Serpent in the Night Sky; Amigo’s Blue Guitar; Tessera 11 (Winter/Hiver 1991) “Performance/Transformance”

Among other things, Warren’s and MacLeod’s plays enact the shifting complexities of brother/sister relationships. In Warren’s play, Serpent in the Night Sky, Duff and his sister Stella endure the ongoing oppression of Gator, a bully and petty criminal. When Joy enters their world, however, the dynamics begin to change. Joy and Duff meet in Montana and return together to northern Saskatchewan. After spending a night together in a motel while on the road, they decide to get married. The play opens with “Preacher on top of his church, watching the night sky” and Duff and Joy entering Duff’s living room, the main set. Duff’s sister Stella and Gator soon appear, Stella having just received $15,000 in lottery winnings. Stella’s and Duff’s mother, Marlene, has gone back to the woods. Joy manages to liberate Duff and Stella from Gator and to reconcile them to each other and Duff to their mother, Marlene. Preacher – a character both comic and thematic in function – performs a marriage ceremony of sorts for Joy and Duff and they begin a journey to the west coast, or to the end of Joy’s fifty dollars, whichever comes first. Warren reworks the formula in which a stranger (in this case an innocent instead of a villain) enters a quietly desperate situation and transforms everyone’s lives for the better, and successfully blends it with the more ambitious invocation of myth in Preacher’s search for “the serpent in the night sky”.