MOTHER LOVE
Secret Life of a Mother, starring Maev Beaty, is an honest and risky production,
Secret Life of a Mother
★★★ 1/2 (out of 4) By Hannah Moscovitch with Maev Beaty and Anne-Marie Kerr. Directed by Anne-Marie Kerr. Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen S. W., until Nov. 11. theatrecentre.org or 416-538-0988 In many gratifying ways, this is a typical Hannah Moscovitch play. The award-winning Canadian writer tends to tell stories about people — increasingly, women — in extreme emotional states. What’s different here is that the masks are off and Moscovitch is writing about her own experience.
At the same time, her story is a microcosm of something billions of members of the human race have gone through but which Western society still tells us is not appropriate for polite conversation: what it’s really like to give birth, all the “gross” parts included.
Moscovitch has been developing the show for six years through a Theatre Centre residency along with actor Maev Beaty, director Ann-Marie Kerr and stage manager/producer Marinda de Beer.
When they started working on it, Beaty was pregnant with her daughter Esmé, and Moscovitch had not yet had a child: her son Elijah is now three. The collaborators are close friends and rightly wagered that this intimacy would lead them to make work that was honest and risky.
Beaty plays Moscovitch, with script pages in hand. At points, she breaks away from Hannah’s story and talks about her own experience. It is not my impression that Beaty needs the script because she doesn’t know the lines: rather, it’s there to make the moves between stories clear and to gently underline the theme that when it comes to mothering, they often feel like they’re making things up as they go along. Some script pages also become part of simple and striking projection effects (designed by Cameron Davis).
The look of the production is clean-lined and sophisticated: two water tanks on a bare stage with a gleaming back wall behind (scenic design by Camellia Koo). Leigh Ann Vardy’s lighting embraces Beaty as she sits confessionally close to the audience, or reflects back on her from inside the tanks.
This cool precision offers contrast to the gut-level emotion that runs through the production, which is split into five sections. First up: “Miscarriages.” We’re only a few minutes into the 70-minute piece and already Beaty is intensely im- mersed in the experience she’s relating: Moscovitch’s anguished attempts to hold onto a 14-week pregnancy, a story that involves upsetting details about being trapped in a public space while experiencing both uncontrollable bleeding and terrible shame.
Why shame? Why is this taboo? Why are there not more systems set up to support the journey towards having a child and what comes after (including the points where things go wrong)? These urgent feminist questions underlie the piece and sometimes come out directly, but the overall approach is to keep things personal and let the audience make the broader connections for themselves. The toughness of the material is further mediated by Moscovitch and Beaty’s characteristic wry humour.
Moscovitch shares a lot: the workaholism that has her emailing updated drafts of a TV script to her bosses while in labour; her tendency toward moments of “domestic deafness” that put Elijah at risk; and, most profoundly, the fear that mothering would rip through her defences and reveal that she is “actually a terrible person.”
Beaty, too, dares exposure, showing us snapshots of her bruised body after giving birth, performing part of the time in her underwear, communicating complex intelligence and emotion through her expressive, barely made-up face. The two women worked together previously on Moscovitch’s play Bunny, in which the title character (played by Beaty) grapples with her desire for sex and is finally able to accept herself when she embraces the unconditional love of her closest female friend.
Secret Life of a Mother is What Bunny Did Next, the two women taking further steps toward self-realization, holding each other up along the way. The story flashes back to the summer they worked together at the Stratford Festival on Bunny, struggling to parent Esmé and Elijah, and feeling guilty that they wanted all of this: not just kids but the work.
The beautiful, deeply satisfying resolution of that dilemma is the very fact of this production, in which the personal and professional converge. Audience members are left to consider how it is, in 2018, that women still find it so hard to honour their professional ambitions while holding the baby, at the same time savouring the payoff of a moving final reveal.