Credit: Trudie Lee
York Theatre to March 16, 2025
Tickets from $29 at 604-251-1363 or www.thecultch.com
Posted March 7, 2025
Not given to laughing out loud very often in the theatre, I – and everyone else – laughed a lot at playwright/director Kevin Loring’s Little Red Warrior & His Lawyer on opening night at the York Theatre. When I came home, however, I looked at Treaty 6 (1876), an agreement between “Her Majesty the Queen” and several Canadian prairie First Nation “tribes”. It’s not funny at all; downright insulting, in fact. The play, however, is a hoot.
Little Red Warrior & His Lawyer started off when Loring was a student at Studio 58 twenty years ago; he wanted to write a comedy about land claims – a tall order, for sure. It has obviously been tweaked on and off over the years – even very recently with a “51st US State” quip. Don’t look for any sacred cows here; everything and everyone is fodder for Loring’s wickedly funny sense of humour.
While we non-indigenous folk balk at poking fun at First Nations, Loring, a proud Nlaka’pamux from the Lytton First Nation, plays fast and loose with Little Red. And you may never, ever think about the late, much-loved Queen Elizabeth the same way again; I guarantee you cannot imagine how Loring envisions Her Majesty.
Credit: Trudie Lee
In the play, Little Red (Gordon Patrick White), the last of his tribe, wakes up one morning to a strange sound and upon investigation discovers his ancestral land is being cleared to make way for development. Furious, he clobbers the engineer, sending him to hospital and finds himself in need of a lawyer. Enter Larry (Shekhar Paleja), the court-appointed lawyer.
If this sounds serious, hold on to your hat. It’s played for laughs and this cast is perfectly equipped to handle it. At the top of his game is Kevin McNulty as Floyd and various other roles; funnier than you ever thought she could be is Luisa Jojic (maybe even funnier than she thought she could be) as Larry’s wife Desdemona; weirdly, calculatingly funny is Paleja as Larry; truly beyond words is Nick Miami Benz as Lizzy (Queen Elizabeth); and hilariously stoic, legs apart, stern of jaw and rugged is White as Little Red.
While Red’s trial for assaulting the engineer is pending, Larry invites Red to stay with him and Desdemona, also a lawyer, in their tastefully appointed home. Lots of jokes here about outdoor plumbing, lifestyle and food choices as well as not-at-all subtle barbs about Larry’s limp response to Desdemona’s horny advances. You can see where this is going.
Credit: Trudie Lee
Little Red Warrior & His Lawyer is what’s called a trickster fable. In this storytelling structure, we are taken through the play by a storyteller, in this case, the Trickster. McNulty is that storyteller – a shopping-buggy-pushing guy off the street who asks us if we want him to tell us a story. Well, that’s what we’re in the theatre for, right? McNulty is so slyly funny, so conspiratorial, so wonderfully adept. A nudge-nudge, wink-wink kind of performance that draws us right in and keeps us there (mostly) for eighty uninterrupted minutes.
Produced by Savage Society (Vancouver) and the Belfry Theatre (Victoria) in association with NAC Indigenous Theatre (Ottawa) and Theatre Calgary, this Cultch presentation is handsome with set design – a cross between a grey forest of trees and a pipe organ (believe it!) – by John Doucet and lit by Jeff Harrison. Bluesy guitar soundscape – by Troy Slocum – is reminiscent of Western movies. Costumes – and there’s one real doozy – are by Samantha McCue. Projection design is Candelario Andrade’s.
Little Red Warrior is a little long and ultimately, I was left with a question for the playwright: it this a cautionary tale? What are we to make of Little Red’s about-face?
A personal note here: some years ago, when the Tsleil-waututh First Nation (TWFN) was in talks with Metro Vancouver Regional District Parks over the future of Belcarra Regional Park, the comment was made that perhaps the TWFN would want to build condos at Admiralty Point. I think it was in jest – but maybe not – and I remember being shocked at that possibility and then thinking, well, it’s their land, their turn and they have the right to do with it what they want. And therein lies a huge discussion: mining, pipelines, logging, development on land that has been returned to various First Nations. It’s thorny and contentious amongst and within bands. At least, for a moment, while experiencing Little Red Warrior & His Lawyer, we can laugh while decision-makers ponder the future of land use.