First Métis Man of Odesa draws from real-life Canada-Ukraine love story, amid COVID and war
Métis playwright and Ukrainian actor recount their harrowing, and often hilarious, journey together at rEvolver Festival
When they started writing a play about their cross-continental relationship, Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova had no idea war was coming.
The Cultch presents The First Métis Man of Odesa at the Historic Theatre from May 25 to June 4 as part of the rEvolver Festival
MATTHEW MACKENZIE recalls starting to take notes for a play based on his real Ukraine-Alberta love story at about 30,000 feet—on a frantic, mid-pandemic flight that he wasn’t quite sure would take him to his destination.
Four months earlier, back in Alberta, the playwright had learned that his Ukrainian actor girlfriend Mariya Khomutova was pregnant. And then, almost immediately, the pandemic locked them both down where they were, thousands of miles apart.
So as soon as he could fly, MacKenzie set out on a desperate Edmonton-Toronto-Frankfurt-Istanbul-Odesa flight in an attempt to reunite with her before their son was born.
“When I got into Edmonton airport, I still couldn’t check in to Europe, but by the time we landed in Toronto, I was finally allowed,” recalls MacKenzie, whose darkly comic trans-mountain pipeline play Bears visited The Cultch in 2018. “We were pretty sure I’d be allowed into Frankfurt and Istanbul, but there was no way to know if I’d be allowed into Ukraine. And then when we arrived in Ukraine, all these American contractors were hauled off by customs. I’m not very tall and I feel like they might not have seen me. People kept asking, ‘How’d you get in?!' Everyone was sure I’d bribed my way in, but I didn’t!”
MacKenzie knew he had the makings of a play—one that he would go on to write with his new wife, whom he would marry in Odesa and then bring home to Alberta before his son, Ivan, was born.
“Through the writing of the play we were getting to know each other,” MacKenzie explains.
At that point, the couple had no idea that a new, dark and chaotic chapter would unfold—that Russia would invade Ukraine, and they would have to overcome even more treacherous obstacles to bring Khomutova’s mother safely to Canada, where she now lives with them. His new house guest brings a whole other level of comedy and culture clash to the story, which has evolved several times since it debuted early on as a radio play.
All the ups and downs find their way into First Métis Man of Odesa, which MacKenzie and Khomutova perform themselves.
“She comes from a classical background,” MacKenzie says and then adds with a laugh: “I’m not an actor, so it’s nerve-wracking to say the least. If I’m wooden or flub a line, hopefully it’s endearing, because people know I’m not an actor. She does the heavy lifting on story.”
As audiences will find out watching the play, MacKenzie is at home in contemporary Canadian theatre, where real-life confessionals are common; laying her story bare was a little more of a leap for his wife, who had been raised amid “high culture” and historic theatre traditions. (The pair first met in Ukraine in 2018, when MacKenzie travelled to Kiev as a dramaturg for a workshop of Lianna Makuch’s Barvinok; Khomutova was one of the actors, and they became fast friends. As MacKenzie says, “It was very much a love born in theatre.”)
Suffice it to say it has been a difficult journey, with all the misunderstandings that come from being a stranger in a strange land. Khomutova and her mother, Olga, had never even heard of Métis before meeting MacKenzie, for instance.
“My mother-in-law would say ‘You don’t look like you're Native,’” MacKenzie says with a laugh.
“People appreciate that we’re not sanitizing the story,” he adds. “So people, whether they’re Ukrainian or Indigenous or not, can relate to the challenges that one has in a relationship that are really magnified when you’re going through COVID and when your homeland, in Mariya’s case, has been brutally invaded.”
A shared sense of humour, clearly, has been what has helped—and continues to help—the couple on their ongoing journey. And as MacKenzie points out, their son Ivan—who ends up giving the show its title—represents hope in the play.
“We didn't want to write a dark, dreary piece,” MacKenzie says. “It’s a love story and there’s a lot of laughs.”
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