BUNNY by Hannah Moscovitch, directed by Sarah Garton Stanley, with Maev Beaty, Tim Campbell, David Patrick Flemming, Jessica B. Hill, Cyrus Lane, Krystin Pellerin and Emilio Vieira. Presented by the Stratford Festival at the Studio Theatre, Stratford. Opens August 18 and runs in rep to September 24. $25-$189. See listing. 1-800-567-1600, stratfordfestival.ca.
Sorrel, the vibrant central character and narrator in Hannah Moscovitchs play Bunny, premiering at Stratford, gets that nickname from her friend Maggie, who points out that Sorrel often looks uncertain and scared.
Thats no surprise, we learn, for Sorrels a woman who never fit in, the child of small-town academics who could only make a mark by being sexually active with the boys in high school the young women in her class despised her.
Over the course of the next two decades, the sexual interest between Sorrel and the men she meets helps shape her, despite the timidity in her interactions with them.
And though the play is a contemporary one, the playwright consciously used Victorian novels as a jumping-off point for the story.
I grew up a fan of those novels, says Moscovitch, one of Canadas finest playwrights, whose Dora-winning play Infinity returns to the Tarragon next season. Even though I realized that however much the great writers bent the conventions to show the difficulty of women trapped in society, they still adhered to moral conventions.
If a female character was good, she married happily. If she was bad, she fell out of society, went mad or committed suicide. Her moral identity was wholly linked to her sexuality, and much of it was determined by the kind of man she chose.
That attitude is still present in todays world, notes Moscovitch. Women in contemporary plays are often punished for their sexual transgressions.
I wanted to write a play with a woman at its centre, surrounded by good men as well as tempting men, but then subvert the binary choice she had in terms of relationships.
My script puts the womans transgressive experiences at the centre of the story and has her overcome the binary by her own actions and realizations. Its through her that we see the linking of sexual desire and sexual shame, but theres a different kind of resolution than many people might expect.
The playwright brings Sorrel into contact with a variety of men, beginning with Justin, the football-team captain whos traditional in his attitudes but also kind and loving. At university, she meets Ethan, a prof whos as transgressive as she is at the same time, she meets Carol, Maggies brother, whos tinged with glamour and the capitalist opposite of her leftist upbringing.
Finally, Sorrels drawn to Angel, a generation younger than she is, very confident as only a 23-year-old can be, making pronouncements about the world and at the peak of his sexual life.
These are, however, only schematized views of the quartet of men Moscovitch makes them more complex with little details.
Both in the writing and in rehearsals, weve pulled the four of them this way and that so that none of them is right on the nose as either good or bad. That builds the electricity that audiences feel when a woman has to choose between two men the morality and the melodrama of that choice really works on us, even though weve seen it a million times before.
The playwright admits that shes lucky to have Maev Beaty creating the role of Sorrel, who’s onstage for the entire show.
I knew Maev was at Stratford, and when they commissioned this play, I hoped Id be given the opportunity to work with her on it. The part of Sorrel is a lot to carry if I took out the lines of all the other characters, two-thirds of the play would still be there.
Shes phenomenally capable of holding viewers attention and translating intricate thought into completely understandable communication. She can play every moment of Sorrels arc.
Having an actor like Beaty in the title role allows Moscovitch to fulfil another intention with the play: to create a strong female relationship.
I wanted something to transcend the binary choices of the male partners, and Sorrel finds that in Maggie, who accepts her for who she is.
If we are doomed to have our sexuality termed transgressive by society, then we need our friends to help support us. And what better way to do that than end the play with a glorious scene between two women?
