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Globe and Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Red Like Fruit is a devastating portrayal of how sexism warps women's stories and identities
Title: Red Like Fruit Written by: Hannah Moscovitch Performed by: Michelle Monteith, David Patrick Fleming Directed by: Christian Barry Company: Soulpepper and the Luminato Festival Venue: The Michael Young Theatre, 50 Tank House Lane City: Toronto Year: Until June 15 In 2017, Martin R. Schneider and Nicole Lee Hallberg, coworkers at a resume-editing company, experimented with trading e-mail signatures and found their working experiences suddenly and radically changed. While Nicole as 'Martin' had the easiest week of her career, Martin as 'Nicole' was thoroughly frustrated. Respectful clients became rude, demanding and patronizing when they thought they were dealing with a woman. One male client even propositioned 'Nicole' after brief, e-mail-only contact. Both participants posted individually about their findings; Hallberg wrote an article for Medium, but it was Schneider's tweets that went viral and made headlines. It seemed that a story about sexism in the workplace made a far bigger impact when it was confirmed by a man's voice. That story came to mind as I watched Red Like Fruit, by Governor General's Award-winning playwright Hannah Moscovitch. Under Christian Barry's direction, the production from Halifax's 2B Theatre Company now at Soulpepper as part of the Luminato Festival is a simply delivered and devastating tale of the background radiation of sexism and sexual assault that becomes inextricably baked into women's identities. Canadian playwrights Hannah Moscovitch and Jordan Tannahill stay true to their roots despite U.S. success Red Like Fruit is arranged around a unique conceit: While the face screaming on the poster and story springing from the stage belong to Lauren (Michelle Monteith), the audience rarely hears her actual voice. Instead, she's asked Luke (David Patrick Flemming) to speak for her, telling her story in the third person as she listens attentively, analyzing its impact on her and the audience and trying to figure out what it all means. Why is she so angry, despite her successful career as a journalist, stable marriage and two healthy children? Why does her chest constrict as she conducts interviews about a high-profile case of domestic violence, where the perpetrator was welcomed back to the Liberal Party after some community service, and the victim's contract was not renewed? What is the difference between 'trauma' and 'experiences' if they both shape us – doesn't every teenager face strange incidents, shrug and move on? And, ultimately, is it worthwhile to put the complex struggle into words, if no one wants to hear them? It's easy to see why Moscovitch's work was a finalist for the 2024 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 'the oldest and largest international playwriting prize honoring women+ writing for the English-speaking theatre.' Lauren's crisis, as delivered by Luke, is personal rather than intersectional, but is full of detailed, sharp observations about what it means to live and work in a world where you ultimately feel dismissed and disposable. The political scandal Lauren investigates, not directly ripped from the headlines but inspired by recent incidents, becomes increasingly chilling as she discovers the extent of the victim's injuries and the concerted attempt to discredit her voice. Worse, Lauren finds it so easy to become complicit in this judgment. She scoffs at the victim's pop-star name, as though it makes a difference. She finds the men involved morally repugnant, yet secretly hopes they like her and her work. Monteith delivers a performance that's haunting in its restrained economy, and which matches the economy of the production, which strips down all ornamentation in an attempt to appear as objective as possible. Kaitlin Hickey's set design is limited to a raised black platform with a single chair for Lauren. She's on display, while Luke stands to the side with a music stand. Hickey's costumes are workplace casual attire, Lauren in a fitted white button-down shirt contrasting Luke's shapeless grey sweater, and her lighting slowly darkens and narrows to a spot that alternately pins Lauren further in place and recedes her into the shadows. It's occasionally even possible to forget Monteith is on stage, which is kind of the point. Lauren's not miming her story while Luke tells it; she's listening to it like we are, reacting to her words coming from an out-of-body location. Sometimes she seems miles away, hard and distant; sometimes, she trembles, her eyes shining bright with tears that threaten to fall but never completely emerge. When she speaks to question the proceedings, her voice, a little high, a little thin, clashes with the more assured script Luke delivers. And when she stretches her face into that one silent scream, it's arresting and almost genre-bending, matching the script's turn from a realistic description of lunch with a colleague to a stylized vision of a bathtub brimming with blood – before it blinks back, as though nothing really happened. But what did actually happen? And who are we to judge the things that have happened to us, without outside input? Flemming's Luke, as Lauren's mouthpiece, has a warm, compassionate but slightly detached delivery that lets us occasionally find the humour in the societal contradictions and horrors that Lauren faces. At the same time, the house goes silent when he narrates brutally clinical descriptions of domestic violence and Lauren's experiences with sexual assault – or was it assault? The character is designed to be sympathetic, acknowledging the difficulty of speaking for a woman and checking in with Lauren to see if she wants him to continue. It's simultaneously intriguing and frustrating that we never find out the connection between Luke and Lauren, or whether he has any stake in this, but again, that's the goal. Presented with a largely anonymous narrator, why would we trust him more with a story than the person who experienced it? Is it that he's an unbiased, outside eye? Or is it because he's tall, and male, and reassuring?
Globe and Mail
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Canadian playwrights Hannah Moscovitch and Jordan Tannahill stay true to their roots despite U.S. success
Want to get a coffee with Canadian playwrights Hannah Moscovitch and Jordan Tannahill? Good luck. Both writers are, to say the least, a little busy. Moscovitch's play Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes runs until June 18 on Broadway – starring Hugh Jackman, no less. She's also a writer and executive producer on AMC's Interview with the Vampire. Her play Red Like Fruit is playing in Toronto now as part of Luminato Festival, and travels to the Edinburgh Fringe later this summer. And Sophia's Forest, the opera for which Moscovitch, 46, wrote the libretto, is in the midst of a four-day run with City Opera Vancouver. She also has a film in the works, a psychological thriller called Child's Play set to star Sandra Oh. Tannahill, 37, has a ton on the go, too: His play Prince Faggot is now in previews and will run until July 6 off-Broadway. (His friend and mentor, fellow audacious playwright Jeremy O. Harris, is a producer on the show.) He has a film in the pipeline, as well – a medieval horror flick called Rapture, set to star Will Poulter, Kit Connor and Manu Ríos. In addition to stacked Google calendars, the pair have other things in common, too: Both had childhoods in suburban Ottawa, and both found early success as playwrights in Toronto. The Globe and Mail facilitated a Zoom chat between the writers on a rare day off from rehearsals and writing. Hannah Moscovitch (HM): Jordan, why did you want to expand your artistic practice beyond playwriting? I feel like you've always been curious about other mediums. Jordan Tannahill (JT): That was one of the great gifts of growing up in a city like Toronto, which is perhaps less driven by capitalism than London or New York. There was room to follow my curiosity – I felt really flexible in that way. But, Hannah, the craft and intelligence of your stage work – I'm excited to see you bring that into the TV and film space. Has that been satisfying? HM: Working in U.S. television is so satisfying. The people I work with are astonishingly good. Once you can pull internationally because you have those American dollars, what you can make is just so extraordinary. I came up through Canada, where you hone your abilities and then by the time the Americans or Brits notice you, you've already got everything figured out – when I ended up on Interview with the Vampire, they were like, 'Oh, we got a really good deal.' And I've learned so much from working with [Interview with the Vampire showrunner] Rolin Jones. He holds himself to such high standards. In the writers' room, he's told us to go away and write a scene that's better than Breaking Bad. JT: Wow. At Cannes, a reckoning with an impossible mission Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch is drawn to the dark side – and Hollywood Jordan, do you remember when you and Hannah met? JT: I remember I was a fan before I met you, Hannah. I was aware of your work and had seen it – but I got to work with [Christian Barry, husband to Moscovitch and co-founder of 2b Theatre] on my very first play. HM: Which was gorgeous, by the way. You were so obviously so good in that, Jordan. I came up quite quickly – everyone got to watch my failures. JT: [Laughing] I don't remember you having failures, Hannah. HM: But you were so fully formed so quickly. You were so good, and such a peer, immediately. JT: I don't feel that way at all, but that's very generous. I sort of feel the inverse way to you, actually – I got to teach myself publicly how to make theatre. There were so many opportunities for young creators, development programs and festivals. I owe such a debt to those initiatives, those artists who mentored me. I saw Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes last week, by the way, and I loved it. It was one of the strongest things I've seen so far in the spring, and I think it's so exciting to see a Canadian work take its place amongst a very strong season of Tony Award contenders. HM: Thank you. I made changes for this production from the version that premiered at Tarragon in 2020, but they were minimal. I had never workshopped it before. So we spent a lot of time trying to make sure it would work in an American context – I feel like I'm saying terrible things. I'm admitting that American contexts are different from Canadian ones. And are they? Do you feel like you've changed how you think about your work since leaving Canada? HM: Yeah. I wonder often, now, how honest I want to be. I'm constantly being told by my American colleagues, 'I don't know what the hell you're trying to say, but just say it.' They're always mad that I'm trying to do things carefully. JT: I'd argue, too, that neither of us have really left Canada – Hannah, in your case, you're very much still a Halifax-based artist. I think we've always had artists whose trajectories will be international. That's a healthy thing to happen within a national arts ecosystem – I know that I still consider myself a Canadian artist, developing work in Canada. HM: Me too. JT: Sometimes you're fortunate enough to begin working internationally, and hopefully, your work will take you out of the country at different times. But it's a dialogue – and I feel very much still part of the conversation in Canada. HM: Agreed. It was never my desire to leave – I was living in Nova Scotia and then started to work in American television, mostly because people there had found my plays and then started to ask me to join them. But there's been some revelation for me in leaving, which I wasn't necessarily expecting. Both Canada as a country and theatre as a medium are marginal – to be outside of that for a little while, to be part of a larger conversation that is more central, has its appeal. I have things I want to say that are important to me, and I want to be able to say them in a broad context. That doesn't mean I don't love theatre or appreciate its liveness. I do. But I don't see any reason why I can't do both. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Hugh Jackman in a Twisty Tale of ‘Sexual Misconduct'
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.
