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It was the most compelling show in town.

For two weeks last February, dozens of people packed into a stately chamber in downtown Toronto to watch an extraordinary, can't-turn-away piece of theatre. The Trial of Jian Ghomeshi may not have been much fun for its leading players, but it made for riveting drama, with high stakes, beguiling characters, awkward dialogue and sucker-punch reversals of fortune.

And though it surely didn't mean to, it achieved what good art aspires to: Telling us in complicated and often thorny ways about ourselves, the state of our body politic and the limits of our own imagination.

But did it leave much room for real artists to weigh in on the subject?

Over the past few years, there has been a welcome flood of conversation about sexual assault, as high-profile cases began to dominate the headlines. Artists played a small part: Stand-up comic Hannibal Buress's jokes about Bill Cosby prompted the long-dormant rape allegations to come back to the fore. During this year's Oscars, Lady Gaga delivered a shattering performance of her song about sexual assault, Til It Happens To You, in which she was joined onstage by dozens of survivors.

The men and women in Gaga's chorus line were part of Project Unbreakable, an online exhibition comprised of survivors reclaiming the narratives of their own assaults by posing for photographs holding up signs bearing their abusers' words, often with their own comments. ("I want to make you my little slut," reads one, with the addendum: "I was 12-years-old")

Still, while the project was worthwhile activism – it both raised awareness and empowered the survivors – it would be hard to argue that it was good art.

So it was a bracing pleasure the other day to attend a workshop reading of Asking For It, a sly, intelligent piece of documentary theatre borne of Ghomeshi-gate.

Created by Ellie Moon, a 24-year-old Toronto actor, the play is built from interviews she conducted with friends, lovers, relatives, Crown attorneys, university professors and others after the Ghomeshi story broke in the fall of 2014. It was presented by Why Not Theatre alongside Crow's Theatre, which has previously staged documentary works by the Montreal playwright Annabel Soutar (Seeds, The Watershed).

As in Soutar's work, Asking For It has a point of view but no interest in hectoring its audience. It recognizes that sexuality is complicated and mysterious, that conversations about consent are awkward and tentative and nuanced, that people in relationships give consent in a variety of ways. It even dares suggest that, sometimes, no doesn't really mean no.

There is a woman who likes rough sex, and feels guilty about having to persuade her boyfriend to choke her. There's another who some months earlier was in bed with a platonic friend – they'd been drinking, and they were physically teasing each other but had agreed it would go no further – when she passed out and then woke up with him briefly inside of her: Only in speaking about the incident with Ellie does she realize that it was rape. A couple of men speak about the guilt they feel after sex. In one scene, Moon and a friend attend a forlorn "Party With Consent" event at a university, where a host begins the evening with a mood-killing PowerPoint presentation about the importance of enthusiastic consent.

During one conversation, Moon laughingly tells another woman that, since she began working on the project, guys have been checking in with her during sex, with "ridiculous" frequency. To which the other woman, a 28-year-old named Dana, replies: "When men are checking in all the time ensuring the consent is ongoing, right, it takes you out of the moment, no?"

Dana and Moon discuss the gulf in communication between men and women. "Everything is just ambiguous and sex is part of that," Dana offers. "Consent is just part of that. But maybe the ambiguity is part of what's hot and appealing about sex. Right, cause, you know, if you take the ambiguity out of art, it sucks." She adds: "Maybe it's the same with sex."

And then, the ambiguity rears its head, in a moment some will find outrageous but others may recognize from their own relationships. Moon recalls that a former boyfriend had "more of a drive than me, and I remember me not feeling up for it and him persuading me, just, you know, turning me on with little acts of foreplay and then I was up for, and when we were finished, I said something totally – haha, I can't put this in [the play] – something like, 'Never let me say no again,' or something." (The man she is talking to greets this news with: "Feminist Ellie Moon, everyone!")

Moon was spurred to investigate the issue when she realized, after the Ghomeshi news broke, that she had had a violent experience with a former boyfriend that would qualify as sexual assault. And yet, in a quietly devastating scene, she – spoiler alert – says that, if he were ever to face charges by another girlfriend, Ellie wouldn't add her voice in support.

"At the core of the play is the question of the limits of our own compassion," Moon said to me over the phone recently. "We're able to empathize with a woman who's raped in a park at night by a masked stranger. Someone who got drunk, are we able to feel compassion for them? What about the person that raped [them]? Were you able to feel compassion for them?"

I asked her about the ambiguity that the character Dana spoke about. "What is lost by formalizing human interaction and by taking out ambiguity? And how we relate to people with mystery?" she replied. "I hope the incredibly uncomfortable moments of this play kind of liberate people into just having a discussion. Because the kinds of conversations we have right now are inadequate."

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