"Tombs Of The Vanishing Indian is a play about reclamation: of history, culture and family.

Set largely in 1970s Los Angeles (but including a mythic character from the 1850s), Marie Clements’s script follows the tales of three grown-up native sisters separated in early childhood.

Janey (PJ Prudat), living in poverty, has been pulled into a police station and questioned by a detective (Martin Julien) because she’s thought to have killed her child. Miranda (Falen Johnson), an actor, auditions for a randy director (David Storch) to play an Indian in a Hollywood film. Jessie (Nicole Joy-Fraser), the most upwardly mobile of the three, is a doctor who’s moved to L.A. with her physician husband (Keith Barker).

But though they’re in different worlds, each feels the pull of her siblings; their lives eventually interlace, at least on a symbolic level.

While the action in set in the United States and references American laws and attitudes – especially those dealing with relocating native populations from reservations to urban areas and federally assisted sterilization programs – there are uncomfortable resonances of Canadian policies, including those involving native boarding schools and foster parenting.

The material is often upsetting, but Clements adds some comic moments; even so, the laughs are bitter. They work best and most perceptively in the Miranda episode, as she bandies ironic words with the director and discovers his secrets."

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Tombs Of The Vanishing Indian (NOW Magazine 3/14)