ON STAGE: Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes
Where: The Belfry Theatre, 1291 Gladstone Ave.
When: March 31-April 24
Tickets: Pay What You Can from tickets.belfry.bc.ca or 250-385-6815
With rave reviews following its 2020 premiere, Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes was expected to do big business in cities across Canada.
However, the Governor General’s Literary Award-winning play went directly from Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre into the front end of the pandemic, which scuttled productions in Edmonton and Montreal. That eventually opened the door for Victoria, with a production directed by Michael Shamata set for March 31-April 24 at The Belfry Theatre. The Belfry Theatre is now just the second company in Canada to produce the drama from Halifax-based playwright Hannah Moscovitch.
That’s very good news for local audiences; the riveting two-hander about a teacher-student relationship gone awry is a conversation-starter, to say the least. Audiences hung around well after curtain call during the Tarragon Theatre run, Moscovitch said, as the characters Annie (played by Sara Canning) and Jon (Vincent Gale) are far from what audiences expect.
Moscovitch knew she was on to something when the play had its first reading at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in 2017.
When she started writing Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, “we were very much in the middle of conversations about the topic of this play,” she said. “I was really scared genuinely — that the audience would hate Annie, that they were going to think she was the villain. But I was super-surprised. In Seattle, they booed Jon. They screamed at the stage.”
Moscovitch got her start in theatre in the late ’90s. Looking back, the culture in the theatre community was at a breaking point. The #MeToo movement had not yet begun, and there was a culture of silence, according to Moscovitch. “I was at award ceremonies hosted by Jian Ghomeshi [the former CBC host who was the subject of sexual assault and sexual harassment allegations], and someone came up to me and whispered in my ear, ‘Watch it with him.’ We lived in that climate. And he wasn’t the only one. That was a lot of that in the arts.”
At first, Moscovitch felt like she wasn’t given permission to write Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, nor was she confident audiences wanted something which shone a spotlight on the relationship between a married professor and a first-year student. “I have it in me to be rebellious, but I also have it in me to be really scared. I wish I had the strength of my convictions. I can do it, but I do it in the fetal position.”
Throughout the pandemic, Moscovitch has worked steadily in television, co-writing the series Unsettled (which aired last year on APTN) and Little Bird (which is due this year on Crave). Both gave her the opportunity to challenge Indigenous stereotypes. The medium of television is now a place where unconventional programming now finds its home, she said.
Her arrival in TV couldn’t have been timed any better. For the near future, the small screen has the benefit of her considerable talents.
“It just happened that my interest in joining that medium coincided with the Golden Age [of new TV],” she said. “I got to ride this wave. It just happened that my skills as a playwright — long, character-driven, serialized work that is dialogue-heavy — is what was taking off on TV when I got all these gigs. I went from my career being [50 per cent theatre and 50 per cent TV] to being 100 per cent of it being in TV. I have never been busier.”
mdevlin@timescolonist.com
