What a Young Wife Ought to Know
Set in 1920s Canada, What a Young Wife Ought to Know tells
the story of Sophie, a young working-class wife who has a lot to learn about
love, sex, and birth control. Recently we spoke with award-winning playwright
Hannah Moscovitch about the production, which begins tonight and runs through
February 8 at Neptune Theatre in Halifax.
What made you want to
become a playwright?
I
went to National Theatre School in the Acting Program and I liked the
playwriting classes more than I liked the acting classes. I was crappy at the
acting classes and enthusiastic about the playwriting ones. When I
was eighteen, I wanted to be an actor because I liked the texts of plays so
much that I wanted to say them out loud. But that’s not what it is to be an
actor. Actors inhabit character - they don’t say text out loud. I think all
along I wanted to be a writer, I just didn’t understand that about
myself. Then once I was immersed in the theatre world, I started to write plays
because it’s what I knew.
Are they the same
reasons you continue to do it?
I’ve worked
in various mediums now – opera, film, TV and radio as well as theatre – so I
have more perspective on what working in theatre is that I did as an acting
student. I am still very fond of the theatre. I like that it’s
collaborative and that the end result is a synthesis of talents and visions, I
like working with performers and directors and designers and theatres, and I
like that the audience is live and responsive in real-time to the work. And I
like that my work will be produced and see an audience (in film, for instance,
the chances of that happening are much lower because of the size of the budget
required to produce it). So those are the reasons I continue to do it.
What are the challenges
of the vocation?
It’s
uncertain, payment is erratic, you become subject of public criticism and
ridicule (as well as praise), and as a freelancer you have limited control over
your career.
What are the rewards?
The
reward outweighs the challenges. The reward is meaningful work. Work
that I love. Being a writer means I have a good life.
What inspired What
a Young Wife Ought to Know?
A
few years ago I picked up a copy of Dear Dr. Stopes: Sex in the 1920s,
a compilation of the letters sent to the famous British birth control advocate,
Dr. Marie Stopes. Men and women, often in dire straits and desperate to
find out how to stop having children, wrote to Dr. Stopes querying about birth
control. The voices of the men and women in these letters were distinct
from anything I had read before. The letters are explicit about ‘unmentionable’
topics: sex, desire, adultery, childbirth, and birth control. The style of the
letters is stark, hilarious and unflinching, and the vocabulary is amazingly
frank and sexual. None of the literature of the time (think F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T.S Elliot, Virginia Woolf) - document what
people’s sex lives were like in the first decades of the twentieth century. To
me, the letters felt like a voyeuristic glimpse into what life, and life for
women in particular, was like before birth control. The Dr. Stopes letters
inspired the play.
What can audiences
expect during the run in Halifax?
I think
they can expect a text by me (complex characters, HBO-style content, dark humour)
a project by 2b theatre company (in their distinct aesthetic, in which
image/lights/sound/image/text/performance are all precise and synthesized), and
beautiful and nuanced performances by Lisa Repo-Martell, David Patrick Flemming
and Rebecca Parent (some of the best actors in Canada). Also, I’ve
written so much sex into this play that I blush in rehearsals. Audiences
can expect a lot of sex. No nudity. A lot of sex.
Is your creative process
more ‘inspirational’ or ‘persiprational’?
Probably
perspirational - I do rewrite a lot. I generally draft between 30 and 70 times
for each play. Also, inspiration is easier for me for some
reason. I don’t work hard to think of initial
(generative) ideas.
What makes a good play?
I love
this question. I think plays can be good for a weird assortment of
reasons. I like lots of different of work. I like Martin Crimp
and Sarah Kane (on the post-modern end of the spectrum), and I like
devised work, and live art. And I like Chekhov and Pinter and Brecht and
Marlowe and Bond. There are a lot of Canadian playwrights and creators whose
work I love. I’m not dogmatic about what I think makes a good
play. I like work that’s rigorous, that’s truthful (has depth), has
vision, and that’s original (in form and/or content and/or style) - those are
my criteria for a good play.
What are your thoughts
on the state of theatre in Canada today?
I
think theatre - as well as many mediums - is up against how good TV has become.
TV is so fucking good. And writers from pretty much every other medium are
gravitating there, which is only improving its quality. For theatre to be
able to compete with clicking on Netflix (at 7.99$ a month) and watching the
best writing that’s happening in any medium is going to be very hard. I think
artistic directing is very hard these days, and there’s not a lot of room for
long-term planning, which is deadly.
What's next on your
creative agenda?
I’m
premiering a play called Infinity at Tarragon Theatre in TO,
with a crack team of collaborators, including Lee Smolin, the theoretical
physicist who runs the Perimeter Institute. I’m working with Stratford on
a new play called Bunny. The new TV show I wrote on
last year called X Company, created by Mark Ellis and Stephanie
Morgenstern, premieres on CBC on Feb 18th. I’m working on the stage
adaptation of Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald with
Alisa Palmer and the Shaw Festival. Yeah, lots of projects.
What a Young Wife Ought
to Know
January
27 – February 8, 2015
Neptune
Theatre, Halifax
www.neptunetheatre.com
