a play that could be subtitled “Who’s Dad?,”
duos and trios reassemble themselves into new configurations and sins
and past relationships come to the surface. It’s a merry-go-round
worthy of any multi-doored British sex farce.

Taylor is beautifully at home with his Native situation and caps the
hilarity by including a character named Summer, a young woman who has
taken one anthropology course and is now willing—she’s 1/64
aboriginal—to see Native spirituality, natural lore, and ancestral
legend in every banal word or gesture she sees around her. Taylor’s
take on the situation is wicked and clever.