Review: "Niizh" by Joelle Peters

Niizh by Joelle Peters
Published October 2024 via Playwrights Canada Press
★★★★★

Late summer, and Lenna is preparing to leave everything she knows: to move off the rez and go to college, to leave her father and brother and community behind. She wants to go, wants to get off the rez and see more and experience more—and she's not sure she's ready.

Reading a play is a different experience than reading a book—first of all, you're reading something in a form that it's not really meant to be experienced in; ideally you'd be seeing it performed with a full cast, not scrolling through the pages in Adobe Digital Editions. It's something I love doing anyway, because seeing how the pieces of a play fit together can teach you so much about dialogue and pacing and character development. (I love, too, knowing that if you handed this play to two different theatre troupes or departments, you'd end up with two very different interpretations.)

Even better: This is one of the best plays I've read in a while—the past two or three years at least. There's so much going on in this slim volume, and yet it doesn't feel overloaded. We have a sense of what life is like on the reservation Lenna lives on, and complicated family relationships, and a new face in town; we have socioeconomic factors and first-gen-in-college missteps (there are parts of this play that I think will resonate heavily with first-gen college students of any background) and a bit of Anishinaabe culture.

Plays can sometimes get away with a level of absurdity that other formats can't (you can have ghosts wander onstage or the furniture decide to speak and it's not necessarily weird), but this one plays it straight, which for me at least makes it easier to focus on the characters and setting. I'd highly recommend this one to read, and I'm sorry it's not being performed near me.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.