Joelle Peters is an award-winning Indigenous (Anishinaabe) actor/playwright working in theatre, television, and film and current Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts.
It’s summertime on the rez, the frybread is sizzling, and the local radio station plays bluegrass, Anishinaabemowin lessons, and Friday-night bingo numbers. Lenna, the youngest of the Little family, is preparing to leave home for her first year at college, with little enthusiasm or help from her stubborn father and reckless brother. Amidst lingering doubts about departing the family flock, Lenna collides into a meet-cute with the charming and awkward Sam Thomas, who is returning to the reserve after many years away. With the promise of a romance budding between them, Lenna is caught in a whirlwind of uncertainty, wondering if she’s ready to bid farewell just as she's about to take flight.
Filled with Indigenous humour, small-town seasoning, and dream-world interludes, this heartwarming love story captures the bittersweet highs and lows of a rural teenage upbringing. A love letter to community, Niizh is a refreshing coming-of-age rom-com about two young lovebirds leaving the nest.
“In Niizh, Joelle Peters offers up a profound love and simultaneous longing for family and community. She stages generational strengths—humour, caring, and insightfulness—alongside generational wounds that can keep our dearest at arm’s length. This disarmingly simple story is artfully crafted with dialogue featuring a uniquely Peters-ian dry wit. Niizh is a celebration of the joys, beauties, and challenges of a young and fiercely capable Indigenous woman.”
- Tara Beagan
“Joelle can write the rez. Conveying the history, the hardship, but, more than anything, the humour and the beauty of our complicated communities. And to see those spaces on stage is a powerful thing.”
- Falen Johnson
