THEATRE REVIEW

APRIL 2026 | Volume 262

 

The most prolific Indigenous playwright in Canada, Drew Hayden Taylor has largely been known as a humourist. His columns in the Globe and Mail and multiple volumes of comic essays along with his twenty or so very funny plays have reinforced that reputation.

Though always leavened with humour, Taylor’s work also takes on serious cultural and political issues that directly affect Canada’s Native communities. The latest of his plays to be staged at the Firehall, which has showcased his comic dramas since the 1990s, wrestles with the forgeries of Norval Morrisseau’s paintings and the human forgeries of non-Indigenous people who claim Native identity: pretendians.

Directed by Columpa Bobb, a long-time collaborator with Taylor and the Firehall, The Undeniable Accusations of Red Cadmium Lightis set in Nazhi Nigig’s art gallery on an Anishnaabe reserve in Ontario. Nazhi (Anita Wittenberg), in her 60s,is an expert on Morrisseau’s art and the widow of another well-known Indigenous painter. The play is a series of her conversations with Cayuga journalist Martine (Tyson Night), writing a story on the Morrisseau forgeries, and her adult step-daughter Beverly (Kaitlyn Yott), a Native educator.

After talk about the consequences of fake Morrisseaus (“believing in something that’s not real”) and the way Beverly was “bamboozled” by the guy who left her, the play gets around to its central issue: is everyone here authentically Indigenous? If not, why? And what does it matter?

It’s hard to discuss this play without giving away the essence of the plot. So … SPOILER ALERT. Nazhi is outed by Martine as a pretendian.The second act focuses on how not just being bamboozled but being betrayed by her own mother affects Beverly. Her father died when she was three and she has been imprinted on Nazhi for essentially her whole life. Mother and daughter have a great relationship and an obvious deep love for each other. Discovering that her mother’s life has been a lie, that Nazhi is not even her real name, devastates Beverly.

The opening jokey scenes between flirtatious older woman and cute young male reporter, and between affectionate mother and daughter, give way to anger, accusations, defensiveness, outrage, confusion and desperation—although even while this is going on, Taylor manages to inject some laugh lines. But it’s not funny for the older woman who is going to be humiliated, lose her reputation and likely her business, or the younger, whose own job is threatened and whose world has totally crashed.

Wittenberg plays Nazhi as high-energy, ballsy, loud, funny and jocular. Having assumed her Indigenous identity for 40 years, Nazhi plays the part with great confidence. (“I can out-Indian anyone.”) When confronted with her fraud, she denies, attacks, deflects, jokes, insists on her integrity and offers to make tea. She piles frustration onto her daughter’s outrage and broken heart.

Night’s Martine, whose lines were a little shaky on opening night, goes from star-struck on first meeting Nazhi to accusatory after researching her background to triumphantly “gotcha.” To her protestations about all she’s done for the Indigenous art community, he retorts: “You can’t earn Indigeneity.”

Yott absolutely shines as Beverly. Pummelled by her mother’s falsity, she visibly struggles to process the news and to figure out how to help Nazhi survive the fallout. It’s an extremely affecting performance despite a false ending and an extra scene that Taylor should have incorporated into the previous one. Given that nothing happens but talk, the play is altogether too long, including a second false ending after Beverly’s final exit. 

The play’s unwavering focus on this latest appropriation of Native resources, cultural capital and identity is an important corrective for those who might otherwise shrug it off and ask why it even matters. Consider Charlie Beaver’s set design for Nazhi’s studio:a giant picture frame where posts and beams might be, broken and collapsed in the middle. We watch and listen to a powerful expression of the damage artistic and human counterfeiting can wreak.

 

 

 

 

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