“I never had a nuanced explanation of sexual assault growing up”: Hannah Moscovitch on her new play, Red Like Fruit

Hannah Moscovitch made a name for herself in Canadian theatre with her plays East of Berlin, Old Stock: A Refugee Story and Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes. She’s mainly working in LA these days but recently spent a few weeks in New York staging Sexual Misconduct with Hugh Jackman. Now she’s back in Toronto for the third season of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire, which she’s executive-producing and writing. As if that weren’t enough, this month, Soulpepper and the Luminato Festival are premiering her searing new play, Red Like Fruit, about a woman who asks a male friend to narrate her memories of a sexual assault. Here, Moscovitch tells us about working with Hollywood royalty, living in the US as a Canadian and the inspiration behind her latest play.

You’ve lived in Toronto and Halifax, and you’re currently in New York to direct Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes. Where are you spending most of your time? I’m mainly working in LA these days. The last time I visited Toronto was for three days in 2019. For seven years in the 2000s, I paid $433 per month to share a three-bedroom apartment with two friends at Dundas and Ossington, back when the Communist’s Daughter had just opened and it was all Portuguese bakeries and Korean karaoke places. The ceilings in my attic room were so low that we called it the Anne Frank room. When I turned 30, in 2008, I bought a condo at Adelaide and Portland. Interview With the Vampire is going to be shooting in Toronto from May until October, so I’m back.

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Has working on both sides of the border been complicated lately? Crossing the border used to take no time, but when I flew to LA via Toronto in March, customs took an hour. I’d never seen them examine my papers so thoroughly. It was wild to be in the US while Canada was having a huge nationalist moment. No one there knows about what’s happening here, and I was experiencing it from afar. I was reporting everything to my American friends, showing them pictures of US alcohol being pulled from shelves.

And now you’ll be bringing an American show to Canada to shoot. Is that nerve-wracking? I’m hoping it will bridge the gap between us, but I’m worried. We made the decision to shoot in Toronto at a much less heated time. Now there’s more potential for misunderstandings. Living in LA has made me more aware of the cultural differences between us. Even the airports—LAX is so loud. On a recent visit to Halifax, I found myself in a waiting area in the airport with 500 people in complete silence. I took a video, showed it to my American colleagues and said, “This is what 500 Canadians sound like.” They couldn’t believe it. We’re different, and now politics has made us hyper-aware of that.

How did Sexual Misconduct get from the Tarragon to Broadway? It was complete happenstance. I met a dramaturge from Melbourne Theatre at an event, and he ended up programming Sexual ­Misconduct a few times. Matt Trueman from the production company Sonia Friedman Productions read a review of the show, got the script, and gave it to Friedman and Hugh Jackman to look at. One day, in the spring of 2023, Trueman called me and asked how I felt about Jackman acting in my play. I was shocked—I thought he was talking about some other actor.

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What’s Jackman like to work with? He’s a formidable actor. It’s amazing to be in the presence of someone who is so watchable and charismatic. As a person, he’s ethical, sensitive and empathetic. He was willing to take on some tricky subject matter and a role that not everyone would be thrilled to play. While he starts off as the protagonist, audiences may sour on him as the story goes on.

Red Like Fruit shares some of Sexual Misconduct’s DNA. What was the impetus behind the new play? I wanted to write about feeling uncertain about one’s own experiences. When I was 16, I took a tour of a church in Crete with my parents. When I was out of their sight, the tour guide grabbed me and touched me between my legs. For years, I had no way of rationalizing that experience. The only rape education I’d received was, “A man jumps out from behind a bush,” and it didn’t fit that mould. I only realized it was assault when I was 29 and told my husband about it in a joking way, and he was shocked. I’ve swung between re-evaluating the experience, explaining it away and blaming myself.

How did you translate that experience for the stage? Like me, the main character, Lauren, has a range of thoughts about her experiences. She’s having a hard time processing them, especially since the culture around sexual assault has shifted so much in the meantime. Think about Monica Lewinsky—she took all of the blame for what happened with Bill Clinton. Imagine that happening now! That dissonance leads Lauren to seek out someone to tell her story back to her, and that person happens to be a man.

How does writing for TV compare to writing for theatre? The scale is totally different. A play is an organic, natural thing that aims to sustain itself over multiple performances. But, in TV, everything is broken down shot by shot, and each one has to be perfect. It’s also such a mass medium. Theatre is intimate: the audience is right there. They can feel a character blush. TV is experienced in isolation, yet it has a far wider reach. When I’m making choices for TV, like about how being gay is portrayed, I’m influencing a generation. That responsibility weighs on me.

Your plays go to great lengths to capture the nuances of truth and trauma. Why is that so important? Nuance is a powerful thing. I’d never had a nuanced explanation of sexual assault growing up, so when it happened to me, I didn’t recognize it for what it was. In Red Like Fruit, things get more confusing the more the character thinks about what happened to her. I write with nuance because it’s true to my experience and I’m trying to be rigorous about describing those feelings. I don’t want my son to go through something like that and lack the words to talk about it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.