Read “Someday” by Drew Hayden Taylor.
Read Alfred Fisher’s brief review of the play from the author’s site:
http://www.drewhaydentaylor.com/books/someday/
Page 393: http://www3.brandonu.ca/cjns/15.2/bkrev152.pdf
Write an essay exploring any one of the following statements from the review:
1. “A short, tight work of finely calculated tension and economy, SOMEDAY is an effective play that develops the inherent power of a desolating, all too well-known scenario in Canadian Native communities: the removal of
Native infants for the adoption trade in the 50s and 60s.”
2. “(Taylor) has mastered his craft and is able to construct drama in which word and expression, as well as the medium of time itself are selected and modelled; in which expression is not a function of description, but the product of a dynamic internal and exclusive cycle of language, gesture and response.”
3. “Taylor’s craft and feeling for theatre are of a depth and subtlety sufficient to contain as well as project a message of explosive power.”
4. “Tension generated by the grinding of nested contexts of Native and White perception as represented within the family is handled intelligently and [with] sensitivity as is the strip of comedy injected by the mother’s lottery win.”
5. “Given the relation of the author to the painful experience forming the central preoccupation of the work, it can also be credited as the gift that lends reflection of the dramatic potency of irony, wit, and taut containment, rather than the waste of bombast and encoded rage.”
6. “The critical event of reunification and trauma set within the context of snowy Reserve and the sardonically coloured presence of the Christmas season all contribute to a level of incongruity that lead to the definition of character in ways that are as subtle as they are telling.”
7. “SOMEDAY will be an especially powerful read for those who care about Canadian drama.”
“A feature of Canadian life that has been noted by writers from Susanna Moodie onward is the paradox of vast empty spaces and lack of privacy, with no defences against the prying or avaricious eye.” – Northrop Frye
“Families in Canadian fiction huddle together like sheep in a storm or chickens in a coop: miserable and crowded, but unwilling to leave because the alternative is seen as cold empty space.” – Margaret Atwood
Tip #1 – Thoughts and Ideas: https://pingo.snowotherway.org/2016/02/25/themes-in-canadian-literature/
Tip #2 – Critical Questions: https://pingo.snowotherway.org/english-language-arts-general-outcomes2003/critical-questions/
Tip #3 – Structure: http://www.murphycentre.ca/trudy/English3201/HandoutWritingLiteraryAnalysisEssay.htm