Burning Vision

by Marie Clements

Marie Clements’s latest play 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.

Burning Vision 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.

Clements’s powerful visual sets and soundscapes contain curtains of flames which at times assume the bodies of a chorus passing its remote judgment, devoid of both pity and fear, on the action: 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.

Marie Clements writes, or, perhaps more accurately, composes, with an urbane, incisive and sophisticated intellect deeply rooted in the particulars of her place, time and history.

Cast of five women and 12 men.

Genres: Plays, School, Drama, Read For School, Historical Fiction, Indigenous, Fiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2003

About the author

Marie Clements (born January 10, 1962) is a Métis playwright, performer, director, producer and screenwriter. Marie was founding artistic director of urban ink productions, and is currently co-artistic director of red diva projects, and director of her new film company Working Pajama Lab Entertainment. Clements lives on Galiano Island, British Columbia. As a writer Marie has worked in a variety of mediums including theatre, performance, film, multi-media, radio, and television.

Reviews

[Dana McCallum]

hard to picture despite being a play and meant to be seen, a lot happening in disconnection but has some good lines. Also... FAT MAN? Why...

[Caroline]

Da fuck did I just read?!

[Madison Evans]

I would give this a 0 but I can’t so I give it a 1.
This is just so bad, it has no redeeming qualities.

[ML Character]

Wow, I love this and I would so love to see it produced well because the design opportunities are INCREDIBLE. Okay, so what happens: it's really hard to tell because it's a swirling impressionistic and surreal collection of scenes and characters who make up glancing fragments of the lives affected by the process of making and detonating the atomic bomb(s). The bombs themselves (nicknamed Fat Man and Little Boy) are personified, the miners and transport workers who helped bring that uranium to the Manhattan Project are there, the Japanese people who were destroyed by it, and Tokyo Rose, UCLA graduate Japanese-American girl with the weirdest gig in the war. I'm so massively bored by another realistic drama and a well-drawn character and blah blah blah-- this is a great example of a script that is begging to be brought to life in performance and impossible to imagine without the element of live enactment. Like, a promise of what theater COULD BE.

[Ren]

Oh look, another book that I had to buy for class and that made no sense to me. Great.

I feel like this needs a lot more context in order to understand it, which my prof did not bother to provide and this book doesn't either. Not to mention it's probably easier to understand when you watch the actual play.

It's probably got a much deeper meaning than what I understood... but I dislike reading tons of symbolism, plays and historial fiction, so this was doomed for me from the get-go.

[Aaron Thomas]

Wow! This is wonderfully theatrical and very, very smart. I loved this so much.
Big thanks to Michelle Carriger (via Courtney Mohler) for recommending it to me after I said how much I was disappointed by Radium Girls, which has somewhat of a similar subject matter but an infinitely less interesting treatment and a much weaker political commitment.

[Alina]

It was confusing, yes, and I will definitely read it again in the future. However, I think this was a masterful intertwining of the voices of exploited Indigenous communities and the Japanese victims of World War II.

"I hear the enemy speaking and I know they are the enemy because they are speaking in a language I don't understand" just kill me now as someone who knows both languages

[alayah]

2.5 stars.

I rounded up because maybe this would land better on the stage, but this was a rough read. The entire thing was *so* abstract that I was constantly confused. I finished the play feeling and learning nothing because I am just sitting here wondering what just happened.

[Haley Trofanenko]

read this book for my english class… definetly not my cup of tea.

[farheen]

i don’t get it

[meg burns]

i feel like it could've been more descriptive; so
s characters were not delved into enough for me but i think it would be cool to see this actually acted out

[Léa]

C'est non. 🙅‍♀️
Pas pu dépasser la première scène, en même temps c'était problématique dès la liste des personnages (belle performance).

[Veronica Ciastko]

Read this play in an undergrad Indigenous Literature class, and re-read it this summer for PhD application writing. It’s not as profound as I remember it being—Clements really lays it on thick with the symbolism, and there are a few too many gimmicky monologues where characters talk to inanimate objects—BUT it’s still spooky as hell and brings together fascinating characters from history. Such as…the ‘Radium Girls’ of the 1930s who painted watch dials with radium and were encouraged to lick their brushes (and thus developed horrible cancers and disfigurements later in life); the Dene people on whose land uranium was discovered in far northern Canada and who visited Japan in the 90s to apologize for their role in the atomic bomb; Tokyo Rose, a homely Japanese-American radio broadcaster, indicted for disseminating anti- American propaganda; Lorne Greene the CBC broadcaster or “Voice of Doom” who announced the daily news during WWII. It’s all still fascinating, and, by bringing these characters together (plus 74829 more), Clements does a great job collapsing time and place to show the real impact of so-called scientific discovery.
This play also has interesting parallels with Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, which, when I can get my shit together, is what I’m trying to write about.

[Kim Brackney]

This play is genius. Because it is so utterly theatrical and has a non-Euro plot structure, it is startling and dense. A reader must pay attention to the audio and the visual possibilities and try to imagine it threading in with the words, because everything supports the shape and momentum of this theatrical wonder. I was lucky enough to see the world premiere and the images are forever burned in my brain. This broke my world open, both as a writer, and as a human being. Thank you Marie Clement.

[Sophie Guillas]

This drew my attention to a very interesting and sad story that I had never heard before, but it was hard to get through at points. I think with a play like this with lots of intersecting perspectives and reliance on sound and visuals you’re inevitably going to miss out when you only read the script. Never the less the ending was really emotional. I would definitely watch this if I had the chance.

[Jocelyn]

Read for class.

Burning Vision is like a massive collage.

It's like the play equivalent of The Tree of Life, except less entertaining and harder to visualize and no dinosaurs and no fun CGI.

[Luba]

Immernoch ein slay!

[Amy GB]

An atmospheric show linking the stories of different people affected by the making and dropping of the two atomic bombs that ended WW2. There is an ensemble cast, using double-casting to show the parallels between e.g. an Indigenous widow and a Japanese grandmother. It also creates the image of a complex tapestry of different lives all impacted in some way by the monstrous bomb that is bigger than them all. Because of the chaotically large cast of characters, it feels like a lot is going on, while simultaneously not much happens. This play is a series of ideas rather than being driven by a story. It feels like a play created along the principles of contemporary dance. It is set, as much as it is set anywhere, in Canada and Japan. But everything is heavily symbolic, which I found quite irritating. The Fat Man character intrigued me, and would have been great if it had been made just a bit clearer who or what he was, and if he had actually done anything. There is I think one scene where characters are really actively affecting each other. I might have enjoyed seeing this live, but overall not to my taste at all.

[Raynah]

I read this play for one of my English classes and I generally do not know how to feel about it. The first scene had me so confused, but eventually, I got used to the writing style and enjoyed the rest of the play a little more.

Without background context, almost the entirely of the story is lost to the reader. Without the discussions during lecture and the reviews by other users here on goodreads, I would not have understood a majority of the characters and the plot. My class lecture actually helped me enjoy the play more than I would have without it.

I was not a fan of the lack of stage directions, but it is interesting to discuss how as readers we pictured how the stage would look. I would probably enjoy this play a lot more if I had seen it acted out on a stage.

[Annika]

“Sometimes what you discover in the dark is not what you expected from the darkness. That the monster under the bed, or in the closet or coming up the stairs of your mind, is not the real monster. The real monster is the light of these discoveries.”

[Laura From]

This play was a great read. The intersection of many people and places creates interesting and important connections. The writing is impeccable and you can hear the sounds described. Any production of this would be amazing!

["C" Heaps]

The amount of historic material covered in this play is astounding in and of itself. What truly makes this play shine, however, is the structure and perspective developed from the indigenous outlook of Métis playwright Marie Clements. On my list of plays I must be part of in the future.

[Hayley Moorhouse]

Kaleidoscopic, daring, theatrical. Clements weaves the threads of these interconnected stories so masterfully, taking history and bringing it to life with magic realism, dream logic, ritual, and fantasy. A harrowing play that feels appropriately strange, certain, and expansive.

[Serena]

Wow I read this for class and it's honestly getting 4 stars just because it somehow combined the vibes of two other plays I saw and was enamored by. I was confused about 70% of the time but felt the extra depth I know was there.

[Dorcas Cherogony]

It was great, made me think a lot and the ending was masterful.

[John Knight]

An interesting play, but I'm not very engaged by surrealism. More my failing than that of the script.

[Jenna]

Marie Clements cleverly weaves a story about the elements needed to create the atomic bomb that one might not at first glance think is interconnected but actually is. The ending is super powerful.

[Kailyn]

Had to read this for class and I will never understand it

[Leah]

Read this for class, and it is definitely something you need to read multiple times to understand. I felt like I was missing A LOT.

Here’s hoping my lecture will help clear things up!

[Nathan]

read for ENGL 3353