What happens when you put together two Canadian families, one Indigenous and one non-Indigenous, at a dinner table for the first time during Truth and Reconciliation Week?
The answer is on display in White Noise, a new Canadian play making its premiere at Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre this week.
While the production is a comedy, producers say it tackles serious issues including what it means to live in Canada from differing perspectives, questions how we respond to internalized racism.
And while getting the play to stage is an accomplishment, it’s one director Renae Morrisseau described as “bittersweet.”
That’s because playwright Taran Kootenhayoo died at 27 in December, without ever seeing the production get its run.
“We’re kind of grieving through the rehearsal process,” Morrisseau told Global News.
“It was written before we found the graves, it was written before the pandemic.”
Kootenhayoo, a promising young poet, playwright, actor and advocate began working on the piece nearly four years ago.
The show was meant to get a spring run last year, but plans were derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The script drew on Kootenhayoo’s own life experiences, highlighting what it is like to be an Indigenous person dealing with daily racism.
“Even some of the characters in the play are characters from when he was a kid,” Cheyanna Kootenhayoo, the play’s assistant director and Taran’s sister, explained.
“He wanted the audience to feel cringy awkwardness … there are just so many moments where it makes you feel uncomfortable you know, but that was the purpose.”
The plot follows an evening at t he home of a family in Vancouver’s wealthy Point Grey neighbourhood, as they host a welcome dinner for their new Indigenous neighbours, who just made a hefty profit from selling an app to Microsoft.
The production aims, among other things, to spark conversation about benevolent racism and how sometimes insidious it is esepcially in health and education, Morrisseau explained.
The production runs until May 1 in Vancouver, though producers hope to see it staged across North America.