Oklahoma in Inuvik

• Published in: Canadian Theatre Review
• Main Author: Fort, Tim
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 1992
• Subjects: Visual Arts and Performing Arts; inuit; Inuvik; Mackenzie Delta
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/ctr.72.006; https://ctr.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/ctr.72.006

In the spring of 1988, I was invited to spend a week staging a play with a senior drama class at a high school in Inuvik, NWT. The class, a majority of whom were Inuit teenagers, worked up a story involving snowmobiles, bar fights, and rip-offs of the Bay company – ending with a moral pronouncement about the difficulties of leaving the bush for the town. Rehearsing in scruffy jeans and AC / DC T-shirts, the group acted no differently than any other collection of high school students trying to cruise through the long last period of the day, but they improvised their assortment of local vignettes, set around familiar points in town and along the Mackenzie Delta, easily and quickly. By the end of the week, we had pieced together a script (which we had the nerve to call True North) and had even managed to evolve some rude staging supported by some well-meaning cardboard scenography. Before I was packed off back to the south, I was invited to bring my “professional perspective” to a second theatrical event-a rehearsal for the spring production of Inuvik’s newly formed community theatre company. The inaugural season had featured Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore, and that night I was invited to watch a run-through of their second production, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s paean to America’s manifest destiny, Oklahoma!. I agreed to attend with some reluctance, trying to imagine what critical criteria I could bring to the event.