The (Post) Mistress eBook

By Tomson Highway

Canada’s most famous Indigenous playwright, Tomson Highway, sets his latest theatrical achievement, The (Post) Mistress, in a not-so-distant past, when sending letters through the mail was still vital to communicating with friends and loved ones, and the small-town post office was often the only connection to faraway places longed-for or imagined.

Born and raised in Lovely, Ontario, a small French-Canadian farming village near Lake Huron, Marie-Louise Painchaud has never had occasion to venture much farther than the nearest community – Complexity, a copper-mining town and a somewhat larger dot on the map of the Georgia Bay area. For thirty years, Marie-Louise has worked at the local post office, and, through the many letters she sorts when they arrive and the ones that she stamps before they go out, she has come to know the lives of everyone in town and vicariously experience their various loves, losses, and personal dramas.

In this one-woman musical tour de force, Marie-Louise confides in us the interwoven stories sealed in the envelopes she handles every day. A samba beat offers the soundtrack for the tale of a local woman’s passion- ate but doomed affair with a man from Rio de Janeiro; a rhythmic tango plays as Marie-Louise divulges a friend’s steamy tryst in Argentina. All together, twelve unique musical pieces, ranging from Berlin cabaret to French café chanson to smooth bossa nova, accompany a multilingual French, Cree, and English libretto.

In The (Post) Mistress, Tomson Highway creates not only a rural comedy but also a sublime parody of small-town life – the northern Ontario version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town or Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

Cast of 1 woman.

Music from The (Post) Mistress is available at http://goo.gl/ivtwqA

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Sep 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780889227811

Tomson Highway

TOMSON HIGHWAY is a Cree author, playwright, and musician. His memoir, Permanent Astonishment, won the 2021 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He also wrote the plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, and the bestselling novel Kiss of the Fur Queen. He is a member of the Barren Lands First Nation and lives in Gatineau, Quebec.

Book preview

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CONTENTS

Production History

Song Order

Production Note

Setting

Set

A Note On Translations and Pronunciation

Act One

Act Two

Acknowledgements

Also By Tomson Highway

About The Author

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Keetha kichi ooma masinaa-igan, Patricia Cano. Athis ithigook eeneetaanagamooyin. Igwa ithigook meena eek’seewaatsee-in. Kimshi-nanaaskoomitin

PRODUCTION HISTORY

The (Post) Mistress was first produced, in an earlier draft, at and by Magnus Theatre in Thunder Bay, Ontario, from January 27 to February 12, 2011, with the following cast and company:

The Postmistress: Pandora Topp

Pianist: Danny Johnson

Saxophonist: Dino Pepe

Director: Mario Crudo

Musical Director: Danny Johnson

Set Designer: Bruce Repei

Lighting Designer: Kirsten Watt

Costume Designer: Mervi Agombar

Stage Manager: Gillian Jones

It was subsequently produced, also in an earlier draft, at and by Ship’s Company Theatre in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, from August 3 to 28, 2011, with the following cast and company:

The Postmistress: Martha Irving

Pianist: Holly Arsenault

Saxophonist: Mitch Clarke

Director: Andrew Lamb

Musical Director: Holly Arsenault

Artistic Producer: Matthew Tiffin

Set and Props Designer: Andrew Murray

Lighting Designer: Paul Del Motte

Costume Designer: Krista Levy

Stage Manager: Ingrid Risk

Technical Director / Production Manager: Jonathon Harpur

It was produced in this, its final English version, by the Ode’min Giizis Festival at the Market Hall Performing Arts Centre in Peterborough, Ontario, from June 21 to 24, 2012, with the following cast and company:

The Postmistress: Patricia Cano

Pianist: Tomson Highway

Saxophonist: Marcus Ali

Director: Ruth Madoc-Jones

Musical Director: Tomson Highway

Producers: Patti Shaughnessy and Bill Kimball

Lighting and Set Designer: Ted Roberts

Costume Designer: Martha Cockshutt

Stage Manager: Elizabeth Kantor

Production Manager: Esther Vincent

Movement Coach: Marie-Josée Chartier

A French version, translated by Tomson Highway and Raymond Lalonde and titled Zesty Gopher s’est fait écraser par un frigo, was co-produced by the National Arts Centre and Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario of Sudbury, Ontario, and performed at the NAC French Theatre in Ottawa from October 17 to 20, 2012, and in Sudbury from October 25 to November 3, 2012, with the following cast and company:

The Postmistress: Patricia Cano

Pianist: Tomson Highway

Saxophonist (Ottawa): Vince Rimbach

Saxophonist (Sudbury): Jean-Yves Bégin

Director: Geneviève Pineault

Musical Director: Tomson Highway

Translation Consultant: Robert Marinier

Set and Lighting Designer: Glen Charles Landry

Costume Designer: Isabelle Bélisle

Sound Designer: Frédéric St-Onge

Stage Manager: Marie-Josée Dionne

Movement Coach: Denise Vitali

SONG ORDER

ACT ONE

Taansi, Nimiss (Hey, Big Sister)

Hey, Good-Lookin’

Quand je danse (When I Dance)

Oh, Little Bear

Love I Know Is Here

The Window

ACT TWO

When I Was Last in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Some Say a Rose

Mad to Love

Have I Told You

The Robins of Dawn

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THE (POST) MISTRESS

PRODUCTION NOTE

The (Post) Mistress is a two-act, one-person play about Marie-Louise Painchaud, a forty-nine-year-old francophone woman who grew up and lives in Northern Ontario.

The running time of the play is approximately 110 minutes, including one intermission.

SETTING

The post office in Lovely, a small town in francophone Northern Ontario.

Friday, August 9, 1986, that is, a time before the internet, when people wrote letters on paper, frequently by hand, and sent them by post.

SET

The first and main feature of the set is a wall completely covered with a gridwork of small, square aluminum boxes – the mailboxes, in effect, of a small country post office as seen from the back, from the perspective of the post-office workers who sort the mail. This, of course, is what the character Marie-Louise Painchaud will be doing throughout the play – sorting envelopes into these boxes.

The second feature of the set is a counter that stands in front of the wall of mailboxes just off stage-centre toward stage left. This counter is seen not from the front, but from its left end only, so that the performer playing/working at this counter is never hidden by it but is plainly visible to the audience at all times. On top of this counter sit the paraphernalia of a postmistress, principal of which are a small