The dangerous joys of love

BASYA LAYE

Hannah Moscovitch is barely into her 30s, but she has already received numerous accolades for her work as a playwright. In 2009, she earned her first nomination for a Governor General Literary Award for her play East of Berlin, about a man who must come to terms with his father’s Nazi past.

Raised in Ottawa, Moscovitch graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada and studied literature at the University of Toronto. Making her home in Toronto was a decision that came easily, she said in an interview with the Independent.

“It’s the good option. There are theatres in Toronto where I can be playwright-in-residence and it’s so important, if you’re going to be a playwright, to have a theatre kind of endorse you, back your work and make it their job to produce your work.” Today, she is playwright-in-residence at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre.

A double bill of two of her works, The Russian Play and Mexico City, is being produced by Halifax’s 2b theatre company and presented by Ruby Slippers Theatre. Later this month, audiences in Vancouver will be treated to an evening chock-full of historical intrigue and romance.

The Russian Play is the darker of the two, “set amidst the doomed men and rotten ideals of Stalinist Russia ... a bleak, bittersweet and darkly ironic ode to the dangerous joys of love.” It is followed by another work that also focuses on love. Billed as a “satiric romance,” Mexico City is set in Mexico’s capital in the tumultuous 1960s, “exploring the intersection between tourism-as-voyeurism and the battle of the sexes.”

Moscovitch admits that her work tends to delve into the darker side of human nature, but Mexico City marks a shift of sorts.

“Mexico City is the only comedy, the only true comedy, in terms of the structure of it, that I’ve ever written ... definitely structurally it’s a comedy. The Russian Play [also] mostly makes people laugh up until the end ... to give it away a little bit.” But, Moscovitch mused, in terms of laughs, “it is set in Russia, so your expectations have to be low.”

Moscovitch was already familiar with the Stalinist period and she described her research for both plays as “smash and grab.... I wrote the plays before I researched in both cases. I did actually take a trip to Mexico City, with a man who’s now an ex-boyfriend ... we just went down there for six days. The Russian Play, I have no idea. It’s always been difficult in interviews to talk about what inspires me because I heard her [the character] talking to me. I sat down and wrote the whole play quite quickly.... The subconscious is mysterious – and I have Russian ancestry.”

Moscovitch grew up in a politically involved family and this seems to have served as inspiration for her work in many ways. “I knew a little bit about [the Stalinist period] because my parents were political activists and they were socialist, so I’m familiar with Karl Marx and I really like [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn and I read everything he’d written. I knew about Stalin’s early days, so I could set it in a very particular period of time, right before the kulaks [affluent farmers] are purged. [A main character] in the play is a kulak and he comes from a kulak class. There’s a particular period when they gained some power before Stalin purged them all and so that’s when the play is set. That makes up the backdrop. In the foreground there’s a love story.”

While both works premièred the same year, in 2006, they have not been produced together until now. “Honestly, The Russian Play has been paired with all of my short works, with Essay, one of my other short plays, a number of times.... At the Harborfront [Centre], they did The Russian Play and a play of mine called USSR, which I’d actually written as a double bill ... and then USSR never got done again, after we put all that work into doing a double bill,” she laughed. Both plays are set in tumultuous times and exotic locales and seemed like a natural fit but, said Moscovitch, “2b theatre were interested in doing Mexico City with The Russian Play, and I saw their point.”

Moscovitch said she has many influences. “I’ve really looked up to a lot of people.... For sure, we have so many genius playwrights in this country, like Daniel MacIvor and John Mighton and Judith Thompson and Jeff Walker and Ann-Marie MacDonald. And outside of that I have my British favorites and then I have my classic favorites.”

Moscovitch also feels the influence of her Jewish heritage. “I have written a couple of plays now that have explicitly Jewish content, as opposed to implicitly, which all my writing does.... East of Berlin and there’s another play, called The Children’s Republic, that premièred just in the fall in Ottawa, that will go up in Toronto in a few years. [It is] about ... Dr. Janus Korczak.... I was offered by the Great Canadian Theatre to write a play about Korczak, which would star children.”

Moscovitch writes with her audience in mind, but is cautious not to be overly focused on a response. “In [both plays] you’ll see that the characters in the play anticipate the audience’s responses – there can be a back and forth there.... Sometimes you can screw yourself as a writer by being overly neurotic about people’s perception of you and your writing in the play and you can strangulate yourself, suffocate yourself by thinking about the audience. But then there are many writers who have characters address the audience directly.... I swing back and forth, between thinking with the audience and playing with my expectations of how they’ll react to my work, and then just trying to stay with the narrative itself and the characters and just really hear and listen to what the characters are saying.”

Though she hadn’t previously done any writing for radio, she was excited to be invited to write for CBC radio’s award-winning drama series Afghanada, now in its fourth season. “At first I kept telling them that I had no idea how, and it was a terrible idea. What attracted me to [writing for Afghanada] is just how much they can stay within the grey zone. They stay within the complexity of what’s occurring in Afghanistan and our troops there. That was really the big draw – how much complexity the show allowed. They don’t make heroes or villains out of [the characters] which makes the situation real, rather than any sort of ideological leanings that they wanted to enforce.”

Moscovitch will not be in Vancouver with 2b’s production, admitting that, “I feel a bit embarrassed following my plays around.” However, she added, “I really like this production, so I’m happy that this is the one that is traveling out there, because I saw it and they blew my mind.”

The Russian Play and Mexico City will be at Performance Works from March 23-28, 8 p.m. Visit vancouvertix.com or call 604-629-8849 for tickets.

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