Today I had the priviledge of seeing a performance of the stage play "In a World Created by a Drunken God." It's one of the perks of teaching at Yellowhead Tribal College, and an excellent one, I might add. Even though it put me behind a day in both my Math Classes...

I got to see it today because one of the stars of the film (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1345828/, Trevor Duplessis also works at YTC and is in preparation to perform the play with a friend of his at a theatre festival in Ontario, and they wanted to practice before a live audience. So morning classes were cancelled and we all crowded into a rearranged classroom to watch. The set and props were makeshift and the actors missed the occational line or cue, but it was still a highly engaging production to watch, and I was highly impressed with the quality of both the writing and the acting.

The story is about an Ojibway man named Jason living in Toronto who is packing up to move home to the reserve, when a stranger appears at his door and tells him that he is his half-brother, and their mutual father (who had had no contact with Jason since he was two months old) is dying of kidney disease and needs a kidney transplant. The entire two acts of the play are in Jason's apartment as the half-brother is trying to convince Jason to go down the road to the hospital and take a blood test to see whether he is a compatable donor for their father. They discuss love, life and family, bond in some moments and fight in others. They talk about the love of a son for a father who was always there, and the pain of a son who was abandoned. Both the writer and the actors go back and forth between moments of comedy and laughter and moments of intense anger and pain.

As you can guess, I very much enjoyed the show. The film won awards for best film and best actor (for Trevor) and I can see why. I'd never even heard of it before I started working at YTC, and I wish it were wider known, because it's very high quality and Jason is a deeply Canadian character that even few canadian writers can portray.

For this, I'm not going to begrudge the lost math class time...