The cast of ALTERNATIVES at the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation in Iqaluit
Left to right: Erin Brubacher, Odile Nelson, Lori Idlout, Aluki Rojas, Vinnie Karetak, Gary Pon
Directed by Erin Brubacher and Odile Nelson, 2004
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It felt right to perform alterNatives in Iqaluit. The play deals with identity and colliding worlds: issues that are extremely relevant in Nunavut...
alterNatives is a play that asks who we are, who we’re allowed to be and how we might choose to be whatever we want. We faced these same issues when casting the play: It would have been impossible, in a northern community of six thousand, to find a Jewish woman to play Colleen, or three Ojibway actors to play Angel, Yvonne and Bobby. More to the point, we weren’t interested in finding actors who shared their characters’ race, culture, or even gender. I had no desire to see three white Iqaluit residents play Colleen, Michelle and Dale and three Inuit play Angel, Yvonne and Bobby. It would have implied that all first people are the same, like saying: Ojibway, Inuit, what’s the difference? This kind of a casting decision would have been a huge mistake. We thought about doing the reverse and having whites play the Ojibway characters and Inuit play the whites—just so there was a visual difference between the two groups—but that also felt really wrong; too heavy handed, like we were trying to make some kind of statement we weren’t. So in the end we chose actors who we’re best suited to the parts in non-aesthetic ways. We decided to have a woman play Bobby: she was the best person to play that part. Nobody played a 'role' into which they were born. Drew Hayden Taylor’s writing allowed us to do this because all identifying marks were already in the script. That’s one of the interests of theatre: an Inuit woman can stand on a stage in Iqaluit and say: “I am an Ojibiway man at a dinner party in Toronto,” and we’ll believe him.
The more we came to know the play, the more we found that the decisions we made in casting alterNatives complimented the questions raised by the play itself. Because while it’s impossible for someone born into one experience to ever fully understand the experience of “the other,” that doesn’t negate the importance of trying; something Dale and Angel show us over a moose roast with a side of science fiction, and something that all the actors in this production tried as they struggled to understand the culture of each character without assimilating the stereotypes that the play already exposes.
...I don’t think there are any villains or heroes in alterNatives. Hayden-Taylor makes fun of everybody. And you can also really feel for all the different points of view this play presents. You get the sense that they are all somehow well intentioned and misguided. They all do/say really hurtful things and they are all wounded. Much of this is underlies the humour and I think that’s a good thing. The comedy during the play allows the sharper, more important issues linger later. It allows the audience to think about all the questions raised by the play and to come to their own conclusions, rather than being spoon-fed answers by the playwright...
Erin Brubacher, 2004
