Mot eats a gristly steak sandwich in Tennant Creek, stops at the G'Day Mate caravan park in Alice Springs and counts the "I shoot and I vote" bumper stickers in Coober Pedy. At the tail end of a 4500km road trip through the guts of outback Australia, Mot's canine companion takes the wheel somewhere near Dubbo, in western NSW. "You think too much," the dog tells her at the end of their journey in Sydney.
Moments of magic realism are woven through Mary Anne Butler's play Highway of Lost Hearts, which follows Mot's journey to find her own. Journalism for the curious Australian across politics, business, culture and opinion. "I wake up one morning to find that my heart is missing from my chest.
I can breathe, I have a pulse, but I feel nothing," Mot says in the first scene, revealing a profound grief that will become her passenger. The play is inspired by a solo trip Butler took from Darwin to NSW to put her hands in the waters of Sydney Harbour, where a close friend died in a boat crash in 2008. In a state of sorrow Butler went straight into an intensive writing workshop with director and playwright Jenny Kemp, who encouraged her to be guided by intuition.
"The surrealism came from that," Butler told AAP. "When I'm writing, if I really tap into my gut, what emerges from that is really exciting and really beautiful. "It's certainly not rational or logical, it stems from really deep experiences and feelings.
" Regional theatre company Lingua Franca is set to stage its production of.
