If there is one thing that you can expect from any play penned by Hannah Moscovitch, it’s catharsis. The accomplished Canadian playwright crafts theatre stagings that come from a place of discomfort because to her, it is the only way to depart from the conventional. Her breakout production East of Berlin examined World War II not through the lens of the Jewish people, but rather through the perspective of the son of a Nazi war criminal. Her latest play, Red Like Fruit, similarly leaves audiences unsettled by examining domestic violence and sexual harassment through a female journalist who prefers that a man tell her story.
“I have huge amounts of respect for people who go to the theatre for escapism,” Moscovitch says. Yet, the stories she wants to tell aren’t the lighthearted spectacle some theatre crowds would hope for. During an interview with SheDoesTheCity, she wonders whether people are willing to join her in a more introspective experience, where they dissect the layers of a performance even after they go home.
Based on the Opening Night turnout, she has no reason to worry about whether Toronto audiences want to get deep with Red Like Fruit. Running until June 15 at Soulpepper Theatre as part of the Luminato Festival, this 2b theatre production follows Lauren (Michelle Monteith), an investigative journalist who is assigned a high-profile case of domestic violence.
The more she interviews sources and gathers the information to write her in-depth piece, the more Lauren begins to reflect on several instances in her own life. As she wrestles with memories of her first intimate encounters, the protagonist relies on Luke (David Patrick Flemming) to help her make sense of her past.
Photo by Riley Smith
Through the main character’s psychological unravelling, Moscovitch wants to spark conversations about who gets to shape the stories we tell about women’s lives, and the ways women downplay their experiences without even realizing it. “The topic matter is still one that tends to fall into silence,” she says. “Despite a lot of cultural shifting around it, it still feels pretty verboten to say some of the things that we say in this play.”
First staged in Halifax last year, Red Like Fruit was shortlisted for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. With the story set in Toronto, Moscovitch is thrilled to bring her play to the 6ix, where she believes people will be able to have a better understanding of the references in her text. She also notes that Soulpepper is a fitting location to tell this story. After all, in 2018, former artistic director Albert Schultz resigned from the theatre company after four actresses filed lawsuits against him for sexual harassment. The nature of Schultz’s exit weaves a throughline between the theatre and the central themes of Moscovitch’s new play.
“I admire what Weyni (Mengesha) is doing with the company so much, and how she’s transformed its programming. Given what the history is of Soulpepper and Albert Schultz’s departure, this play in particular being programmed there is meant to speak to that legacy,” she says.
Although Moscovitch lived in Toronto for more than a decade, she has since moved to the US, where she’s been involved in multiple theatre and TV productions. From her play, Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, receiving an off-Broadway staging led by Hugh Jackman and Ella Beatty to being a co-executive producer on AMC’s hit series Interview With the Vampire, she’s been thriving outside of Canada, and to her that is a problem.
Photo by Alejandro Santiago
“We all have a bit of an inferiority complex in Canada. The theatre community here is marginal,” she says. “We are a hockey culture, and we love our novelists and we love our musicians, but it’s not a theatre culture. As soon as you go to other countries that have a theatre culture, you’re like, oh, we don’t have one. Got it.”
While she’d like to see the Canadian theatre world continue to grow in appreciation and scale, Moscovitch is excited to return to Toronto for her onscreen projects. In addition to Red Like Fruit, she’s behind the script for a movie reimagining of Alice Munro’s short story Child’s Play, led by none other than Sandra Oh. Given the allegations made by Andrea Robin Skinner (Munro’s daughter) in the wake of the author’s death, Moscovitch took on the responsibility of adapting the short story with caution.
“We wanted to make sure that the film is not in any way part of the silencing,” she says. “That it is part of giving a platform to Andrea (Skinner) as much as we can. This film will be important, because it will set a precedent for how her (Munro) work is adapted, transformed and thought about.”
Moscovitch will also stay in Toronto for the shooting of Interview With the Vampire Season 3, which will begin production this fall. Even though she can’t spill the details on what will happen next in the AMC series, she did share that the best part of working on the show is her collaborators.
“I love the collaborators on it (Interview With the Vampire). It’s wild to get to work with performers who are as strong as our performers across the board. It is unreal,” she says. “I watch the monitor like I’m watching a ninth inning of baseball every day, and that goes on for like five months, just me sitting there being jaw-dropped, watching what these performers are capable of.”
Photo by Dahlia Katz
With a prestigious career in theatre, film, and TV, what motivates Moscovitch as a creative isn’t the medium, but rather the people she works with. When thinking about her collaborators in Red Like Fruit, she can’t help but sing praises to director Christian Barry and lead actors Monteith and Flemming, who are responsible for elevating the production to new heights.
“I thought it was as good as it could be in Halifax. I felt really good about it and that’s unusual. A lot of the time I’ll be like, that isn’t really working yet,” she says. “In this case, I was just astonished. I feel like in a way it’s quite vulnerable. That’s the play. There’s no hiding.”
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