Urban Indian takes viewers on offbeat ride

THEATRE

TALES OF AN URBAN INDIAN By Darrell Dennis. Directed by Herbie Barnes. A Talk Is Free Theatre production. At Presentation House Theatre and aboard a bus on Friday, September 21. Continues until September 30

I HAVE SEEN plays on lawns, in living rooms, and once, memorably, in a prison cell. But until Darrell Dennis’s Tales of an Urban Indian,

I hadn’t watched a play on a bus. And it’s not just any bus, but a sweet vintage B.C. Transit ride complete with retro ads familiar to older Vancouverites.

You board the bus at Presentation House in North Vancouver and performer Craig Lauzon hops on around the corner. As you journey around the city, Lauzon tells the semiautobiographical story of Dennis’s youth on and off the reserve. Prowling up and down the bus’s aisle, he spins a bittersweet story of being stretched between two worlds— his home in the Shuswap Nation and life in the big city of Vancouver.

Lauzon has a lot to do. It’s a wordy 90-minute show full of characters and

kyé7e, voices, from his his grandmother, to a brief visitation from a very Hebrew God. On top of that, he needs to perform on a moving bus, roving around and climbing all over his tiny corner “stage” on the front seat. It’s as much a feat of athleticism as acting—i imagine it’s quite a core workout—and not a recipe for subtlety. But Lauzon, a veteran of the Royal Canadian Air Farce, pulls it off admirably.

In the early part of our trip, I tried to decode the bus’s route. Would we, for example, drive through Xwemelch’stn, formerly known as Capilano Indian Reserve No. 5? There is a poignant payoff in the bus’s course that I won’t spoil.

The story’s route is less twisty than the bus’s. Maybe it’s just oneman-show–itis from the recent Vancouver Fringe Festival, but the play’s structure is a little too familiar. Like every Hollywood biopic, it follows a straightforward path from childhood to adulthood and from a fall toward redemption. I admired the honesty of the storytelling, but would have welcomed a little more invention in its technique.

I wondered if director Herbie Barnes might have found an alternative to the bus’s generic fluorescent lighting. I felt quite conspicuous as an audience member and would have welcomed a more theatrical choice.

It was a miserable evening when I saw Tales of an Urban Indian.

An inch of rain fell that day. All that precipitation, combined with the lighting, meant that there wasn’t much of a view out the window. Which is too bad, because what we see out the windows has a role in the play’s impact. If you have some late-summer

Tales of an visitors coming to town,

Urban Indian

is a perfect, offbeat recommendation for them. It’s amusing, but also unflinching in its portrayal of the life of a First Nations kid in B.C. And it’ll be the weirdest bus tour they’ve ever taken.