Interculturalism Light: The Irony of Blues in The Berlin Blues

Drew Hayden Taylor has been writing plays for years that use comedy and stereotypes to address intercultural issues. Taylor’s fourth play in his Blues quartet, The Berlin Blues, like the preceding three plays – The Bootlegger Blues (1991), The Baby Blues (1999) and Buz’Gem Blues (2002) – contains a thread of physical comedy, word play and revelations that coalesce around the intercultural aspects of negotiating racial divides. In his latest Blues play, we find a somewhat stereotypical German couple, bent on building their German’s fantasy theme park in Ojibway territory. Predictably, this capitalist venture is greeted in the community with both scepticism and optimism. The German’s envision “Ojibway World”(22), complete with the “Medicine Ferris Wheel,” “four directions shuttle service,” “Turtle Island Aquarium,” “Whiskeyjack Pub and Bar” and a hotel called “Haida-way” and the “Weesageechek Water Slide”(19). Considering the German couple’s predilection for indianische anything, this...