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Review: Sisters pull together in 'Tombs Of The Vanishing Indian'
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment


"Tombs Of The Vanishing Indian is a play about reclamation: of history, culture and family.

Set largely in 1970s Los Angeles (but including a mythic character from the 1850s), Marie Clements’s script follows the tales of three grown-up native sisters separated in early childhood.

Janey (PJ Prudat), living in poverty, has been pulled into a police station and questioned by a detective (Martin Julien) because she’s thought to have killed her child. Miranda (Falen Johnson), an actor, auditions for a randy director (David Storch) to play an Indian in a Hollywood film. Jessie (Nicole Joy-Fraser), the most upwardly mobile of the three, is a doctor who’s moved to L.A. with her physician husband (Keith Barker).

But though they’re in different worlds, each feels the pull of her siblings; their lives eventually interlace, at least on a symbolic level.

While the action in set in the United States and references American laws and attitudes – especially those dealing with relocating native populations from reservations to urban areas and federally assisted sterilization programs – there are uncomfortable resonances of Canadian policies, including those involving native boarding schools and foster parenting.

The material is often upsetting, but Clements adds some comic moments; even so, the laughs are bitter. They work best and most perceptively in the Miranda episode, as she bandies ironic words with the director and discovers his secrets."

Get the Story:
Tombs Of The Vanishing Indian (NOW Magazine 3/14)

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