| Hannah Moscovitch | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 5, 1978 Ottawa, Ontario[1] |
Hannah Moscovitch (born June 5, 1978) is a Canadian playwright. She is best known for her plays East of Berlin, Essay, and The Russian Play.
Today based in Toronto, she was raised in Ottawa's Glebe neighbourhood. Her father, Allan Moscovitch, is a social policy professor at Carleton University. Her mother is a labour researcher. Both have long been active in left wing politics. Moscovitch's father is Jewish of Romanian and Ukrainian descent[2] and her mother is of English and Irish ancestry;[3] at age eighteen, Moscovitch travelled to the Golan Heights and spent four months living in a Kibbutz.
She enrolled in the National Theatre School in the acting stream. One of her student works, Cigarettes and Tricia Truman, won enough notice to be workshopped at Ottawa's Great Canadian Theatre Company. After graduation Moscovitch moved to Toronto where she waitered at the Teatro restaurant on College Street and studied literature at the University of Toronto, while continuing to work on plays.
She gained considerable notice for two short plays written for Toronto's SummerWorks. In 2005 she presented Essay, a play about gender politics in modern academia. The next year at the festival The Russian Play premiered, a romance set in Stalinist Russia. Both were well received by critics and audiences. In 2007 her first full length play, East of Berlin, premiered at the Tarragon Theatre. The play focuses on the legacy of the Holocaust on the children of those involved. The main character is the son of a Nazi war criminal who grows up in Paraguay. He eventually travels to Berlin and meets the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor. The play was acclaimed for its complex subject, humour, and characters and was also a popular success, returning to Tarragon in winter 2009 and 2010.
In March 2009, "In This World" was produced by Montreal's Youtheatre. The play, addressed to a teenage audience, deals with violence and sexual and racial politics.