Review: Medicine Boy (SummerWorks)

A Script that Struggles

by Christian Baines

A play that promises to bring out the good, the bad and – as its narration makes extremely clear – the ugly of First Nations' history, Medicine Boy has been one of the hottest tickets at this year’s SummerWorks festival. Certainly, there are few plays on the program with more deserving ambitions. Written by Waawaate Fobister, the work follows Mukukee (Garret C. Smith) as he attempts to reconnect with his beloved, late mother (PJ Prudat), his heritage, and his identity in relation to these ancestral ties.

Medicine Boy delivers history, humour, and its fair share of intrigue over the course of an hour, so it’s all the more heartbreaking that it doesn’t tell us much of a story, at least not beyond well established historic fact. Its efforts to establish a bond between the audience and Mukukee are undercut by an irritating abuse of repetition and a jarring reliance on cliché. eg: Can someone please send “lives in your heart” back to the Disney film from which it escaped, and ban it from all new scripts henceforth? And while a certain amount of obscurity should be expected within the play’s dreamscape world, the characters spend so much time remarking on its strangeness (again, reciting throwaway lines we’ve heard far too many times before), that it’s hard to become truly immersed in it. 

As Mukukee’s guide and our narrator Daebaujimod, Jonathan Fisher’s gift for comedy is undeniable. But the jokes come in fits and starts, and feel more grafted onto the narrative rather than being allowed to flourish naturally. 

The performers can hardly be faulted, and the subject matter is worthy of frequent re-visits. But Medicine Boy struggles to find either the story it wants to tell, or a unique voice with which to tell it. The result is a missed opportunity to take this material somewhere new.    

Medicine Boy plays at Scotiabank Studio Theatre until August 18.