In Indigenous storytelling, wisdom often emerges from the space between seemingly opposing forces. Talk Is Free Theatre’s current production of Tales of an Urban Indian at Toronto’s Hope Metropolitan Church masterfully inhabits this liminal space, offering a profound meditation on identity that is simultaneously deeply personal and universally resonant.
Written by Darrell Dennis, this one-person show follows Simon Douglas, a contemporary Indigenous man whose life story unfolds between reserve and city, tradition and modernity, comedy and tragedy, and cliché and uniqueness. The play, which has evolved in real time while travelling internationally since its 2009 premiere, has often taken place on a moving city bus. The bus served as both the theatre and the set: transporting audiences to locations relevant to the journey Simon was discussing. In this new staging, Director Herbie Barnes – who inhabited the role of Simon in both 2009 and 2018 – transforms a church basement into an intimate theatrical space that preserves the two-sided seating of the bus configuration, while creating a space that is more metaphysical, or even sacred.
Audience members line both sides of a bus-shaped rectangle which has been cordoned off by simple sheets and boards. The result is a curious space that evokes both a metaphorical sweat lodge and the transitional spaces of urban life. At the space’s center is an urn filled with small, smooth stones. The stones symbolize and help to ground Simon’s storytelling about various individuals who have shaped his existence. As he tells a person’s story, he often moves a stone – particularly if their final fate is tragic, when he places that stone into a small line on the floor in front of the space’s back door.
From the moment when Simon tentatively enters the space through that back door, actor Nolan Moberley (who has played the role since 2023) delivers a performance whose persuasive, propulsive sway hits the audience like a gale force wind. In the role, he embodies not just Simon but the vast array of characters who populate his memories. From his protective mother to his teenage girlfriend, from reservation elders to urban friends, each character emerges distinctly and vividly through the actor’s chameleonic transformations. The performance style is necessarily heightened and not strictly realistic – the script’s words cascade in stylized torrents — yet within the framework of the script Moberley accesses raw, authentic storytelling that can pivot in an instant from hilarious to heartbreaking, from puerile to profound.
Throughout the 90-minute performance, the actor is in near-constant motion: commanding the space while establishing direct eye contact in turn with individual audience members, and creating an intimacy that is more commonly associated with storytelling than traditional theatre. His presence is mesmerizing and magnetic — whether he’s channeling the silly energy of 80s hair metal (smartly used to evoke specific moments in time), depicting teenage sexual awkwardness, or conjuring the wolves that prowl the edges of the reserve.
The production explicitly leans into fascinating dualities. While Simon’s journey is uniquely personal, it intersects with recognizable tropes of Indigenous experience – tropes which he mocks at the start. The play is both brutally honest – for instance about intergenerational trauma and substance abuse — and playfully satirical, particularly in its caricatured depictions of non-Indigenous characters. It also manages to be both clear-eyed about systemic racism and cautiously hopeful about human resilience.
Like its protagonist, Tales of an Urban Indian exists in multiple worlds simultaneously: it’s an individual journey, a living anthology, and a theatrical vehicle that — like the bus in which it was formerly performed – continues to pick up new creative passengers and new layers, even while carrying forward its essential truths. And in its new incarnation at Hope Metropolitan Church, Tales of an Urban Indian challenges Toronto’s urban settlers and Indians directly: to look right into the eyes of these complex and contradictory realities, and to find ourselves in the spaces between.
Tales of an Urban Indian continues until May 31, 2025. Book tickets at tift.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
