Art used as framing device in drama coloured by charged family dynamics By: Holly Harris Posted: 5:23 PM CST Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026

In today’s age of fake news and AI, “truth” becomes a mutable point, able to bend and flex as easily as an artist’s paintbrush on a canvas.

The world première of Drew Hayden Taylor’s art-world thriller, The Undeniable Accusations of Red Cadmium Light, opened Wednesday at Prairie Theatre Exchange’s Cherry Karpyshin Mainstage, delving into the games people play when maintaining their personal, convenient status quo.

The company’s penultimate production, helmed by Winnipeg-based director/playwright Tracey Nepinak, features Charlene Van Buekenhout as 67-year-old Nazhi (Nezhikewzid) Nigig, who runs an art gallery on the Otter Lake First Nation.

Hailed internationally as an expert in Indigenous art, she gleefully identifies forgeries of “Picasso of the North” Norval Morrisseau, regarded the grandfather of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada, in part through the use of the paint colour red cadmium light.

Taylor, an award-winning playwright, novelist, journalist and filmmaker born and raised on the Curve Lake First Nation, deftly sets us up by creating a cosy domestic world in which Nazhi chirps and chatters.

She brews mint tea and cooks up steaming pots of soup for her visitor, arts reporter Martine Marten (Vinnie Alberto), interviewing her for an article on counterfeits that ultimately exposes darker truths (no spoilers here).

Van Buekenhout does a fine job fleshing out her character, making her instantly appealing. She’s proud of her adopted daughter, Beverly Nigig (Calla Adubofour-Poku), a successful Indigenous educator up for a promotion in the “big city,” and regales Marten with stories of her late artist husband, Theo.

An effective touch is the way she shows Marten walls of “paintings” hung in her chalet-flavoured gallery (created by set/props designer Adam Parboosingh); their invisibility underscores the play’s theme of reality versus imagination.

So, too, the howling winds that underpin the entire two-and-a-half-hour show (including intermission), courtesy of sound designer/composer Ryan Black, evoke the omnipresence of ghostly ancestral spirits, while adding an element of foreboding (though cracking sounds of lake ice, augmented by weirdly flashing lights, do not exactly work).

Lighting designer Anika Binding provides mood throughout, as well as a stylized palette of colour, flooding the entire stage in saturated cadmium red hues as Nazhi utters her final lines. Costumes by Amy McPherson include beaded moccasins and colourful shawls for Nazhi, pedestrian shirts and trousers for Martine and career-climbing “professional” wear for Beverly, including a Burberry designer wool scarf from that bastion of colonialism, Britain.

Adubofour-Poku’s portrayal as Nazhi’s upwardly mobile daughter will surely grow and deepen throughout the show’s 12-day run, but her acting feels uncomfortably stiff and one-dimensional, despite the hot-pepper jolt of F-bomb-fuelled outbursts during Act II. Her reaction to her mother’s skittish disclosures often teeters on broad-strokes hysteria, not genuine angst, as her world is ripped apart.

Alberto fares better, despite some holes in his character’s journalistic integrity and approach that mar the story’s believability. However, his confrontation of Nazhi near the end of Act I provides some of the show’s most compelling moments.

Despite the play’s noble premise and timely themes of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation, an abundance of expository dialogue weakens its structure.

Several sections either lag or feel superfluous, becoming overly didactic in a way that thwarts the narrative’s momentum, particularly during the mother-daughter exchanges in Act II.

One of the most powerful moments comes (OK, one spoiler can slip out here) when Marten asks for his sacred gift of tobacco back from Nazhi, the shocking symbolism of that singular act sending a palpable chill through the opening night crowd.

However, its greatest flaw is the fact that “art” ironically plays second fiddle to the play’s human relationships (still the jet fuel of any live performance), calling into question whether the entire audience has been duped.

Did an entire play, titled and inspired by Morrisseau’s world-famous paintings, present itself as something it’s not? Such are these seeds of doubt planted, and one wishes that, instead of arm-wrestling with identity politics, this framing device (pun intended) could have been more present, rather than the show devolving into fraught family dynamics.

But that again might be the entire point of it all. Nazhi’s cold assertion that the “world will end not with a bang but an accusation,” as she guzzles Southern Comfort in her rising desperation, rings true not only for us but for Taylor’s canvas of characters in a way that not even pigment can disguise.

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