SOURCE: "The Bingocentric Worlds of Michel Tremblay and Tomson Highway, Les Belles-Soeurs vs. The Rez Sisters," in Canadian Literature, Vol. 144, Spring, 1995, pp. 126-40.

In the following essay, Usmiani compares Les Belles-soeurs to Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters, demonstrating how both plays parallel aspects of postmodern theater but express a different spirit.

The emergent theatre of Native peoples offers theatre scholars and historians a unique opportunity to observe the fusion of cultures in the making. While contemporary postmodern theatre represents just one more link in a long chain of historical evolution that goes back two and a half millennia, contemporary Native playwrights are forced to work in a genre without direct antecedent in their culture—although theatrical elements are present, of course, in many aspects of traditional ritual and story-telling. In the best plays to emerge so far, the authors have successfully grafted the techniques of Euramerican postmodern theatre...