{"id":15812,"date":"2018-04-17T10:26:04","date_gmt":"2018-04-17T17:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=15812"},"modified":"2018-04-18T09:23:22","modified_gmt":"2018-04-18T16:23:22","slug":"salt-baby-playwright-chooses-to-laugh-through-hard-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2018\/04\/17\/salt-baby-playwright-chooses-to-laugh-through-hard-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Salt Baby<\/em> playwright chooses to laugh through hard times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The history of indigenous reconciliation is long and painful for many people. Playwright and director Falen Johnson has chosen to laugh instead of cry; as a result of that, she wrote the indigenous comedy Salt Baby<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a comedy and it\u2019s fun,\u201d says Johnson about her play. \u201cI think that\u2019s such a staple of many indigenous cultures\u2014to survive colonization, the only way to get through it is to laugh. That\u2019s just the reality of who we are as people. We\u2019re funny people; I think we have to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Salt Baby<\/em> director Falen Johnson (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Johnson started writing the play 10 years ago, after she graduated from theatre school, which consisted of \u201c8- or 12-hour days of doing some sort of art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter I graduated I found myself not having anything to do and I felt like I needed something that felt creative and fulfilled that part of my life,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The play is a semi-autobiographical take on Johnson\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I call it a \u2018memoir,\u2019 then everybody thinks that everything on stage actually happened and that\u2019s not true,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve definitely drawn from parts of my life. There are things I\u2019ve totally pulled from, but there are other things that you make up for dramaturgical reasons, or for the sake of story. And so I definitely pull from things in my life and from people in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson says it wasn\u2019t hard to make a comedy from the play\u2019s subject matter.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of my work sits in this place of a struggle between the reserve and the city, because that\u2019s sort of been my experience, and that struggle, frequently, is absurd, so it wasn\u2019t really hard to pull it into comedy,\u201d says Johnson. \u201cThere are verbatim lines and almost verbatim scenes in the play of things that have happened to me or to people I know that I\u2019ve witnessed. They might seem totally unbelievable when you see them on stage or read them in the script, but these things keep happening\u2014they happen. And they\u2019re still happening 10 years later. The world hasn\u2019t really changed that much.\u201d<\/p>\n

The realities of indigenous identities still hold true, says Johnson.<\/p>\n

\u201cQuestions around status and status cards\u2014all of that stuff is still very much relevant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Salt Baby
\n<\/em>Various times, Tuesday, April 17 until Sunday, May 13
\nVarious prices, The Belfry Theatre
\ntickets.belfry.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The history of indigenous reconciliation is long and painful for many people. Playwright and director Falen Johnson has chosen to laugh instead of cry; as a result of that, she wrote the indigenous comedy Salt Baby. \u201cIt\u2019s a comedy and it\u2019s fun,\u201d says Johnson about her play. \u201cI think that\u2019s such a staple of many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15813,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-webexclusive"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15812"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15814,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15812\/revisions\/15814"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}