When audiences enter the Martha Cohen Theatre to take in Theatre Calgary’s 2026-27 season opener First Métis Man of Odesa, they will be getting a beautiful true-to-life love story.
But they will also be getting an experience that goes much deeper than the real love of show co-creators Matthew MacKenzie and Mariya Khomutova.
Dramatizing the real life story of MacKenzie travelling to Ukraine to create documentary theatre during the first invasion in Eastern Ukraine by Russian forces in the late 2010s, it puts to the stage his meeting with Khomutova during his efforts to create theatre about that war, their falling in love, the heartbreak of being separated during COVID-19, her journey to Canada away from the full-scale invasion by Russia, marriage, and the birth of their son.
Now on its 10th stop, the play has garnered acclaim from audiences and three Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Outstanding Production, Outstanding New Work, and Outstanding Direction for the production’s director Lianna Makuch.
For MacKenzie, going on stage and telling the story of Matt and Masha has become a snapshot of what their lives were like up to 2022, and has become a reminder of how he and Khomutova have changed since the 2023 debut of the show at the Western Canada Theatre.
“The war, of course, in Ukraine is ongoing. But our son, who is a baby in the show, often when we speak of him now, he just began grade one. So it’s a neat opportunity to check in with where we are in our lives,” he said.
“But it definitely is a level of vulnerability that I’m not used to with a lot of my other work, and so performing to focus really feels like an offering rather than just your standard play.”
For Khomutova, she said that so much has changed since the setting of the play and in some ways that has made it easier to go on stage and play a fictionalized version of herself.
“I think the perception of us in 2026, comparing to 2022, how we did it back then and right now is different,” she said.
“We have changed so much, and actually, I think it’s easier now in some ways because right back then we were really going through that stress of the war, and Ivan not sleeping, and my mom being right there, and doing the show and the tour of the show all together.”
However, said Khomutova, stepping back into the show after a two-year hiatus in performances of this work was hard.
“It’s hard, and then it’s therapeutic. We had this rehearsal period in Toronto two weeks ago when we like just stepped into the show after two years break, boy, it was unpleasant. Boy, it was painful. Actually stepping into the scenes, especially in the second act of the show where the war happens. Oh yeah, that was surprising,” she said.
“I thought the war would be challenging, but no, actually, how we as a family went through the war and through my mom’s coming here-that was very hard.”
Taking place during a war, but not about war
Khomutova said that although First Métis Man of Odesa starts with the backdrop of war, and that theme intensifies with the reality of living through the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, it was her hope that audiences would see past that headline-grabbing aspect of her home country.
“I really wanted to perceive Ukraine as a place of beauty and the place of love, culture, and yeah, not a destructive place, not a war zone,” she said.
And that strongly comes out in scenes between Matt and Masha as their love blossoms, and through eloquent storytelling, takes the audience on a pre-COVID journey of Odesa’s culture and beauty. Fictionalized on stage, it’s an impossibly romantic setting that makes it hard to see how the pair couldn’t fall in love, and to make audiences themselves fall in love with Ukraine.
“We really wanted to have this note of hope and having a dream, having a sense of living in spite of all the difficult times that we’re all going through together right now. But not to really fall into the feeling of despair that we are all lost or whatever. There are so many reasons to fall into that state, but still having at least something to aim for and have a dream,” said Khomutova.
That hope also means telling the stories of people who have lived and still live in Ukraine, said MacKenzie.
“We were very conscious of to not try to appropriate the experience of our friends and family in Ukraine who are living under threat every day, but at the same time we are hearing their stories. We’re experiencing that here in Canada, and so to be able to share all that is a great honour,” he said.
That initial desire to use theatre to explore reality instead of fiction is what brought both Khomutova and MacKenzie together, but as an art form it has also served as a metaphor for the pair themselves. Documentary theatre, said Khomutova, is common in the West but in Ukraine was all but forbidden.
“Our teachers at the university used to say, ‘You have to go as much far from yourself as you can. Like nobody’s interested in your trauma and your feeling. Nobody’s interested. Characters.’ So for me, it was absolutely new way of thinking about whether I’m interesting material enough myself to bring, you know, my biography and my life on stage. I struggled a lot with it,” she said.
“I sometimes think about it, and I even put my teachers in the theatre sometimes as audience members, and I wonder what would they say, what would they think, and what would I say to them? I would say, you see, it worked out. I went further, and it worked out. You see, you can be proud of me.”
A broader change that is taking place, said MacKenzie, is that Ukrainian theatre, which was previously dominated by the Russian language and Russian stories, is now re-finding its own cultural footing. He said that there was a hope that First Métis Man of Odesa would continue to promote home-grown culture on stage instead of foreign-dominated works in Alberta as much as it continues to inspire in Ukraine.
“You look at our art scene, our theatre scene, and still the vast majority of work that gets funding is American and British. I’m so passionate about us writing our own stories and seeing them on the same level as stories from our American and British cousins,” he said.
“I do hope that there will be a shift because I know that Mariya, when she’s been hearing about the conflict with America and even separation conversation in Alberta, that there’s so many similarities to what was occurring in Ukraine 10 years ago.”
First Métis Man of Odesa is a presentation by Theatre Calgary of a Punctuate! Theatre Production. It runs from Sept. 8 to Sept. 27 at the Martha Cohen Theatre.
For tickets and information, see https://www.theatrecalgary.com/shows/2026-2027-first-metis-man-of-odesa.