Finding the right class, at long last ‘I need to be a part of telling this story’ By: Ben Waldman Posted: 7:00 PM CST Wednesday, Mar. 1, 2023

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This article was published 01/03/2023 (954 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Bailey Chin’s professional acting career is off to an auspicious start: before she’s even graduated from university, she’s already been in a production on the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s main stage.

Now, she’s set to co-star in Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, a timely and award-winning two-hander from the acclaimed playwright Hannah Moscovitch, on now at the Tom Hendry Warehouse.

It all has happened so fast, and, as it often does, it happened by chance.

Chin, 24, did a little bit of acting at Linden Christian School, performing in the school musical every other year.

“And then I went to university and tried to do science?” she says, ending the statement with retrospective confusion. “I was taking biology and chemistry, and they all seemed interesting, and it was hard. But I was also taking Intro to Theatre at the U of M.”

“It became the thing I ended up looking forward to most,” recalls Chin, sitting in the lobby of the Warehouse three days before opening night.

“It was this little space where everybody was a bit different.” Chin speaks effusively about her first professor, Bob Smith, who she says treated her and other students with respect, kindness and understanding. “Bless that man.”

But there are good professors — who inspire students and espouse career- and life-oriented wisdom — and then there are those who forget, or, rather, ignore, the ethical responsibilities which come from standing at the front of a lecture hall filled with impressionable and vulnerable students: Chin’s fictional co-star Jon (to be played by Kevin Aichele) would seem, at least based on the play’s synopsis, to belong to the second camp.

Annie, the character Chin plays, is a little younger than she is: at the play’s start, she is a 19-year-old high achiever exploring the adult world for the first time. She walks into Jon’s class, eager to learn from a literary star.

“He’s sort of the cool professor,” says Chin. “He’s very much so the professor who throws the textbook in the garbage and sits on the chair backwards, and is like, ‘I’m one of you,’ which can be great until it goes too far.”

It is not a spoiler to say that the two characters begin to spend time together, developing a relationship grounded in a power dynamic that is quite obviously problematic.

But in the hands of the gifted and prolific playwright Moscovitch — who won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama for this production — it is safe to assume that clichés and tropes will be avoided, revealing deeper truths about human relationships, academic integrity and the extractive nature of creative collaboration.

Moscovitch’s previous works include the autobiographical solo show The Secret Life of a Mother, which examined the complex nature of miscarriage; Bunny, in which a married English professor assesses her own sexual experiences; and the Dora-winning Infinity, which delves into a daughter’s recollections of her parents’ marriage. (The ever-reliable canadiantheatre.com has a full, extensive biography of Moscovitch.)

The ideas within Sexual Misconduct appealed immediately to Chin, who read the play during the period of the pandemic when theatre had yet to return from its virtual hiatus.

“I remember sitting in my room on my bed and I finished the play and I just sat there, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I need to do this. I need to be a part of this in whatever capacity. I need to be a part of telling this story,’” Chin says. “I was so intensely moved by it.”

Under the direction of Royal MTC artistic director Kelly Thornton, there is considerable anticipation for the production, which runs until March 18.

It isn’t lost on Chin that the story being told is, unfortunately, all too common in academic and creative settings. It also isn’t lost on her that by virtue of her being a person of colour — she is half-Chinese — there are added layers to her portrayal of Annie, who in the show refers to herself as “a very small person.”

“I think there’s a very interesting perspective when you put different kinds of bodies on stage. It tells a different story, right?” Chin says. “Annie can be anybody, and that’s the point.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

Ben Waldman
Reporter

Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the Free Press while earning his degree at Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. Read more about Ben.

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