Buz’Gem Blues

The Buz’Gem Blues is the third play in Drew Hayden Taylor’s ongoing zany,
outrageous, often farcical examination of both Native and non-Native stereotypes
in what is to become what he calls his Blues Quartet

Marianne has talked her mother, Martha, into attending an Elders conference with her, where she is to be used as a resource person, even though Martha doesn’t believe she has anything to offer anyone

Held in a college setting, the keynote paper of the conference is a dissertation on “the courting, love, and sexual habits of contemporary First Nations people as perceived by Western Society,” delivered by none other than a “Professor Savage”

Just to keep the caricatures in balance, Savage’s nemesis throughout the action is a young Native man, replete with dark sunglasses and a Mountie coat, “The Warrior Who Never Sleeps”

As absurdly claustrophobic as Gilligan’s Island (the Professor and Marianne become an item), Taylor is pulling some of our most revered icons—European anthropologists, their Native Elder informants and their militant young warrior critics—off their pedestals, looking for a place to ground them in a world where the most politically correct ethnic representation is a young woman, 1/64th Native, coming up with recipes for choke-cherry parfait

The Buz’Gem Blues is not a play about clichés with which we have become so familiar we recognize them as stereotypes instantly, but rather about how our ritualized and institutionalized systems of maintaining and policing those clichés prevents us from recognizing our common humanity within each other

“Like the best black writers of the late 1950s ... Taylor’s plays are about ordinary people living ordinary lives. He skewers liberal and native stereotypes, preferring to deal on a more human level” ~ Hamilton Examiner
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