Hannah Moscovitch is practically a Banffite.
The Toronto-based playwright has been travelling to The Banff Centre for years and has written most of her plays there.
This Saturday (March 30) a production of her play Little One will hit the Margaret Greenham Stage.
“We call it a lullaby nightmare,” said Moscovitch. “Little One is about two siblings, and they’re adopted with different biological parents and they grew up together in affluent Ottawa. They love each other with all their hearts, but loving and hurting is the same thing.
“There’s a question that hangs over the play whether Claire is or is not a psychopath. There’s questions about love, questions about sibling rivalry, and psychopathy.”
Moscovitch, who also grew up in Ottawa with one sibling, said the tale is based on a story she once overheard.
“When I was 16, I was travelling around the world with my parents and spending a lot of time with my youngest sibling, and at the same time we were visiting friends of my parents,” she explained. “I overheard a 45-minute conversation about the fact they had adopted a sibling and there were a lot of difficulties with that young girl. It stayed with me, because some of what was being described in it was fairly extreme.”
Fourteen years later, Moscovitch wrote Little One.
“I’m drawn to this story because it fits well into the kind of theatre I like to write,” she said. “It explores a really complex character and complex questions that don’t have a clear answer, and I like stories that combine tragedy and comedy.
“So the darker the story gets the funnier it gets, that’s what life seems like to me.”
Moscovitch refused to say how the story ends, instead insisting people will have to see it for themselves.
“It’s a lot about love and guilt and I come back to those themes a lot,” she said.
“I tend to choose topics that allow me into that landscape.”
The Banff Centre’s playwright colony – a retreat for writers to work on their compositions – is a place where Moscovitch has come many times to develop her art.
“(The Banff Centre) commissioned a play of mine called This Is War, that premiered this year,” she said. “I feel like the connection to Banff is there – I’ve also spent about six months there – because I’ve been in the playwrights colony so often.
“And I’m excited to bring Little One to Banff, because I like the theatre and the people there.”
A memorable experience of Banff involved an elk interrupting the reading of a play, she said.
“During a reading of This Is War in one of the conference rooms with the huge windows, and there were maybe 40 or 50 writers in there – a very intimidating audience to present your work to – and in the middle of this formal event an elk charged someone,” she said. “It fully trumped the reading – this guy, when he realized the elk was about to charge him, threw his coffee cup in the air and turned and ran like a hundred miles an hour up a hill with a massive elk chasing after him.”
Moscovitch’s career as a playwright hit the big stage about eight years ago, with critically acclaimed productions at the Toronto SummerWorks festivals. Since then she’s had a number of plays at the Tarragon Theatre, along with five years spent working as a contributing writer to the CBC radio drama Afghanada.
Currently, she’s engrossed in a number of projects.
“I’m working on a ton of things,” she said. “Right now I’m on a contract with CTV writing their next cop drama – I’m just a junior writer in the room on it, but it’s going to be called Played, and be released in September.
“I have lots of theatre projects coming up. I have a play called Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes that’ll go up, I have a couple of opera projects and a film project. It’s a strange career I’m having, I’m going lateral and exploring other mediums.”
Working on plays, however, is her first love and Moscovitch looks forward to the next chance to return to Banff.
“Whenever I come to Banff, it’s because I’m on a writing retreat, so I’ve written a lot of my plays there and have very fond memories of Banff,” she said. “One year the playwrights colony asked me to bring published copies of all my plays, because they wanted them to be in the library.
“If you believe that contacts or circumstances or environment shape writers and plays, then they have influence on my work in some way.”
The show starts Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and tickets are $20. As the play contains mature content, it is recommended for an audience of 14 years of age or older.
