Twitter! This is the TRAILER to the show I've been working on like a maniac with the brilliant showrunner
@Podemskichick
for years. THE TRAILER'S just been released and I'm freaking out.
In theatre school, women got smaller & shittier roles than the men. When I protested, my teachers thew up their hands & said "but that's what the world's like! We're preparing you for the world!" 20 years out I know that's not true. They didn't prepare me, they indoctrinated me.
When I was 27 I was dating a guy. He said to me: "What do you want most in life?" I said: "The Governor General's Award" (!!! I said that, so cute). He said: "I want a wife and kids." Later, we broke up. Cool to write to him and say I won the Governor General's Award?
I've twice been warned about a performer being "difficult to work with", worked with them anyway, and found out that "difficult to work with" means "a woman who speaks up". In both cases the performers were extraordinarily talented & spoke their minds respectfully. This happens.
Oh the dudes who say to me: "I'm just warning you, you might only get a female audience for this play." Dudes, I'm good with that. And dudes who don't want to see my female-centred plays, from the bottom of my heart I invite you to get the fuck out.
I had a whole life doing theatre that's been swept away in the pandemic (not a complaint, just...accurate). I got to hear a reading of one of my plays this week and it was like remembering I have a superpower I forgot about and don't use anymore. Also actors are magic.
I took no photos of the premiere of Interview with the Vampire S2 in New York City so I'm happy a celebrity playwright did -- my lord these two actors pictured are wildly transcendently talented. Writing for them is dreamy.
I feel like if I keep bringing my crushes to Saint Theoโs itโll be impossible to keep getting a table last minute.
Congrats on the premiere
@Immortal_AMC
.
Twitter, I've nearly done this with Elijah. I've carried his stroller down New York subway steps, thinking to myself: "if I slip, I'll fall backwards with the stroller on top of me & wrap my body around it so he's okay." Maybe offer to help people carrying strollers.
When theatre people hopefully suggest that theatre will be okay because it can go online I canโt help but think โ thatโs a good idea but Iโm pretty sure someone already had it itโs called television. (Online theatre is for superfans who donโt mind that itโs very bad television.)
I've been asked a lot now: why write a
#metoo
play when so many women are writing them? I get the question (but I really do, we're all brainwashed). Here's the question asked in reverse: "Why write anything about men when we've heard so much about them for so fucking long?" 1/3
This is the most obvious and brutal racism. This is genocide-denial. I'm Jewish, and if the Alberta government floated taking the Holocaust out of the curriculum I'd know what to call them. I hope every other Canadian is also breaking furniture in their house right now.
"Recommended changes to the kindergarten-to-Grade 4 curriculum for fine arts and social studies include eliminating all references to residential schools and their harms to Indigenous people and removing references to "equity.""
My 4-year-old son's frisbee flew in the wind into the path of a couple out walking. He ran to within eight feet of them and then stopped dead. I saw the couple register happy astonishment that a tiny child was obeying social distancing. And then profound existential despair.
My son started school in the pandemic, when he was 5. So I have yet to see the inside of his school. I just push him past the "parents line" and yell "get in there!" Anything could be in that school. Anything. Vampires. Unicorns. Who the fuck knows?
Once you state in public that you're a feminist women in their 80s & 90s will come up to you & whisper things like "when I wanted to get a job my husband fought me on it but I fought back" and "I have a dirty mind for sex & have hidden it all my life" etc. Anyway, I recommend it.
I will get offered a gig or a possible gig and I will say -- no, I can't do it, I don't know how, I don't have enough experience. Then I will hear that a male colleague, younger than me, with half my CV, took or got that gig, and I will think WOW WOW really WOW.
#confidencegap
I say this sometimes to starting-out playwrights and it seems to relieve them so here: I didn't have a professional production of my work until I was 29, and I spent my whole 20s working in a bar and being rejected by every theatre and granting body in Canada, and writing badly.
Hey RPC, I went on birth control for 15 years, fucked a bunch of hot men who were amazing, worked on my writing career, met my hot husband, had a kid with him at 36, love my husband, love my son, and am a professional writer who works consistently on meaningful projects. Yay!
@JoametteGil
The police were called when I was hit by a car. It knocked me out. I woke up in hospital to a police officer giving me a ticket for jay walking. My heart started to accelerate - I was on a heart monitor that alerted the nurses - they came running in and kicked the cop out.
In 2016 I was in Stratford, sprinting home on a break from rehearsal to nurse my son, and mumbling lines from the play to myself trying to revise them, and the cops stopped me and asked if I was on meth.
#secretlifeofamother
It's stunning that I can write play after play about women being sexually assaulted and in abuse-of-power relationships and no one thinks I'm writing about myself. It's as though we don't believe these things actually happen. It's as though we don't believe it.
Being in theatre right now feels like there's been an airplane crash and we're all huddled in the life raft in the middle of the ocean and the two shitty psychological options are "I'm going to die here" or "I really love rafting."
So many Conservatives worried about having money (CERB) acting as a disincentive to work! OMG I AGREE but I want them to go first - let's take all their TRUST FUNDS and INVESTMENTS ACCOUNTS away! Cause that fuckpile of $$$ must be disincentive-izing them!
I think everyday about the fancy agent in New York City who said to me: "Making theatre in Toronto is like making theatre in Denver. Maybe there's good theatre there but nobody gives a fuck."
Okay twitter. It's been a weird day. Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story has been nominated for 4
@DramaDeskAwards
. I'm up against Tina Fey for Outstanding Book of a Musical hahaha ahhhh brrrmmmm WHAT.
So the next man who says to me "The Russian Play doesn't say much about Russia...?", is it offside for me to scream in their face: "Holy fuck it's a feminist piece about love being dangerous for WOMEN it's about WOMEN Russia is a metaphor you fucking loser." 1/2
I can say publicly now that I'm working on a 10-part original audio drama series about witches for
@audible_com
. Many formidable artists are working on projects as part of the inaugural slate: Tanya Talaga, Colm Feore, Catherine Hernandez.
I've written a new play, Post-Democracy. I was commissioned to write it in 2007 so yay I finally finished it. Yesterday it started rehearsals in Winnipeg
@PrairieTheatre
and you'll be able to watch a digital version of the project soon.
Leadership in theatre is usually making artists feels like they're lucky to be working at a theatre at all & putting artists through dumb competitions. Leadership in other mediums is usually making artists feel it's a collaborative relationship in which everyone is respected.
I'm often frustrated in theatre by how much we accept that directors can speak for playwrights. Directors, in my experience, are uneven in terms of their comprehension of what playwrights do and need, and what writing is. Some are illiterate. Playwrights can speak for themselves.
Iโm going to have two plays onstage in TO for 3 days from Feb 6th to Feb 9th - Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes
@tarragontheatre
and Secret Life of a Mother
@crowstheatre
- so you can pick how youโd like to be bummed out.
Came onto twitter to tell you I'm reading a 14th Century text about witches - for an upcoming project - and in one story the witch steals the penises of all the men and all the priests in the village, which feels pretty on the nose even for the 14th Century.
Have been thinking of the first 10 years of my career when I thought but could not say: "There are no plays by women in your 9 play season. And when women come onstage in those plays, it's only briefly, to complicate the plot for the men, usually by hesitating to fuck them."
Many women have been assaulted and/or preyed on and/or harassed just like how many men have a complex relationship with their dad. So many women are writing about
#metoo
. Personally I'm delighted for audiences to get a break from "DADS ARE HARD". 3/3
I've been thinking a lot about what run-of-the-mill sexism/anti-woman bias sounds like from audience members. Here's what it DOES NOT sound like: "I hate ladies." Here's what it DOES sound like: "When that character Brian came on the play finally got going." 1/3
Conservatives - Erin O'Toole - make the argument that the people who ran Residential Schools were trying to to do good. Listen, the Nazis at Auschwitz thought they were doing good. They were building a better world, free of Jews. It's a terrible fucking argument.
The language of enthusiasm is overused, and can ring false, but uh, when I started out, whole seasons of theatre blew by with no works by women in them, like eleven plays in a season all by men was so normal no one commented on it. And now:
We're SO excited to share the news of our Six Women Writing commissioning project! โ๏ธ In the works are new plays by
@treyanthony
, Sandra Caldwell,
@FalenJohnson
,
@moscotweets
,
@katsandler
& Erin Shields! For details on how YOU can support their work visit:
Do Americans know that Canadians sit up here, just North of them, and full-out stare at them like they're TV, and what's on TV is a zombie apocalypse sci-fi horror Gilead Nazi movie.
Twitter, I wrote on the first season of AMC's upcoming Interview With the Vampire. It's premiering in less than a month, on October 2nd. I am insanely proud of it. From the bottom of my heart I want you to watch. Here's the latest trailer...
Thank you to the Canada Council for the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama. The most beautiful part is looking back to past nominees & recipients & dreaming forward to future ones & thinking - if I am with them then I am happy.
#GGBooks2021
๐๐ Groundbreaking, poetic, entertaining and moving: here are the
#GGBooks2021
winners in Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Non-fiction, Young People's Literature - Text, Young People's Literature - Illustrated Books, and Translation. Congratulations!
#CanLit
Sometimes I think that I have a secret - and having this secret makes me feel like Iโm kind of a rebel - and itโs that I know, from the very bottom of my heart, that Iโm good at my job.
Twitter, I just opened a play called Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes - retweeted stuff about it, will retweet more later, don't want to swamp you. It felt crazy. I haven't wanted to curl up & die from pure vulnerability at an opening like that since 2007 East of Berlin.
I so so rarely am CREAMING over the pens of American made things, itโs just not really my taste usually.
BUT THIS PEN? THIS PEN IS OLD WAY! That writers room goes AWF!!!! NO SKIPS! ALL HITS NO MISSES!!!
True southern gothic lit shit.
Someone loathed one of my plays so much that in their comments to the artistic director they wrote: "WHO IS THE MAYOR OF THIS CITY SO I CAN COPY THEM ON THIS COMPLAINT?"
Twitter, I graduated from an Ontario high school in 1996. While we grade 9 girls learned how to "say no" and how to defend ourselves against rapists jumping out of bushes, the boys in our class played dodge ball.
The rolling chaos of a 50-person birthday zoom for a 75 year old Jewish man. No one knows if they can be heard. No one knows if their video is on. No one knows who shared their screen. Everyone is screaming.
I'm kinda amazed by this anti-abortion kid who says the quiet part out loud - being anti-abortion isn't about preserving life, it's about punishing women for "sleeping around."
Quick question. Would you want to see a piece of theatre about two characters -- Brett Kavanaugh and Ruth Bader Ginsberg? Them in their downtime together on the supreme court? [[[[this isn't the type of content I normally take on, but I'm curious]]]]
"Why was it so focused on domestic issues?" (because it's about birth control, which is pretty political, you fucking loser). "What if at the end you restart the whole thing but from Brian's point of v--" OH MY GOD FOR FUCK'S SAKE I GET IT YOU'RE NOT INTERESTED IN WOMEN!!!!
Twitter, in 2023, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, a music-theatre hybrid about my Romanian great-grandparents coming as refugees to Canada in 1908, and about being a refugee, co-written with
@bencaplanmusic
&
@XtianBarry
for
@2btheatre
, will cross the 400 performances mark.
When my working class mother went to college she'd never met a single other person who'd been. She became a social worker in London UK in the 70s - she fought to unionize her workforce, and they collectively REFUSED to separate poor mothers from their children. She's a heroine.
A lot of my job as a writer has become assessing if the producers and artistic directors I work with are in denial about the pandemic, how in denial they are, and if the denial is going to lead to a hostile outburst when I suggest that the project may need to be postponed.
Power. Privilege. Corruption... Tickets for the world premiere of Post-Democracy by Hannah Moscovitch are on sale now! Visit to book your virtual viewing.
#theatre
@moscotweets
I know we expect confidence from men and gratitude from women, so it's shocking when women don't conform. There's a certain ugly joy to saying "no" to anyone who expected me to gratefully say "yes", and watching in real time as their gender expectations get overturned.
For those theatre creators/playwrights developing new work - development cycles will be pushed back a number of years maybe three or four. Are we developing work into a void?
What a weird thing to tweet after a long absence from twitter and with so much (bad) shit going on in the world but here it is - it's important to me to be really really good to women who are younger than me.
Okay I just retweeted this like "this is normal" but I am so freaking happy. This play hasn't premiered yet (Jan 2020
@tarragontheatre
) and MTC in Australia is taking a big leap and yay.
SEXUAL MISCONDUCT OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES
by Hannah Moscovitch
The archetypal student-teacher romance genre is turned on its head in this fascinating premiere directed by Petra Kalive, starring Dan Spielman.
Explore Season 2020 at
#MelbTheatre2020
Sometimes when people talk about (terrible but expensively made) shows and say โthe writing is so goodโ I think: Youโve never watched AMCโs โInterview with the Vampireโ have you?!?
Good TV and film writing has snap, crackle and pop! Very few of these shows do!
Twitter, the economics podcasts I listen to all say that making it easy to buy something is how you get people to buy something. And then I think of the many terrible theatre websites and the many confusing clicks it takes to buy yourself a couple of tickets.
There are a fuck of a lot of plays about how men feel about their fathers - OEDIPUS REX to HAMLET to KIM'S CONVENIENCE. I even wrote one it's called East of Berlin. Those four plays are the same & different. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ins Choi and I offer variety. 2/3
Iโm picking a weird moment to freak out over Andrew Scheer. If a hopeful to run Canada said: โI donโt think Jews should have the right to marry who they want but I wonโt act on that when Iโm prime ministerโ I wouldnโt be like โthatโs fine I feel goodโ Iโd be like โyouโre a Nazi.โ