The history of indigenous reconciliation is long and painful for many people. Playwright and director Falen Johnson has chosen to laugh instead of cry; as a result of that, she wrote the indigenous comedy Salt Baby.
“It’s a comedy and it’s fun,” says Johnson about her play. “I think that’s such a staple of many indigenous cultures—to survive colonization, the only way to get through it is to laugh. That’s just the reality of who we are as people. We’re funny people; I think we have to be.”
Johnson started writing the play 10 years ago, after she graduated from theatre school, which consisted of “8- or 12-hour days of doing some sort of art.”
“After I graduated I found myself not having anything to do and I felt like I needed something that felt creative and fulfilled that part of my life,” she says.
The play is a semi-autobiographical take on Johnson’s life.
“If I call it a ‘memoir,’ then everybody thinks that everything on stage actually happened and that’s not true,” she says. “I’ve definitely drawn from parts of my life. There are things I’ve totally pulled from, but there are other things that you make up for dramaturgical reasons, or for the sake of story. And so I definitely pull from things in my life and from people in my life.”
Johnson says it wasn’t hard to make a comedy from the play’s subject matter.
“A lot of my work sits in this place of a struggle between the reserve and the city, because that’s sort of been my experience, and that struggle, frequently, is absurd, so it wasn’t really hard to pull it into comedy,” says Johnson. “There are verbatim lines and almost verbatim scenes in the play of things that have happened to me or to people I know that I’ve witnessed. They might seem totally unbelievable when you see them on stage or read them in the script, but these things keep happening—they happen. And they’re still happening 10 years later. The world hasn’t really changed that much.”
The realities of indigenous identities still hold true, says Johnson.
“Questions around status and status cards—all of that stuff is still very much relevant.”
Salt Baby
Various times, Tuesday, April 17 until Sunday, May 13
Various prices, The Belfry Theatre
tickets.belfry.ca