Jason Pierce, a 31 year old Canadian half-Native man, is packing up his urban apartment to leave it all behind for his romanticized vision of a return to life on the reserve where he grew up. As he’s leaving, he is paid an unexpected visit by a 34 year old American man, Harry Deiter, who awkwardly introduces himself as Jason’s half-brother. What Harry wants from Jason is bizarre: to be compatibility-tested for a possible kidney donation to their dying non-Native father, a man Jason has no memory of ever meeting and who, after a brief and secret affair, abandoned Jason’s mother when he was two months old.
Both Jason and Harry are about to have their most fundamental and sustaining beliefs shaken to the core by their respective relationships to the biological father they inadvertently share. Harry, the naïve historical positivist, buoyed up by a lifetime of relative privilege as a member of the dominant imperial culture, encounters in Jason the anger and bitter resistance of the exploited and abandoned colonial, in terms of both Jason’s Native and his Canadian heritage and identity.
Embroiled in the irreconcilable absurdity of their dilemma, Harry is forced to acknowledge that the father he has loved and respected all his life has concealed from his American family his capacity for an absent, heartless cruelty. Jason, on the other hand, must wrestle with the possibility that the man who so thoughtlessly exploited and abandoned his Canadian Native mother and their son may in fact have the capacity to be a loving and present husband and father.
This play raises powerful questions that transcend issues of culture, morality and history—they cut to the ethical quick of what it means to be human in a chaotic world stripped of the comfortable security of identity politics.
