- The Russian Play and Mexico City by Hannah Moscovitch at Presentation House Theatre from Nov. 16 to 26. A 2B Theatre Company Production.
TO say the two one-act plays by Hannah Moscovitch coming to the Presentation House Theatre this month are about love would be technically correct, but severely lacking.
Mexico City and The Russian Play are coming to Presentation House next week - the second performance of the plays in the Vancouver area after a 2010 showing garnered critical and audience praise for the Toronto playwright.
Billed as two plays about love, the two stories have little else in common.
"It's a broad topic, so it leaves you lots of room to be creative," says Moscovitch.
The evening begins with Mexico City, a story of a 1960s couple hoping to rekindle a wilting marriage with a trip to the Mexican capital, but it turns out both have differing ideas on what the vacation means. Following the intermission is The Russian Play, a bleak, darkly comic ode to the dangers and joys of love set in the 1920s Soviet Union, focusing on the story of Sonya, a peasant whose love affair leads to her ruin.
The challenge, and the comedy, hinges on actress Colombe Demers, who plays both Sonya and the narrator, switching on a dime between Sonya's swooning kiss with her lover and the narrator, who looks at the scene and says curtly, "So, you see how it was between them."
"The idea was to have those sharp, 180-degree turns between Sonya and the narrator who's speaking to us," says Moscovitch.
The character of Sonya came to her almost in a dream, she says: she heard the voice say a single line of dialogue, and grew the play from that, with the setting borrowed partially from Moscovitch's own family history, her father an immigrant with Romanian and Ukrainian descent.
"Where do you hide a piece of bread?" was the line, "and then I saw 1920s broken down Russia around her in my head, and so from that came the whole play," she says.
Mexico City, however, was inspired by a trip Moscovitch herself took with her then-boyfriend, which left her enamored with the concept of escaping to an exotic destination to ignite a struggling relationship, even if not enamored with her own partner of the time.
"Neither of the characters in it are like me or the ex-boyfriend at all, but I did like the idea of a trip to Mexico to rekindle a romance. Something about that got my attention as a writer," she says.
The two plays visited Vancouver in spring of 2010 and have often been shown together, but that wasn't always the intention, says Moscovitch - far from it.
"I'm always very scared of intermissions because the audience can leave," she says, explaining her many one-act plays sounding half-joking, half-seriously worried. "And the funny thing is now my plays all get billed together. Not only are there intermissions but there's intermissions in which you can definitely leave, because there's no cliffhanger or anything to hold audiences to come back."
Yet it hasn't been a problem - she says she's been thrilled so far with the audience reactions to her work, and the different interpretations by various actors. As a playwright, she feels her works are incomplete, meant to be interpreted and polished by whoever picks them up.
"It's exciting to see the choices a new set of actors, designers are going to make," she says.
Since writing The Russian Play, she wrote her first full-length play, East of Berlin, in 2007, focusing on the son of a Nazi war criminal who grows up in Paraguay, eventually travelling to Berlin to meet the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor. The play was performed in three runs at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.
She said she's fascinated with writing plays in the past because it helps to piece together how we got to where we are.
"You see it on Mad Men, why people are so fascinated with that show. It's recent history, so it's telling people a lot about now," she says.
Following that she wrote Children's Republic, her first two-act play, and she just finished writing Little One, which premiered once in Ottawa, but has since been heavily reworked ahead of an upcoming Toronto opening.
It's a consistent string of successes for a playwright who says she got into the field because she wasn't a good enough actor.
Growing up in Ottawa, she attended the National Theatre School, first getting notice for one of her student works, Cigarettes and Tricia Truman, which was workshopped by the Great Canadian Theatre Company.
She said she never set out to become a playwright, but somehow it just fit.
"There are better choices you can make in your life," she says, starting to laugh. "I don't know exactly why I do it. I don't really know. I shouldn't, I feel I shouldn't."
But she's still got stories to tell, she says. So even while Moscovitch pens the past, she's busily writing her own future.
