In navigating #MeToo period discussions round sexual consent and energy dynamics, nuance is all the things – a problem Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch rises to in her incisive Sexual Misconduct of the Center Courses. The play received the governor basic’s literary award when it was first carried out in 2020. It’s now taking part in at Belvoir Avenue theatre in Sydney – a switch manufacturing of its Australian premiere in 2021 on the Melbourne Theatre Firm.
Directed by Petra Kalive in a decent 80 minutes, it is a refreshingly charged and interesting tackle a narrative of a teacher-student affair which – as a substitute of providing simple solutions – embraces the extra difficult questions.
The story is instructed by middle-aged lecturer and writer, Jon (Dan Spielman): quick-witted and lauded as a rockstar tutorial, however agonising over his failed marriages (three now). Set previous to the #MeToo motion, Jon is making an attempt to put in writing his newest novel – we hear it’s about lumberjacks – however is unable to pinpoint why he’s so creatively pissed off.
Enter 19-year-old Annie (Izabella Yena), a younger undergraduate pupil of Jon’s who catches his eye along with her placing crimson coat. She’s sensible, and an enormous admirer of his work. She lives shut by, sits on the entrance of his class, calls him “cool”. There’s a budding attraction, however – as Jon insists – he’s by no means been tempted to pursue the faculty lady fantasy.
Jon and Annie’s forbidden sexual relationship – clouded by their age distinction, the facility dynamics and college handbook guidelines – turns into a supply of Jon’s internal ethical turmoil and an irresistible outlet for his emotional and artistic satisfaction. In monologues, he narrates the affair in previous tense because it performs out within the current (the play is structurally damaged up by chapter titles, projected on a display screen behind the stage), revealing a captivating however self-consciously flawed man. He’s conscious of how older male writers romanticise and scale back younger girls as objects of fiction, but resists the concept he might ever turn out to be such a stereotype (spoiler: he does).
In a dizzying and fascinating efficiency, Spielman expertly saddles this position – swinging between his realisation across the wrongfulness of the scenario, and his justification that his relationship with Annie “didn’t really feel dangerous or creepy – it felt good”. However the heavy emphasis on Jon’s internal ideas invariably poses the query: is he who we must be listening to from? And Jon comes razor-thin near dictating the story to the play’s disservice – till a turning level at which we realise that he could now not be holding the playing cards.
It’s right here the place Sexual Misconduct of the Center Courses finds its spark. By framing the story via a male point-of-view, Moscovitch shrewdly steers away from a line of #MeToo revisionist items, wherein feminine protagonists reclaim full management of their very own sexuality and energy (see: Promising Younger Lady). As an alternative, Jon’s third-person narration provides layers of depth; Moscovitch makes use of it to softly skewer his contradictions, revealing his most acute ethical realisations as transient and fast-forgotten. “He recognised this wasn’t good,” a chapter heading reads, simply earlier than he succumbs to the temptation: “So, he … yeah”, he admits to us.
When the play fast-forwards into the wake of #Me Too, new gentle is forged on Annie and Jon’s relationship. Though the play pulls its punches in one in every of its most difficult conversations about consent and abuse of energy – when Annie, now in her early 20s, dares to specific her tackle the affair – Kalive pulls sufficient from her lingering confusion to faucet into the subtleties of what goes unsaid.
That is additionally on account of Yena’s expertise: Annie is confident, vivid and humorous – however along with her wringing arms, shuffling toes and lumbering childlike actions, the actor leaves no illusions as to who holds the higher hand.
Marg Horwell’s multifunctional set grapples along with her characters’ altering relationship via time, and Rachel Burke’s lighting design switches focus between Jon’s narrative authority, and Jon and Annie’s real-time dialogue – crucially taking the play to a last second of catharsis for Annie and the viewers.
To its energy – and to a smaller diploma, its detriment – Sexual Misconduct of the Center Courses asks extra questions than it solutions. But it surely reveals us the complexities: Jon’s well-meaning however blinkered intentions, Annie’s younger want for approval, and the reflection introduced with age and hindsight.
The truth is, retrospection turns into the play’s strongest software – it lends it a way of immediacy and pertinence – and asks us simply who will get to regulate the narrative.
Sexual Misconduct of the Center Courses runs at Belvoir St theatre till 10 July
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