Hannah Moscovitch is not your typical English specialist. While daylighting as a student at U of T, she has also managed to cultivate a stylish and cerebral body of theatrical work. The Ottawa native—who originally trained as an actor at the National Theatre School—has a busy year ahead of her. Her latest play, East of Berlin, is currently enjoying a successful run at the iconic Tarragon Theatre, and in the new year, Factory Theatre will present a double-bill of her two past Summerworks hits, The Russian Play and Essay. The Varsity slipped into a vacant UC lecture hall to hear what this fascinating writer has to say about her first season-programmed production, what it’s like to watch a play evolve in rehearsal, and which U of T classes have made her think.
Settling into the back row of molded-plastic seats in UC161, Moscovitch apologizes for seeming a little tired. It’s no wonder: last night was the opening of East of Berlin after weeks of rehearsal. “Well,” she says sheepishly, “we went through most of a bottle of Scotch during the show—so maybe that has something to do with it.” Despite this admission, her green eyes are sharp as a tack, as are her answers.
“It’s fantasy-fulfillment,” she says when asked how the whole page-to-stage process is affecting her. “It’s been a really positive experience. You often hear that when you move to an established theatre that there are a lot of compromises the artist has to make. That hasn’t been my experience at all at the Tarragon. There were many writing discoveries that were made during the four-week rehearsal process—it really was such a collaboration between all of us. For instance, there’s a scene on the ramp at Auschwitz done in total silence. That was something that myself and the director, Alisa Palmer, had to figure out together.”
Developed within the 2006-2007 Tarragon Playwright’s Unit, East of Berlin has been a year in creation, from first draft to the production onstage now. “I pitched something completely different to [artistic director] Richard Rose.”
So, what is East of Berlin about, and where did it originate if not from the initial pitch?
“What led me to the topic was a series of interviews with the children of Nazis. One book was called Legacy of Silence, and the other was called Born Guilty. It wasn’t just the content that interested me. What got me was that the interviews were conducted by Jews. The context was fascinating. Often these children of Nazis had quite specifically wanted to do the interview because they knew the interviewer was Jewish. That became the subtext, and often, the text of the interview.”
Hannah goes on to explain about how broken by their parents’ guilt the interview subjects seemed. As she talks about these cases, it’s hard to imagine children being born in Germany, 1941. Obviously, in the midst of all the destruction and “resettling” of Hitler’s Germany, there would be birth. It seems like that paradox is what led Hannah to this unsettling material and inspired her to shape it into a cohesive story.
East of Berlin is a three-hander, presented by a young man raised in Paraguay after the Second World War. His father was not only a Nazi, but also a doctor at Auschwitz whose “treatments” were the stuff of nightmares. The other two characters are a childhood friend, Hermann, and a Jewish woman named Sarah Kleinman.
“Half the play takes place in Paraguay, and then shifts to West Berlin in the 1960s. The phrase ‘East of Berlin’ is a euphemism for Auschwitz, and that euphemism went into the language of Berlin Jews during the war—‘to go east’ became a code for going to your death.”
The research necessary to support her subject matter was daunting, but Moscovitch found herself up to the task. “Once I started, I realized there was so much I didn’t know about. What it would have been like to live in a Nazi enclave in 1960s Paraguay? Then there was the equally difficult task of returning to the other side of the story, which has taken on almost mythical proportions. I read about myself—because I had to—my history with regard to the Holocaust. That’s the backdrop.”
The comfort Moscovitch found from reading about the suffering in the concentration camps is remarkable. “I would end up on the streetcar reading The Nazi Doctors, or Psychology of Genocide—y’know, one of those books with huge letters on the front.” She laughs, describing the looks commuters gave her. “But I’ve certainly had moments, when watching it up on stage where I’ve thought ‘what possessed me to write about this?’”
Currently, Moscovitch is taking a semester off so that she can concentrate on her writing. Still, I’m interested to know which U of T courses may have informed her creative work.
“The education here is so astonishingly good. One of the best things is just being taught to think critically. The grounding in great systems of thought—like the first-year philosophy survey course, or contemporary literary criticism, and particularly the American literature course with Professor Paul Downes—I found that really influenced my thinking. There were lots of them—but those ones really stand out. It’s amazing how your mind just will not do things unless you’ve trained it to. We call it intelligence, but I believe it’s really just training our minds to work a certain way. In that firstyear philosophy class, reading David Hume— the need to take responsibility for your beliefs. That was definitely important for me.
“I think that if anything, coming to U of T as an artist already, you bring a certain irreverence that makes things a bit more accessible. There’s something about being an artist in the presence of art—you recognize that Shakespeare is unfinished. The director finishes it. It’s finished by the production. There’s a different angle into it. You bring that to the classroom.”
East of Berlin continues at the Tarragon Theatre Extra Space until November 25, 2007. Student tickets are available for $18.
