The one-per-cent solution

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/04/2021 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It would seem Prairie Theatre Exchange is going for a Dallas/Dynasty kind of old-school melodrama with its upcoming new play Post-Democracy, set in the realm of the ultra-wealthy. Arne MacPherson plays the CEO of a large company hit with a sex scandal while abroad on business. It threatens not only the impending deal, but the corporation itself.

Surprise! It’s a play by Canadian theatre prodigy Hannah Moscovitch, whose roots are decidedly not in the old-money capitalist realm.

“It’s not my childhood environment,” understates the Ottawa-born Moscovitch, 42, on the phone from her home in Halifax. “In fact, my mother and father are social activists and union activists.

“My father’s a professor with some expertise in Marxist economics,” she says. “So it’s diametrically opposed to my childhood where we were constantly surrounded by folk songs and … co-operation.”

Former PTE artistic director Robert Metcalfe commissioned Post-Democracy more than a decade ago, but the project was in Moscovitch’s head going back to the first five years she spent in Toronto immediately following her graduation from National Theatre School in Ottawa. She worked at a fashionable bar — Teatro on College Street — catering to the city’s “one per centers.”

“There were a lot of stockbrokers and a lot of businessman who had a lot of money,” she recalls. “They went to this bar. And I worked there for five years.”

“I felt like a spy sent from the left wing spying on the right wing,” she says. “And then I became friends with some of them, as you do when there’s a bar like that where they go a lot. I dated some of them.

“I spent five years in that culture,” she says. “It’s a very specific culture. It has its own norms, specific to that culture, (dictated) by everyone having extreme levels of wealth. Inclusion depends on having that much money.

“It’s normal to have two nannies who both live in the house,” she says of the people she knew. “It’s normal to spend huge amounts of money on art.

“It’s normal to buy yourself a new car for a quarter of a million dollars. It’s normal to have furniture custom-made for your house. It’s normal to wear Chanel to breakfast,” she says. “It’s normal to spend your whole weekend real-estate shopping because if your whole world is predicated on having money, then your whole life is about spending that money. So every weekend you’re going to go and look at real estate and see if you can buy even nicer real estate than you already have.”

The play has been in the works for years, as Moscovitch established herself in theatre circles with hit plays such as Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story (slated to run this season at Winnipeg Jewish Theatre before being cancelled by COVID), East of Berlin and This Is War. Even so, the time for Post-Democracy seemed right, Moscovitch says.

“We have been having a lot of conversations about polarization of wealth in our culture,” Moscovitch says. “The right wing like to call it class warfare.

“We’re also having a lot of conversations right now about gatekeepers who hold power, and how they get power, and why they have power and what they do with that power. This piece speaks to that as well. So it feels really of the moment.”

The play was to have been performed live this past March, of course. The filmed version is directed by PTE artistic director Thomas Morgan Jones and shot by Ice River Films, led by film director Sam Vint.

So can the show still be called a play?

“It’s going to be radically different because it’s a f***ing movie,” says Moscovitch flatly. “It’s radically different than a play in every way.

“It is not live. (Because of) the many precautions that had to be taken around filming it because of the pandemic, no one could touch each other. No one is wearing masks in the show but everyone had to wear masks in the space all the time.”

Also different is the way the play evolved, without benefit of live preview performances.

“I didn’t participate in the way I would normally,” she says. “I would normally be there in previews figuring out how the play works in front of an audience and making changes and making sure it’s communicating with the audience in the way I want to. None of that happened.

“So it’s a totally different experience to work on a play that is going direct to video,” she says. “And yet I’m very proud of the work that I and everyone did. I love what they’ve done.”

An added bonus is that the play can be viewed beyond Manitoba, indeed, around the world.

“I feel great about that,” Moscovitch says. “I think it’s super fun that people will get to see my work. There’s something really fun about theatre being available more widely and more accessibly without there being parking problems and babysitter problems.

“I think what you forfeit is the liveness which is the core of what theatre is,” she says. “It’s a deal with the devil but I accept that as the price. We’re in a pandemic.”

She acknowledges this production’s global accessibility might means other theatre companies might not produce it in the future.

“I wanted PTE to première this play in whatever way they could,“ she says. “If that means other theatres don’t want to do it, then I’ll just write a new play.”

In fact, these days, Moscovitch is more likely to find work writing for TV and film, which she says occupies 80 to 90 per cent of her work these days.

“I love TV and film,” she says. “I feel like I’m in a state of grace. A lot of people are really struggling, right? The pandemic has been apocalyptic for theatre. It’s a wasteland right now.”

And that’s another reason she is grateful Post-Democracy will be playing in living rooms around the world.

“Honestly, there’s just hope in it,” she says. “Those four actors got to do a production. PTE got to put out a production. And all of those designers and staff got to work on something.

“So I think it’s great. You get to do some art and remind yourself that this is what we do.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing