Susinn McFarlen in Burning Mom, photo by Moonrider Productions for the Arts Club Theatre Company. Set design Patrick Rizzotti, costume design Kirsten McGhie, lighting design John Webber, projection design Kim Clegg.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
From destination to itinerary to vehicle, there is nothing usual, or even likely, about the road trip in Mieko Ouchi’s Burning Mom, the solo play that starts previews Saturday at the Citadel.
A grief-shattered 63-year-old widow learns how to drive a 26-foot RV, and drives it to Burning Man, the counter-culture week-long festival in the Nevada desert, the year after her husband dies.
Everything about this one-woman odyssey is wildly improbable, including this: it’s a true story. And that woman is Ouchi’s mother Dorothy. “Very much a real story,” says the playwright…. Well, 99.9 per cent real.” And as for the .1 per cent she made up, “you will not be right if you guess what it is.”
After listening to sold-out audiences in multiple cities (a rare occurrence in Canadian theatre), Ouchi, the Citadel’s associate artistic director, has concluded that “what has moved people so much is that my mom is, in the best sense of the word, an ‘ordinary’ person. She shops at Costco; she lives in suburban Calgary….” And if an ‘ordinary person’ can be brave enough to have a grand life re-affirming adventure, so can you, and you over there, and you at the back.
The response to Burning Mom, says Ouchi, has been “phenomenal,” first on the 800-seat Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre mainstage in Winnipeg, where, delayed by COVID she directed the premiere in 2023. By the time Burning Mom was at the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver a year ago, “there was buzz. And ticket sales just took off; we were held over before we even started, a runaway train.” The production garnered its star Susinn McFarlen a Jessie Award (Vancouver’s Sterlings) for best comedic performance — she plays Dorothy and everyone else, including the playwright and her bros — along with top honours for designers Patrick Rizzotti and Ana Camacho.
At Victoria’s Belfry Theatre in the fall the entire run sold out. The Arts Club has remounted it for a Lower Mainland tour, and added the Citadel to its tour roster. Last weekend there were less than 75 tickets available for the entire run here.
“It’s not me who’s selling it,” Ouchi laughs. “My plays haven’t been done in Vancouver for a while, and never before in Victoria or Winnipeg…. I really feel the hook is the show,” and its empowering idea.
The story starts in sudden, shattering loss, as Ouchi recounts. “Tragically my dad passed away very suddenly in 2010.” The chair of the design department at the Alberta University of Arts in Calgary, and a fine artist himself, he was, as his daughter describes, “beloved by his students, an epic person in that world.” He’d been feeling sick at Christmas, and figured he had the flu. The devastating news was that it was stage 4 pancreatic cancer and he had six months to live.” Three weeks later he died, “and we were all in complete shock.”
“My poor mom, she’d married at 18, left her parents’ home with her first serious boyfriend, and had never lived on her own…. The devastation was so profound; it was hard on all of us, but especially her. We were so worried about her,” says Ouchi. “Every couple divides up duties differently. But there were so many things she knew absolutely nothing about…”
At the end of that first year, “the life had been kicked out of her,” says Ouchi. At a family meeting, her mom proposed, to everyone’s enthusiastic approval,“a family vacation. Because we’ve had such a terrible year we just need a break, to gather our thoughts. Great idea mom!…. And I immediately thought ‘Mexican all-inclusive’.”
“I think we should go to Burning Man,” said Dorothy. And Ouchi and her brothers were incredulous. “Whaaat!? What did you just say?”
“She confessed that she’d been learning how to drive the RV that we’d been pushing her to get rid of….” It was new (her dad was a couple of months away from retirement). And it was massive (“it takes multiple people just to park it”). “And that’s where the play starts,” says Ouchi.
“Extraordinary. She had this ember in her that she fanned into a flame,” Ouchi says of her mom. “There’s something about her bravery that people have connected with so emotionally, so personally.” Not least because “she’s such a ‘normal person’.” Ouchi reports that at the show “people come up to me and say’ if your mom can do that, I could do something I’ve wanted to do, too. And I’m ‘go for it! That sounds immensely do-able’.”
Susinn McFarlen in Burning Mom, Arts Club Theatre Company. Photo by Moonrider Productions.
En route to Burning Man, Dorothy encounters the kindness of strangers. “A lot of people help her on the way,” which is another reason, Ouchi thinks, that people find the play so appealing, given the toxic state of the world. “There so much ugliness and anger and divisiveness right now. And this is a true story about kindness. People are hungry for it. They’ve found it so pleasurable to live in that world for a while.”
“It starts in grief but the play doesn’t live there at all,” says Ouchi. “It’s about how do you move on, how do you get yourself out of that state of grief…. My mom was just so determined to do it.”
The showstopper feature of the stage, as you’ll see in the Arts Club production at the Citadel, is Ouchi’s mom’s great big RV, in hyper-realistic detail. “People continually say ‘how did they drive that in here?’” Ouchi laughs. That giant scale is why she turned down an offer from the “brilliant but tiny” Arcola Theatre in the east end of London where an initial reading took place as part of an international series. “I really wanted to introduce the play at the large scale it was written for.”
The sight of her mom’s mega-RV onstage has amazed audiences, she reports. She constantly overhears people saying ‘“they must have really big doors back there!”. One of her favourite stage manager show reports ever, came from the Winnipeg run. At first sight of this size-large RV, an impressed high school boy stood up in the balcony and shouted “holy shit, this play is epic!” One for the memoirs.
PREVIEW
Burning Mom
Theatre: Arts Club Theatre at the Citadel
Written by: Mieko Ouchi
Directed by: Mieko Ouchi
Where: Citadel Rice Theatre
Starring Susinn McFarlen
Running: Feb. 14 to March 8
Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820
