The Rez Sisters And Tremblay's Les Belles

A great deal of present-day postmodern theatre simply constitutes one piece of a large evolutionary historical puzzle from which playwrights are able to apply and adapt various styles, techniques, and examples. Although traditional Native story-telling and customs bear many signs of early theatric components, contemporary Native playwrights find themselves working in an unprecedented industry, where very few precursors to their craft exist. Therefore, some of the most renown plays in Western society have lodged elements of European and American postmodern theatre into the mold of Native storytelling. While one might assume that this technique would yield an incompatible mismatch of cultural performances, a comparison of Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters and Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-sœurs reveals that the result is actually a form a theatre that embodies the tried-and-true elements of Western postmodernism, yet carries with it an unparalleled esprit de corps. The two plays—Highway’s The Rez Sisters being an adaptation of Tremblay’s Les Belles-sœurs—are, upon thorough examination, very similar in terms of their social and political impacts, use of language, and application of theatric movements. That being said, the two plays, being dissimilar in terms of both narrative and overarching elements, prove fundamentally …show more content…
In Les Belles-sœurs, hyperrealistic qualities are most noticeably demonstrated through Tremblay’s use of flawed grammar, stock phrases, mispronunciations, and curse words that bear associations to Catholicism and its liturgy, known as sacres. In The Rez Sisters, however, one of the most striking indications of hyperrealism is Highway’s seemingly uncontrollable use of expletives and crude language. One example, among countless possibilities, is Emily Dictionary’s section of the riot