Grief goes to Burning Man

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This article was published 26/04/2023 (1235 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After a death in the family, there is no shortage of roads to take. In grief, some amble slowly along a nostalgic, roundabout path, cobbled with stones of bittersweet memories. Others hit the freeway and avoid glancing up at the rearview mirror.

A year after her husband died in 2010, Dorothy Ouchi got into an RV and drove to the Nevada desert for the world’s largest outdoor arts festival: Burning Man.

Playwright Mieko Ouchi was caught off guard by her then-60-something mom’s idea, to say the least.

“She’s the kind of person you’d meet at HomeSense or Tim Hortons,” says Ouchi, the Edmonton-based playwright of Burning Mom, on at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre mainstage from April 27 through May 20. “Nothing about her screams, ‘I have a yearning to go to Burning Man.’ So that was part of the charm of the decision. It was just so unexpected.”

Ouchi, who made a name for herself at the helm of Edmonton’s Concrete Theatre and now is associate artistic director of the Citadel Theatre, didn’t at first consider adapting her mom’s story for the stage. Her most well-known shows, The Red Priest and The Blue Light, dealt with the classical composer Antonio Vivaldi and the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, respectively, while other works included Silver Arrow, a steam-punk adaptation of Robin Hood.

She was directing that show when David Yee, the artistic director of fu-GEN, the country’s premier Asian Canadian theatre company, approached her about producing a play together.

Ouchi told Yee, whose Among Men will play next season at RMTC, about her mom’s desert odyssey, and he was struck.

“He said, ‘That’s the play right there,’” Ouchi says.

So Ouchi got to work, researching her parents and looking inward to understand her mother’s strange, eclectic decision. During her career as a filmmaker, Ouchi had made documentaries about her family, including her parents, who met as long-haired, ponytailed hippies at the Alberta College of Design in the mid-1960s.

After graduating, they moved to the mod enclave of Kensington Market in Toronto, selling prints and taking in an explosion of pop and graphic art.

“They were hippies,” she says of her parents, Eugene and Dorothy Ouchi. “And I was their cute little hippie baby.”

Both of her parents mounted successful careers in art: Eugene represented Canada in the 1971 Venice Biennale, ran a successful design firm called Stepstone, and eventually became the chair of design at his and Dorothy’s alma mater, now known as the Alberta College of Art and Design.

Dorothy continued on as a full-time artist while also getting a degree in early-childhood education.

They continued to make art as a couple, sharing a home studio, while encouraging their children to pursue creative choices as well.

For Ouchi, visual art wasn’t in the cards. “I can’t draw at all,” she says. Meanwhile, the Ouchis didn’t quite shed their hippie, nomadic ideology: they frequently dragged their kids on road trips in a dark orange van.

While her previous large-scale work explored historical characters, for Burning Mom, Ouchi had to contend with the pressure of documenting the story of the woman who raised her. “I had to have a really big conversation about whether or not she was all right with me sharing her journey, because it was very personal,” says Ouchi. “But my mom is a really amazing person, and had already started to tell her story at a grief counselling group.

“She told me, ‘If it helps somebody, go for it!’ Because I think what she discovered was it was so helpful just to find some joy and bring it back into her life again.”

Ouchi is hesitant to share details about her mom’s trip, because the story that plays out onstage is based in large part on Dorothy’s diaries from her trek to Burning Man. Those diaries, Ouchi says, were made up of abstract paintings, which she and her mother dissected together.

The one-woman show will star the two-time Dora Award-winning actor Lisa Horner, who earned the hardware for her work in The Wizard of Oz and Grey Gardens, a stage adaptation of the Maysles brothers’ documentary. (Soon to get behind the wheel of an RV, Horner is perhaps best known for a different starring vehicle centred around a vehicle: the IKEA television commercial in which she screams, “Start the car!”)

Ouchi says that despite the prevalence of death in the show, it is not at all morose.

“My goal was never to write a tragedy, but to write about someone’s journey back into their lives. It touches on obviously sad topics, but I would say that overall, it’s hopeful.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com