About the Play:

Finalist for the 2003 Governor Generals Literary Award for Drama (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize)

Burning Vision is a full-length drama by Marie Clements, inspired by the history of her Sahtu Dene ancestors. The play traces the journey of uranium mined by members of a First Nations tribe at the Port Radium mine site by Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, through Ontario's refineries, to the Manhattan Project lab in New Mexico and finally in the form of the atomic bomb that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In doing so, Burning Vision draws a parallel with the harmful effects of uranium on human lives, even before the bombs were created.

Burning Vision sears a dramatic swath through the reactionary identity politics of race, gender and class, using the penetrating yellow-white light, the false sun of uranium and radium, derived from a coal black rock known as pitchblende, as a metaphor for the invisible, malignant evils everywhere poisoning our relationship to the earth and to each other. Marie Clements unmasks both the great lies of the imperialist power-elite (telling the miners they are digging for a substance to "cure cancer" while secretly using it to build the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki); and the seemingly small rationalizations and accommodations people of all cultures construct to make their personal circumstances yield the greatest benefit to themselves for the least amount of effort or change on their part. It is also a scathing attack on the "public apology" as yet another mask, as a manipulative device, which always seeks to conceal the maintenance and furtherance of the self-interest of its wearer. Burning Vision is a merciless indictment of the cross-cultural, buried worm of avarice and self-interest hidden within the terrorism of the push to "go with the times," to accept the iconography of a reality defined, contextualized and illuminated by others.

Burning Vision premiered in 2002 at Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver. Since then the play has been successfully staged in 2003 at the Festival de Theatre des Ameriques in Montreal, and in 2003 at The Magnetic North Festival in Ottawa, and was a Finalist for the 2003 Governor Generals Literary Award for Drama.

Cast: 5 women, 12 men

What people say:

"...a brave new play that bombards the senses and fires up the mind....." — The Globe and Mail

About the Playwright:

Marie Clements is an award-winning Métis/Dene performer, playwright, screenwriter, director, and producer who has worked extensively in and across a variety of mediums including theatre, performance, film, new media, radio, and television. She writes, or, perhaps more accurately, composes, with an urbane, incisive and sophisticated intellect deeply rooted in the particulars of her place, time and history.