What's her line?

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Hannah Moscovitch

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Brendan Gall and Diana Donnelly.

In the aftermath of her breakthrough season in 2007-08, Toronto playwright Hannah Moscovitch was deluged with play commissions from artistic directors anxious to get in on what might be the next big thing in Canadian theatre.

Young, photogenic, bright and refreshingly open, Moscovitch is the face of a new generation of playwrights in this country. Based only on a few promising one-acts and her first full-length drama, East of Berlin, she is one of the most sought after theatre scribes.

The 31-year-old Moscovitch, a finalist for the 2009 Governor General's Award for drama, seems sheepish now to admit she scooped eight commissions, including one from Prairie Theatre Exchange titled post-democray and another called The Anatomists for New York City's Manhattan Theatre Club.

A young playwright's folly?

"Well, yes," says the Ottawa native over the telephone from Montreal recently. "I took a lot of commissions without realizing the work. So now I'm trying to write them all at once."

The graduate of Montreal's National Theatre School currently has five plays on the desktop of her souped-up Mac. Two of them are second drafts and three are first drafts.

"So we'll see if this is totally stupid," says Moscovitch, who won't be in Winnipeg for tonight's opening of MTC Warehouse's run of East of Berlin.

Though she didn't win a Governor General's Award this week, chances are she will make the short list in the near future. With that kind of output coming down the pipe, Moscovitch will be undoubtedly heard from again by the judges.

"I'm trying to beat the odds by inundating the field," she says with tongue in cheek. "Maybe I'll be up against myself."

Her latest play, The Children's Republic, just opened at Ottawa's Great Canadian Theatre Company. Last month she debuted The Huron Bride, a Victorian ghost story that was part of a four-play collective called The Mill. She's also turned out a treatment for a screenplay about an Israeli soldier who goes back to Germany, where his family originated.

"I'm still in a learning phase of how to write plays," she says. "I'm still in the phase of copying the writers I admire, like John Mighton, George F. Walker, Judith Thompson and Daniel MacIvor, all the people who have preceded my generation. I get a sort of permission from how they write, and their style and stories. It's an inevitable phase writers go through."

East of Berlin -- the title is a euphemism for the deporting of Jews to death camps during the Second World War -- is a Holocaust-shadowed drama about Rudi, who returns to Paraguay to confront his father, a Nazi doctor who experimented on Jewish concentration camp prisoners. His Jewish girlfriend is pregnant and he's been lying about dad's past.

It's a heavy-duty career introduction for a then 20-something rookie.

"I didn't think about, 'What am I going to write about for my first full-length play,'" she says. "I might have chosen a better subject if I had. Like family, one of those killer subjects that everyone can do something with. I would write like Eugene O'Neill or Tracy Letts in August: Osage County and expose my family to the world.

"But I'm stuck with Nazis who grew up in Paraguay."

Moscovitch stumbled upon the subject while reading Legacy of Silence: Encounters With Children of the Third Reich by Dan Bar-On and Peter Sichrovsky's Born Guilty, two books in which children of Nazi war criminals were interviewed by the children of Jewish victims. She fell in love with her research and these damaged offspring, haunted by their past, who must grow up in the shadow of their parent's war crimes. She read about how they sought atonment and urinated on their parents' graves.

Her fascination was with the massive fallout of the Holocaust, some of which she had experienced first-hand growing up surrounded by survivors. She is the product of a pair of left-wing social activists: a Jewish father -- a Carleton University professor and a refugee from Ukrainian pogroms -- and an English/Irish mother.

"I spent a lot of time thinking about the trauma of that kind of genocide on the psyches of people like me," she says.

The sympathy she felt led to the unusual approach to the Holocaust that is East of Berlin, which took 10 months from first draft to opening night. Moscovitch was all too aware of the backlash she risked by humanizing Nazi progeny.

"I thought for sure B'nai Brith was going to burn my house down," says Moscovitch, who trained as an actress. "But the Jewish community and my family were very positive about the play.

"I'll upset them when I write my Eugene O'Neill play. Then I'll go for the jugular."

East of Berlin opens tonight at 8 p.m. tonight and runs through Dec. 5 at MTC Warehouse. Tickets are $13-$41 and are available by calling the MTC box office at 942-6537.

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca

Holocaust art

Reading about the children of Holocaust victims and perpetrators led to Moscovitch writing East of Berlin. As a fledgling actor, Moscovitch played her namesake in an early workshop of Emil Schur's play Hana's Suitcase, the story of long-forgotten gas chamber victim Hana Brady.

Here are her recommended Holocaust works:

Movie: The Grey Zone (2001), starring Harvey Keitel -- "I think it's a complex piece of art that flew under the radar, oddly enough."

Play: Bent by Martin Sherman -- "I really liked that, and there was an Israeli play about the Holocaust that really stayed with me."

Book: Night by Elie Weisel, and Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 19, 2009 E10