A respected First Nations Canadian playwright and Governor General’s Award finalist, Daniel David Moses was known for using storytelling and theatrical conventions to explore the consequences of the collision between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures. Coyote City and Big Buck City are the first two in his series of four City Plays that track the journey of one particular Native family between a world of Native spiritual traditions and the materialist urban landscape in which we all attempt to survive.
Coyote City, a tragedy, begins with a phone call from a ghost that sends a young Native woman, Lena, her family in pursuit, on a search in the city for her missing lover Johnny. Big Buck City, a farce, tells the story of Lena’s subsequent Christmas reunion in that city with her family just in time for the birth of her own miraculous child.
"Coyote City…in performance clearly would become a poem in its entirety… I’ve read nothing that conveys so powerfully how Canada and the future look to young Native men and women who choose the company of their own dead in preference to life in a society with no role or place for them. It’s not just the best Canadian play I’ve read this year but the best in several years.”
—Ronald Bryden, Globe and Mail
"While he offers plenty of pratfalls and broad caricatures, Moses ultimately aims for something darker, more complex, something magical. Big Buck City is a strangely powerful, disturbing piece of work…life and death and money and magic swirl around each other…an amusing but familiar farce [turns] into something more powerful and more difficult to pin down.”
—Chris Dafoe, Globe and Mail