Civilized

About the Play
William Blank, a federal bureaucrat resurrected from 1907, thinks something isn’t right. With gusto and charm, poetry and conviction, he tries to defend the indefensible: the Indian Residential Schools. But only when he yields to what he’s known all along does the truth reveal itself: that something was horrifically wrong!

CIVILIZED, a play about the banality of evil and putting it right, explores how the Canadian government failed to prevent the abuse, and in many cases, deaths suffered by Natives at the Indian Residential Schools. The last Indian Residential School didn’t close until 1996! During those years, thousands of children died, many, as we are now finding out, were buried in unmarked graves. Many more children were scarred mentally and physically for life. All told 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were taken from their families and forced to attend these church-run, government-funded schools. In 1907, Dr. Peter Bryce, the Chief Medical Officer of the Departments of the Interior and Indian Affairs, reported that the Indian Residential Schools of Canada were “dangerous to health” with “an almost total lack of ventilation with Indian boys and girls dying in overcrowded, unhygienic school-rooms and dormitories.” The Canadian government was funding these institutions and clearly had an obligation to ensure they were properly run and safe, yet the government failed to act. Why?

CIVILIZED attempts to answer this question by resurrecting a fictional government bureaucrat, William Blank, from the past to explain. Using actual government reports, writings, and speeches from the period, one uncovers a contemptuous and superior attitude of the Canadian government. CIVILIZED is a compelling look at how colonialist ideas of what it means to be “civilized” were responsible for the horrors inflicted on the First Nations People. 

Meet John D. Huston (Actor)
A member of Canada’s Metis Nation, Huston has had a lively career “culturally misappropriating the works
and identities of dead white guys”, includes playing Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan, William Lyon MacKenzie in Toronto, Shakespeare in England, & Charles Dickens across Canada. In 2017 he was privileged to portray Louis Riel for the 50th anniversary production of Canada’s longest running dramatic presentation, The Trial of Louis Riel. He later voiced Riel on CBC’s Ideas episode, “Sir John A. MacDonald on Trial for Crimes Against Humanity”. In 2016, he performed Mark Leiren Young’s, controversial, Shylock at UNO, Canada’s festival of solo work. SCREWTAPE, John’s one-man adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, garnered him a Best Actor win in 2015 from the Ottawa Capitol Critics Circle. His solo performance of A Christmas Carol earned him a second such nomination in 2016, the only non-Ottawa actor to be nominated two years running.