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When the car hit her, Hannah Moscovitch was running late for a grant-application appointment at the Ontario Arts Council.

That was in 2006. She no longer remembers the accident, but she does remember waking up in the ambulance, her mouth stripped of most of her front teeth, and more or less screaming at the emergency paramedic: Where's my laptop? It was, she says now, a definitive moment.

Her professional partner, Michael Rubenfeld, rescued it from the street. He opened the case, then turned it on to show that it was still working. At which point she passed out, thinking,

“I must be a writer.”

Rubenfeld and Moscovitch are co-artistic directors of their own company Absit Omen Theatre. Absit Omen translates from the Latin roughly as “let the evil eye not be present.” And, apart from that singular encounter with the automobile, and a torn keen ligament (an injury sustained in movement class) that delayed her graduation from the National Theatre School by a year, Moscovitch's dramaturgy seems to have been blessed.

This month, one of her best-known plays, East of Berlin, has been remounted at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre and has been extended until Feb. 8. It will also be staged at Touchstone Theatre in Vancouver next month (Feb. 18-28) and Theatre Network in Edmonton from March 10 to 29. Two shorter works, Essay and The Russian Play, will be mounted in the spring by Calgary's Urban Curvz at the Pumphouse Theatre from April 29 to May 9.

On top of that, the just-turned-30 Ottawa native, now living in Toronto, has half a dozen new commissions lined up, including one for New York's Manhattan Theatre Club and an experimental work for Mill, a four-play project shepherded by Daryl Cloran's Toronto-based Theatrefront. Her contribution is a Victorian ghost story.

Moscovitch's self-doubt about her status as a playwright first materialized at the National Theatre School in Montreal. She had auditioned and been accepted as an actor (part of her audition involved presenting J.B. Priestley's A n Inspector Calls in three minutes). But after her second year, then NTS director Perry Schneiderman called her in and suggested that she might be better suited to the school's writing stream.

“I was crushed,” she laughs. “I was so insulted. I felt he was wrong.” But three months after she graduated, she turned down an acting audition at Stratford and “I realized he was right.”

She was mentored at NTS by Sheldon Rosen and Maureen Labonté. “You need help,” she says. “You need people to help you invent yourself as a playwright. I owe them a lot.”

Out of her work at NTS came Moscovitch's first play, Cigarettes and Tricia Truman, which did well enough that Ottawa's Great Canadian Theatre Company included it in its FourPlay series.

“Most writers have either an emotional insight into their characters or an intellectual insight,” Rosen says. “What makes Hannah special is that she has both, so she's able to create real characters in intelligent circumstances. And she's got a rich curiosity and the intellectual ballast to challenge and satisfy it.”

East of Berlin, a story about the son of a Nazi who falls in love with the daughter of a Holocaust victim, emerged out of research Moscovitch was doing for another play. “I came across books about the children of Nazis, and it was children of Holocaust survivors who were doing the interviews,” she said in a recent interview. “The subtext was interesting because the whole interview was pitched as a kind of apology. And what seemed theatrical to me was the idea of putting the child of a Nazi onstage and having them address the audience, as if the audience was the child of a survivor,” and instinctively unsympathetic.

Moscovitch grew up in Ottawa's Glebe district, the oldest child of two left-wing social activists, one Jewish, one Catholic/Anglican, who opened their home to a rich assembly of fellow radicals. At one point, she recalls, there were 13 people living in the family basement and “lots of political singalongs.” Her mother is a labour union researcher; her father teaches sociology at Carleton University. At 18, Moscovitch went to live on an Israeli kibbutz in the Golan Heights. “You have to do that when you're 18. I pulled weeds for four months and drank a lot,” then came back to enroll at NTS, she says.

It was only after her years there and three more acting, waitressing and writing plays, that she took a degree in philosophy and English at the University of Toronto. That, says Rosen, now teaching at Ryerson, “allowed her to develop a larger world vision than most young writers, and to be able to supplement her creative explorations with a very solid historical, sociological and psychological grounding. She's got the discipline, desire and intelligence to push her playwriting beyond her basic gift and build a much larger expressive muscle. So look out. She's just warming up.”