Prolific playwright engulfed with projects
Motherhood has allowed Moscovitch to write from a deeply personal place
There are a few reasons why Hannah Moscovitch would sound a little flustered on the phone, as she did this past weekend speaking to the Star from New York City.
She had just seen a preview of her new musical Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story at the prestigious off-Broadway venue 59E59 Theaters, where it will run until late April before be- ginning a European and Asian tour. She’s commuting back and forth to Philadelphia, where she is creating a new opera. And bookending her time in the States are two different openings in Toronto: Tarragon Theatre’s presentation of Bunny, which opened in late February, and What a Young Wife Ought to Know, which opens next week at Crow’s Theatre.
“I’m quite tired. I’ve been trying to think who I can complain to,” Moscovitch said. “That’s a terrible thing to say. I’m really happy about it, obviously. But I’m also really strung out.
“That’s mostly, honestly, be- cause I have a 2-year-old son and I’m trying to be a good mother.”
Moscovitch is married to Christian Barry, the artistic director of Halifax’s 2b Theatre, which is producing Young Wife, and director of that play as well as Old Stock, which he co-created with Moscovitch and Ben Caplan.
The birth of their son, Elijah, has coincided with possibly the most productive moment in Moscovitch’s career and she was already one of Canada’s more prolific playwrights.
It has also prompted Moscovitch to work on increasingly personal stories through her plays, which is perhaps another reason she speaks in pauses, stops and starts, thinking long before coming to final answers in our interview.
Moscovitch is inherently a private person, so sharing stories that come from deeply personal places doesn’t come naturally.
“And I feel like I’ve always really admired confessional work but been too reserved a person to do it,” she said. “But I really admire Sylvia Plath and Sheila Heti in particular.”
When Bunny, a story inspired by a Victorian novel about a young woman accepting her sexuality, premiered at the Stratford Festival in 2016, it was Moscovitch’s most personal story to date.
Another show in development with Tarragon now, Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, also walks a fine line between fact and fiction in regards to a student and professor relationship.
Another work in development with the Theatre Centre and planned for production next fall, tentatively titled The Secret Life of a Mother, sends Moscovitch into full confessional mode with actor Maev Beaty playing Moscovitch herself, telling the story of Moscovitch’s first few weeks as a mother.
Moscovitch has been marrying this impulse to tell personal, female-driven stories with a form she has relied upon since the beginning of her career: the first-person confessional structure.
What a Young Wife Ought to Know, set in 1920s Ottawa, is about the social conditions that led to birth control and doesn’t come from Moscovitch’s own lived experience, but it began as another form of confession through letters that Moscovitch found at a yard sale.
“I read these letters, which were written to Dr. Marie Stopes, this pioneering birth control advocate in the ’20s and the letters themselves are that: they’re confessional.
“It’s very weird to read these letters where women are talking very frankly about sex, like intercourse with their husbands, and childbirth and attempts at birth control, and the horrors of child after child after child, and the death of children, and whether they love their husbands and whether they love their children, and how much and when and in what ways.
“And it’s just this incredible confession from these women, who obviously don’t have anyone else to talk to, who are fully isolated by their era,” she said.
The subjects that Moscovitch has been drawn to in this period of her career — female sexuality, female reproduction, motherhood, wifedom and, most often, the confusing, messy aspects of those things — and her unique way of convey- ing them comes at a time when private conversations are becoming more public.
Once, she felt nervous that she was breaking a kind of unwritten rule by telling these stories. And then #MeToo happened.
“It just feels like there’s so many empowered women right now who are ready to hear an authentic story,” she said.
“There’s a taboo. And so it feels confessional, because it feels like you’re pushing through something societal.” Motherhood hasn’t made Moscovitch feel much more productive (as many promised her it would), but it could be one reason why her recent work feels so vital.
“I think that there is a clarity, for sure, and I don’t know if it’s Elijah precisely or just middle age,” she said.
“But the next set of projects that I have coming, they feel fairly risky in a good way. They feel like they’re harder and harder, and stronger and weirder, and better and clearer.” What a Young Wife Ought to Know is at Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Ave. March 20 to April 7. See crowstheatre.com for information.