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    The (Post) Mistress eBook
    The (Post) Mistress eBook
    The (Post) Mistress eBook
    Ebook88 pages51 minutes

    The (Post) Mistress eBook

    By Tomson Highway

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    About this ebook

    Canada’s most famous Indigenous playwright, Tomson Highway, sets his latest theatrical achievement, The (Post) Mistress, in a not-so-distant past, when sending letters through the mail was still vital to communicating with friends and loved ones, and the small-town post office was often the only connection to faraway places longed-for or imagined.

    Born and raised in Lovely, Ontario, a small French-Canadian farming village near Lake Huron, Marie-Louise Painchaud has never had occasion to venture much farther than the nearest community – Complexity, a copper-mining town and a somewhat larger dot on the map of the Georgia Bay area. For thirty years, Marie-Louise has worked at the local post office, and, through the many letters she sorts when they arrive and the ones that she stamps before they go out, she has come to know the lives of everyone in town and vicariously experience their various loves, losses, and personal dramas.

    In this one-woman musical tour de force, Marie-Louise confides in us the interwoven stories sealed in the envelopes she handles every day. A samba beat offers the soundtrack for the tale of a local woman’s passion- ate but doomed affair with a man from Rio de Janeiro; a rhythmic tango plays as Marie-Louise divulges a friend’s steamy tryst in Argentina. All together, twelve unique musical pieces, ranging from Berlin cabaret to French café chanson to smooth bossa nova, accompany a multilingual French, Cree, and English libretto.

    In The (Post) Mistress, Tomson Highway creates not only a rural comedy but also a sublime parody of small-town life – the northern Ontario version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town or Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

    Cast of 1 woman.

    Music from The (Post) Mistress is available at http://goo.gl/ivtwqA

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateSep 15, 2013
    ISBN9780889227811
    The (Post) Mistress eBook
    Author

    Tomson Highway

    Tomson Highway was born near Maria Lake, Manitoba in 1951. His father, Joe, was a hunter, fisherman and sled-dog racer, and his family lived a nomadic lifestyle. With no access to books, television or radio, Highway’s parents would tell their children stories; thus began Highway’s life-long interest in the oral tradition of storytelling. When he was six, Highway was taken from his family and placed in residential school in The Pas; he subsequently went to high school in Winnipeg and then travelled to London to study at the University of Western Ontario, earning a music degree in 1975 and a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1976. Instead of becoming a professional concert musician as he had at one point contemplated, however, Highway decided instead to dedicate his life to the service of his people. Fluent in Cree, English and French, he was for six years the artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts, the first and most enduring Native professional company in Canada which he also helped found. From 1975 to 1978 Highway worked as a cultural worker for the Native Peoples’ Resource Centre. He has worked for the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture and also for the Ontario Federation of Indian Friendship Centres as a program analyst. From 1983 to 1985 he worked as a freelance theatre artist before becoming the artistic director of the De-ba-jeh-mu-jig Theatre Company in 1986. He has been writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, and Concordia University. Tomson Highway is widely recognized for his tremendous contribution to the development of Aboriginal theatre in both Canada and around the world. In 1994, he was inducted into the Order of Canada, the first Aboriginal writer to be so honoured.

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      Book preview

      The (Post) Mistress eBook - Tomson Highway

      Post_Mistress_Front_Cover.jpgPost_Mistress_Endpaper-F.jpg

      CONTENTS

      Production History

      Song Order

      Production Note

      Setting

      Set

      A Note On Translations and Pronunciation

      Act One

      Act Two

      Acknowledgements

      Also By Tomson Highway

      About The Author

      Post_Mistress_Title_Page.jpg

      Keetha kichi ooma masinaa-igan, Patricia Cano. Athis ithigook eeneetaanagamooyin. Igwa ithigook meena eek’seewaatsee-in. Kimshi-nanaaskoomitin

      PRODUCTION HISTORY

      The (Post) Mistress was first produced, in an earlier draft, at and by Magnus Theatre in Thunder Bay, Ontario, from January 27 to February 12, 2011, with the following cast and company:

      The Postmistress: Pandora Topp

      Pianist: Danny Johnson

      Saxophonist: Dino Pepe

      Director: Mario Crudo

      Musical Director: Danny Johnson

      Set Designer: Bruce Repei

      Lighting Designer: Kirsten Watt

      Costume Designer: Mervi Agombar

      Stage Manager: Gillian Jones

      It was subsequently produced, also in an earlier draft, at and by Ship’s Company Theatre in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, from August 3 to 28, 2011, with the following cast and company:

      The Postmistress: Martha Irving

      Pianist: Holly Arsenault

      Saxophonist: Mitch Clarke

      Director: Andrew Lamb

      Musical Director: Holly Arsenault

      Artistic Producer: Matthew Tiffin

      Set and Props Designer: Andrew Murray

      Lighting Designer: Paul Del Motte

      Costume Designer: Krista Levy

      Stage Manager: Ingrid Risk

      Technical Director / Production Manager: Jonathon Harpur

      It was produced in this, its final English version, by the Ode’min Giizis Festival at the Market Hall Performing Arts Centre in Peterborough, Ontario, from June 21 to 24, 2012, with the following cast and company:

      The Postmistress: Patricia Cano

      Pianist: Tomson Highway

      Saxophonist: Marcus Ali

      Director: Ruth Madoc-Jones

      Musical Director: Tomson Highway

      Producers: Patti Shaughnessy and Bill Kimball

      Lighting and Set Designer: Ted Roberts

      Costume Designer: Martha Cockshutt

      Stage Manager: Elizabeth Kantor

      Production Manager: Esther Vincent

      Movement Coach: Marie-Josée Chartier

      A French version, translated by Tomson Highway and Raymond Lalonde and titled Zesty Gopher s’est fait écraser par un frigo, was co-produced by the National Arts Centre and Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario of Sudbury, Ontario, and performed at the NAC French Theatre in Ottawa from October 17 to 20, 2012, and in Sudbury from October 25 to November 3, 2012, with the following cast and company:

      The Postmistress: Patricia Cano

      Pianist: Tomson Highway

      Saxophonist (Ottawa): Vince Rimbach

      Saxophonist (Sudbury): Jean-Yves Bégin

      Director: Geneviève Pineault

      Musical Director: Tomson Highway

      Translation Consultant: Robert Marinier

      Set and Lighting Designer: Glen Charles Landry

      Costume Designer: Isabelle Bélisle

      Sound Designer: Frédéric St-Onge

      Stage Manager: Marie-Josée Dionne

      Movement Coach: Denise Vitali

      SONG ORDER

      ACT ONE

      Taansi, Nimiss (Hey, Big Sister)

      Hey, Good-Lookin’

      Quand je danse (When I Dance)

      Oh, Little Bear

      Love I Know Is Here

      The Window

      ACT TWO

      When I Was Last in Buenos Aires, Argentina

      Some Say a Rose

      Mad to Love

      Have I Told You

      The Robins of Dawn

      Post_Mistress_pg_xiii.jpg

      THE (POST) MISTRESS

      PRODUCTION NOTE

      The (Post) Mistress is a two-act, one-person play about Marie-Louise Painchaud, a forty-nine-year-old francophone woman who grew up and lives in Northern Ontario.

      The running time of the play is approximately 110 minutes, including one intermission.

      SETTING

      The post office in Lovely, a small town in francophone Northern Ontario.

      Friday, August 9, 1986, that is, a time before the internet, when people wrote letters on paper, frequently by hand, and sent them by post.

      SET

      The first and main feature of the set is a wall completely covered with a gridwork of small, square aluminum boxes – the mailboxes, in effect, of a small country post office as seen from the back, from the perspective of the post-office workers who sort the mail. This, of course, is what the character Marie-Louise Painchaud will be doing throughout the play – sorting envelopes into these boxes.

      The second feature of the set is a counter that stands in front of the wall of mailboxes just off stage-centre toward stage left. This counter is seen not from the front, but from its left end only, so that the performer playing/working at this counter is never hidden by it but is plainly visible to the audience at all times. On top of this counter sit the paraphernalia of a postmistress, principal of which are a small

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