Review: Hugh Jackman in a Twisty Tale of ‘Sexual Misconduct'

New York Times

09-05-2025

We first see the willowy Ella Beatty, half of the cast of 'Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,' lugging furniture onto the stage of the Minetta Lane Theater. If you've heard that the play, by Hannah Moscovitch, is part of an Off Broadway experiment called Audible x Together — featuring big names, spare décor, short runs and rock-bottom prices — you may find yourself wondering whether the backers had penny-pinched on a crew. If so, they might have let the other half of the cast do the lugging: Hugh Jackman has the guns.
But the backers — Audible is a division of Amazon and Together is Jackman's venture with the hugely successful producer Sonia Friedman — are not exactly impoverished. Art, not parsimony, is the source of Beatty's labors. Setting the stage for the terrific, tightly plaited knot of a play, the curious opening will pay off later. So will every seemingly casual moment of Ian Rickson's long-game staging, from lighting (by Isabella Byrd) that often, weirdly, illuminates the audience, to Jackman's manhandling of an actual lawn mower.
Jackman plays Jon Macklem, a critically acclaimed yet best-selling author who teaches literature at a 'world class college.' He has not had as much success in his domestic career, being the kind of Kerouac cliché who spends years, as he puts it, 'racking up ex-wives like a maniac.' Currently he is separated from his third.
Soon another cliché enters: the 'grossly underwritten' sex-object character that lust-addled novelists (a description Macklem cops to) write about to 'expose their mediocrity.' That's Beatty's Annie. Though she is a 19-year-old student in one of his classes, and he is starting to grizzle at the edges, their affair begins.
'The erotics of pedagogy,' Macklem, only half-mortified by the phrase, explains.
It is here you may say to yourself: I've seen this before. The questionable relationship between male mentors and female students is almost its own genre in plays ('Oleanna') and novels ('Disgrace') — perhaps because it is almost its own genre in life. (I immediately thought of Joyce Maynard and J.D. Salinger.) But Moscovitch clearly wants to complicate that narrative by shaping it almost entirely from the man's point of view. Macklem speaks perhaps 80 percent of the words in the play, spinning long, disarming, verbally dexterous monologues. Annie's lines are more like this: 'I shouldn't / I don't know why I / Said that / Sorry I'm mm.'
Beatty, recently seen in Ibsen's 'Ghosts,' is all but ghostly here; she delivers Annie's halting vagueness so precisely that she at first seems merely underpowered as an actor. In fact, she's fulfilling the play's plan perfectly: Even if overwhelmed by Macklem's force majeure, she cannot seem like a victim. All but demanding his sexual attention, she tells Macklem that his books, in their crudity, taught her 'what I like.' She devours him hungrily, comparing him favorably to boys she has slept with. She shows him her own fiction, and laps up his besotted praise. She understands from the start, she says later, exactly what the 'exchange' was.
So you're left to wonder: Who's grooming whom? And for what?
With Macklem especially, the play wants to keep the issue of culpability unsettled as long as possible. That's a tough job, given the way time has trained us to presume absolute guilt in such situations; the affair takes place in 2014, a few years before #MeToo acquired its hashtag. Nor does Macklem's temper, which flares when Annie behaves in ways he considers irrational, give us confidence in his ability to transcend his ego. In those moments he seems merely bullheaded and cutting, a lot like that lawn mower.
Who but Jackman could keep us guessing despite that? His onstage seductiveness has always been frank yet cheerful, its sharkiness couched in charm. When he played Peter Allen in 'The Boy From Oz,' women (and men) in the audience begged for his sweaty T-shirt at the end of the show. (In exchange for a donation to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, he obliged them.) To take advantage of that appeal, Rickson has Jackman deliver a lot of his lines directly to the audience, at one point while seated at the lip of the stage with his legs dangling down as if he were Judy Garland.
But Jackman goes well beyond the brief. On the night I attended, when a woman in Row B started coughing loudly, it was clear that the man who'd played the exuberant, audience-coddling Allen — Garland's son-in-law — was not about to leave her uncared-for. Ad libbing, he offered her a bottle of water — and was clearly ready to deliver it in person. She said no, but I was surprised that the 400 other theatergoers didn't start hacking immediately. He had them just where Macklem wanted Annie, and possibly vice versa.
For an audience no less than an individual, the steep slope of powerful attraction is difficult to negotiate. Neither Macklem nor Annie (she's given no last name) is sure-footed. He's an overinflated balloon, blowing himself through life. She's, well, 19. Beyond any other consideration — attraction, power, psychology, class — her absolute age, not the gap in their ages, is what Moscovitch wants us to consider. Annie is not yet a fully grown human; she barely has the emotional wherewithal to handle her impulses, to know which ones she can safely indulge.
Lest I spoil the ingenious working out of the story, I won't say more except that we meet Annie again when she does have that wherewithal. That both she and Macklem have aged we see at once by the simplest of means: posture, diction, a change of clothes for her, a change of glasses for him. (The costumes are by Ásta Bennie Hostetter.) Whether either character has grown is a different question, one you'll have to decide for yourself. Is revenge growth? Is growth itself revenge?
That's the thrill of Rickson's production: It doesn't tell you what to think but, in its big payoff, gives you plenty to consider. Better yet, it achieves that payoff with minimal fuss. The set (by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones) needs only a few chairs, a desk and a lamp to place you anywhere you need to be. Mikaal Sulaiman's sound consists mostly of faint music, the kind you sometimes think you hear while falling into a dream. There are no microphones; the actors' actual voices are hitting your actual ears.
If this is theater on a shoestring, let the theater never have shoes. And though I'll wait to proclaim the Audible x Together experiment a sustainable success — at least until its next production, 'Creditors,' with Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff and Justice Smith, opens later this month — 'Sexual Misconduct' is proof of concept even as a one-off. Those cheap tickets buy you not only a seat at the Minetta Lane but also a place in the living conversation of raw yet thoughtful theater. Plus maybe, if you cough enough, a bottle of water.