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.
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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.
"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 Highway of Lost Hearts at Riverside Theatres in Parramatta later this month.
Alt-country duo Smith & Jones, from Bathurst in central western NSW, provide a live soundtrack to Mot's travels through deserts, salt lakes and eerie rural outposts.
Director Adam Deusien said the pair wrote a song soon after reading the play for the first time, having felt an instant connection to Butler's work.
"There's something present in Smith & Jones' music that has a quality of being able to talk about sadness with momentum and energy, like a good country song does," Deusien said.
"There's the melancholy happiness inside the music, but the lyrics say something else.
"That's really present in Highway as well; the character of Mot is experiencing such heavy, burdensome grief, but she doesn't necessarily know where it lives."
There is also a kind of magic in following Mot's path from the country to the city by bringing the production to Sydney.
Starring Kate Smith as Mot, the production will visit Tamworth and Queanbeyan this week before a two-show run at Parramatta on June 14 and 15.
"So much of regional touring is about coming from the cities and going out to the regions, which is really important," Deusien said.
"But there's also the need for the work to go in the other direction - there are excellent stories and great artists that should be seen around the country."
Australian Associated Press
