The encumbrance of being earnest

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This article was published 29/04/2023 (952 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mieko Ouchi’s Burning Mom, the final mainstage show at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, has the ring of truth. It’s the story of Ouchi’s own mother, Dorothy, and the pilgrimage she makes after the unexpected death of her husband, taking a road trip to a radical art festival in the middle of the desert.

They say truth is stranger than fiction. But what’s overlooked in that cliché is that truth is often the enemy of art.

It’s difficult to be critical of something so heartfelt, so earnest. But while Burning Mom — which is directed by the playwright — is clearly filled with genuine emotion, it’s lacking metaphor, poetry, dramatic arc or conflict, providing what feels like faithful biographical detail at the expense of narrative oomph.

The overlong first act sees 63-year-old Dorothy struggling to adapt to life after Eugene’s death. She decides to keep the fancy RV they bought for their retirement, teaching herself to park it and taking it on a solo camping trip.

Then, to the surprise of her children, she announces she wants to use it to go to Burning Man, the massive Nevada gathering that takes place every year in a temporary city on the sun-baked playa, where a giant wooden effigy is burned. (The playwright possibly assumes too much knowledge about it on the part of the audience.)

The play presents the buildup and the journey — which Dorothy takes with her son and his friend — as a high-stakes adventure fraught with setbacks, but the payoff is decidedly low-stakes, a series of tiny anticlimactic moments. Stopped at the border? Yes, but sent on their way. Need new tires? Yes, safely installed without incident. Run out of gas? Maybe almost, but no.

As Dorothy, Montreal-born musical theatre vet Lisa Horner (Come From Away, Kinky Boots) has the outsized charisma necessary to hold an audience’s attention during a 130-minute one-woman show (including intermission), and though her sunny portrayal doesn’t lend depth to Dorothy’s grief or fear, she has a convincing fun-mom vibe. But the script doesn’t give us much sense of who she is beyond a mother, nor much detail beyond the superficial about her life with Eugene; it’s as if the playwright is unable to see beyond her own relationship with the character.

Things do get more colourful and funny once the trio arrives at Burning Man (and for those who are looking at the huge, realistic RV sitting solidly onstage during Act I and thinking, “Is this all you have for me, Brian Perchaluk?” rest assured that the veteran set designer has some gratifying tricks up his sleeve).

And yet we keep waiting for the Big Moment. Will Dorothy take a life-changing acid trip under the desert stars? Will she get hopelessly, terrifyingly lost in the dusty expanses of the temporary city but find herself? Will she get naked — literally and emotionally — after 10 grimy, gritty days in the hot Nevada sun?

She does smoke a bit of weed. She does lose her way briefly. And she does experience a lot of nudity, none of it her own. But much of Burning Mom remains strangely frictionless, as Dorothy moves from one experience to the next, each with the promise of peril or transformation that goes unrealized.

It’s like watching a slide show of a stranger’s mildly interesting trip to Burning Man, while the stranger describes the slides to you, rather than painting a picture in words.

There are exceptions, moments when you grasp the exquisite strangeness of Dorothy’s time at the festival, as when she stumbles upon a bar that’s like a mirage in the desert — you can practically taste the drink she describes — or when she recalls dancing till dawn to booming EDM. But these instances are merely recounted as part of a string of unconnected interactions, diary entries without context. She meets nice people, they have unremarkable conversations, they part ways.

Burning Mom provides more platitudes than epiphanies. Platitudes are OK, even necessary — they provide shorthand comfort for pain, a familiar way to contextualize human emotions — but they’re meant for greeting cards, not mainstages. Dorothy’s need to recognize herself as a person outside her long marriage and rise like a phoenix into a new life is relatable, to be sure. But that doesn’t make it incendiary drama.

jill.wilson@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @dedaumier