Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova in First Métis Man of Odesa, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alex McKeown.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

First Metis Man of Odesa, opening at the Citadel April 27, is at its heart a love story, ignited by a chance spark — a “something between us” — in a theatre across the world from here. And in the epic arc that real life provides, along with its characters, it’s to a theatre that the love story returns.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

In the course of it (as the title hints), continents are traversed, the vast world shrinks and expands, global events throw up monumental obstacles to human connectedness, a baby is born along with a play. And that play is currently crossing this country in a Punctuate! Theatre production directed by Lianna Makuch.

Art and life have refused to disentangle. Canadian Métis playwright Matthew MacKenzie of Edmonton and Toronto and Ukrainian actor/now playwright Mariya Khomutova of Odesa, husband and wife theatre artists, play versions of themselves onstage in the piece of theatre they’ve created together. First Metis Man of Odesa is their story. An awful lot of air miles are involved. And it’s a play that, as MacKenzie puts it, “we’re still living, still in the midst of…”

Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova in First Métis Man of Odesa. Photo by Alex McKeown.

“I fall in love with Masha in the play,” says MacKenzie (he uses the character name interchangeably with Mariya). “And I also fall in love with Ukraine. That’s important: it wasn’t just a place of war and destruction and despair. It was this magical place!”

From their Toronto home, MacKenzie (Bears, The Other, After The Fire) reviews the high-speed history of their “sudden family,” that now includes two-year-old Ivan and Khomutova’s mother Olga. After a research trip the year before MacKenzie was back in Ukraine in 2018 as dramaturge for a workshop of Lianna Makuch’s Barvinok at the Wild Theatre in Kyiv. “They hired Ukrainian actors, Mariya spoke English, and we struck up a friendship there, and corresponded on and off for a year.”

“Was there a spark?” he asked Khomutova, via Facebook messaging. “Did you feel something? And she said she definitely did.”

She’s more romantically expansive. “I was an accidental person from outside,” she says of the gig. “He was this mysterious, silent, analyzing guy…. He didn’t speak a lot during the workshop. He was observing the work and the actors and probably doing notes inside his head.” She laughs. “We said goodbye after that workshop and I was sure it was a forever goodbye….”

“I think it was a call of fate.” The original connection, she thinks, was theatre. She was a theatre kid who knew, at 12 or 13, that “this is the most important part of my life, more important than school, more than English courses.” Like many in Odesa, Khomutova grew up in a Russian-speaking family (she still speaks Russian with her mom); her expressive and fluent English, acquired from age four on, even pre-dates her Ukrainian. The trilingual actor says her parents probably would have wanted her to be an English interpreter, a secure line of work in an international city like Odesa. “I said no no no, too boring for me.” The days of hearing Russian in the street, as it was before the brutal 2014 Russian invasion, are long gone, needless to say, replaced by Ukrainian.

At first it was distance that threw up obstacles to the real-life rom-com the couple were living. Khomutova visited MacKenzie in Toronto in 2019; he visited her in Odesa the following year to meet her parents. And MacKenzie loved it there. “Such a cool city, a city unto itself — the music, the food, the organized crime (laughter), everything! Lots of foreigners, lots of Jewish people….”  

Two days after he flew back to Canada,” COVID crashed into the story in a big way, “dramatically timed,” as he says. The international travel ban went into effect “and we didn’t know when we’d see each other again.” Then they discovered Khomutova was pregnant. In the race against time and closing borders, up against a global pandemic, would love prevail and arrange a happy ending? Would MacKenzie get back to Ukraine for a wedding? “Right out of an old movie,” he says. “A perfect golden day in the city…. No one I knew was there. Not a single person. Just me.” Then, as the ante got upped, could they could get to Canada for the birth of their son?

Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova in First Métis Man of Odesa, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alex McKeown.

And so it was that the crazy tempo of screwball comedy, albeit dark-hued by the pandemic, found its way into the first iteration of Métis Man of Odesa, which premiered in 2021 as part of Factory Theatre’s You Can’t Get There From Here Audio Series of podcasts.

Ivan was born in Edmonton at the Royal Alex. And he spent the first eight months of his life with his parents in a one-bedroom flat before the trio moved to Toronto (mainly to give Khomutova access to the film and TV industry). But they’ve spent a lot of time here in MacKenzie’s home town (for one thing, he’s Punctuate!’s artistic director).

A year and a half later in Toronto, “our lives are beginning to feel normal,” says Khomutova, “and I feel like a citizen with my ‘permanent resident’ status; Ivan is becoming more and more an independent person; I’m becoming a normal person.” Just then, war happens, a Russian invasion of horrifying brutality. And the equilibrium, so hard won, of this COVID love story was upended once more by global events.

Says Khomutova, “I didn’t expect that something could be more shattering in my life than moving to Canada so fast, being married, giving birth. What could be more?’” MacKenzie agrees that the love story he and Khomutova live in real life seems to have selected its dramatic obstacles for epic size. “It’s a relationship that’s been stress-tested in big ways.”

“Every person Mariya has even known has had their lives turned upside down by the war,” he says. Khomutova’s father Eugene, a neurologist, is still in Odesa (they hope to see him in Turkey this summer so he can meet his grandson). There’s guilt attached to being far away from the dangerous world of her friends. Some have died, some are refugees now, “and I am in a safe place. I’m not in Ukraine, helping, volunteering. And at the same time I’m not really in Canada. My head is not present with my husband and my child. I’m absent here and I’m absent there.…”

And there’s this: “the influence of Russian culture on me is huge,” she says sadly, thinking of her classical theatre training at university in Kyiv. She cites MacKenzie’s analogy between Shakespeare’s relationship with Canadian theatre, and Chekhov’s with Ukraine. “All things that were precious to me are suddenly broken, and they turn out to be a weapon of war….”

“If this amazing Russian culture couldn’t prevent war, or the evil that this country was going to bring, what was the good of it? What was it for? These are questions I ask in the play, because it’s a huge transformative act in my brain.”

“Who would think our small family would survive so many difficult things? But somehow it did.” And it was because of “the creative work” of theatre, as she puts it. “I am sure about that. If it wasn’t for theatre and Matthew’s proposition to write a play about it all, I would have collapsed…. It was therapy for both of us.”

Her husband concurs. “She was really disappearing inside herself, and it was definitely affecting our relationship…. Writing the play allowed us to learn what the other person was thinking, to air things out and talk about things we hadn’t developed the muscles as a couple yet to do. We figured them out as artists first, and it’s an ongoing process.” Says Khomutova, “it was like meeting my husband again, in a place where I hadn’t met him before.”

After all, when they did the math, they discovered they’d been together, in one place, a total of five weeks max, says MacKenzie.

War meant that their COVID love story, high stakes but with a certain farcical buoyancy, had to grow. “When war happened, we definitely needed to write about it. But we didn’t know how…. It felt like two totally different genres,” says MacKenzie. “But then we dug in more to the start of us, us meeting and coming together. The human side of things .…not the constant body count from the news stream.” And it’s been resonating with audiences, he reports from a tour that began in Kamloops and has just finished a run at the Theatre Centre in Toronto. “It’s a love story deeply impacted by the war. But when we leaned too much into the political, it didn’t feel like our story.”

Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova in First Métis Man of Odesa, Punctuate! Theatre. Photo by Alex McKeown.

And then there was the question of casting; it’s a tricky business playing yourself onstage. Khomutova is a star actor, fine-tuned, experienced. But Mackenzie had his doubts about his thespian skills. “I’d been onstage before. But I made my friends promise to never let me do that again.” Encouraged by the example of Ravi Jain and his real-life non-actor mom playing themselves in A Brimful of Asha, and by advice from actor friend Sheldon Elter (the star of Bears) to go for it, MacKenzie did. “It seems so far people find my line-flubbing or weird stiffness as charming or authentic … rather than just bad,” he laughs.

For Khomutova, steeped in the classical Russian theatre tradition, the multi-tasking world of Canadian theatre where people wear many hats, and especially “the idea of real people/ real world theatre” (as MacKenzie puts it), took some getting used to. “It took a while for Mariya to see what we were doing as theatre.” She agrees. “I didn‘t consider personal stories onstage as a piece of art for a long time. It was not theatre for me. It was closer to a stand-up as a genre.”

She approached writing with some hesitation. “I didn’t want to do it at first,” she says. “I thought Matthew was trying to use my emotions and my experience, my parents and my friends as material for a play…. I thought it was not ethical in the beginning.” Then gradually, she found herself writing “for myself, like a diary…. I’d send Matthew the pages, a bizarre amount of pages. And because he’s a great playwright he was choosing, choosing. That’s how the play was written.”

Khomutova still can’t quite believe that her introduction to Canadian theatre is performing in a play that’s a personal story still in progress. “After the war happened, the whole understanding of the meaning of the theatre is shifting for me. What stories should I participate in, what language do I want to speak, what texts should I promote…. What is art itself, and whether it‘s needed, and why…. So, it’s a big crisis with big changes inside of me. And our show reflects on it too.”

PREVIEW

First Métis Man of Odesa

Theatre: Punctuate! Theatre in the Citadel Highwire Series

Written and performed by: Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova

Directed by: Lianna Makuch

Running: April 22 (in preview) through May 13

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com