Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing
*Date of Birth: December 6, 1951 on his father's trap-line in Northern Manitoba.
* Eleventh of twelve children: 5 boys and 7 girls. Only 6 of the eleven are alive today.
* Was a nomad for the first 6 years of his life living in the natural environment: forests, lakes of Northwestern Manitoba.
*Belonged to the reserve Brochet Manitoba
* Only language was Cree. Later learned English in his late teens.
*Father, Joe Highway, was a trapper, fisherman and legendary dog-sled racer
Take a more in-depth look into Tomson Highway's life...........
"Dad got transferred to Thompson Hospital, so mom and some of my family stayed at my cousins' house. So I started writing the play in his hospital room, with my feet on his bed. So that's when I did the first draft. And while I was there I went into town in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon and ran into these beautiful young men, many of whom I knew � I mean physically beautiful. There were ten tables put together [in the bar there] and people were having a riot: laughing and telling stories around these tables. But this day all these men were crowded into the bar, and there was a story about women playing baseball, and someone did a fly-ball and the ball was stuck down a woman's cleavage, and she was so embarrassed that she walked right off the field. And this was all in Cree, and it's a hilarious language, and everybody was laughing so hard. Then a light went on, and there was a mini stage, and I turned around and the stripper was right above me, just twirling her tits. And the perspective I had from that angle was seeing fifteen to twenty men staring at the stage, like they were seeing God . . . God as a woman, God as a stripper, which is some of what I was looking at in the play [Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing]."
And all this time my father was dying. The Vancouver tour ended and I flew to Toronto, to Regina, and all this time I was writing � writing in airport waiting lounges, everywhere. The first draft blew out of me as a cry of despair. Two nights before the end of the tour, he died, which was the perfect time, like he knew. So the play came from the heart, it was a cry, it came from such a deep place.
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My Personal Reaction to the play:
Generally, when I read a play, I tend to get into it and want to keep reading. While this play did have some interesting aspects, it did not interest me as much as some of the other plays I have read, for example The Glass Menagerie. There are some very good ideas and themes in that play as well. I know that I am not a theater critic, and that I shouldn't judge someone else's work, but I thought that it would have been a little more interesting to read a play that had characters that you could somewhat relate to, and that it wasn't as confusing as Dry Lips. Now I am not bashing this play, like I had stated before, there were a lot of good themes and ideas circulating around throughout the play, but it just didn't interest me as much as past plays I have read in the past.
