Maev Beaty in Secret Life of a Mother.Kyle Purcell
- Secret Life of a Mother
- By: Hannah Moscovitch
- Directed By: Ann-Marie Kerr
- Co-created by: Marinda de Beer
- Starring: Maev Beaty
- Presented by: Theatre Centre
Autotheatre isn’t a term I’ve seen used in criticism before, but I think we’re in need of a word that can suggest the theatrical version of autofiction – the school of heavily autobiographical writing made famous by the likes of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti. It’s certainly the literary category I felt immersed in when watching Hannah Moscovitch’s Secret Life of a Mother at Toronto’s Theatre Centre on Thursday night – and my immersion triggered a comparable sense of excitement and relief.
Why these feelings? I’m not the first reader to complain of a certain exhaustion brought on by the artifices of plot and character, the knowledge that an author’s work at making her fictional world cohere often happens at the expense of intellectual depth. It’s a problem I find even more acute in theatre, where the conventions of a particular breed of tidy, digestible storytelling are more entrenched, and the “suspension of disbelief” can feel like the law of the land. I’m the sort of audience member who remains very attached to her disbelief, and watching Maev Beaty step on stage, introduce herself, explain the show’s modus operandi – she would be playing her friend, the playwright Hannah Moscovitch, despite their very different temperaments, which we might well know from Beaty’s typical onstage work – felt like the sincerest of compliments. No need for us skeptics to hold our breath or suspend anything; our questions and uncertainties would be part of the way we engaged.
The 70-minute play is divided into five short acts about pregnancy, childbirth and early motherhood. The good parts are so good I might actually call them groundbreaking. Chief of these is Act 1, titled “Miscarriage,” in which Beaty (as Moscovitch) relays the story of a near-miscarriage and an actual one with total frankness. “The gross parts,” as Moscovitch puts it, aren’t censored; vaginal blood – and the various shades it comes in – occupies a crucial part of this narrative. There’s a powerful convergence between the physical and the emotional here, with Beaty (as Moscovitch) recounting getting on an airplane with toilet paper stuffed inside her underwear so that the expelled tissue from a D&C didn’t end up on the seat’s upholstery. No detail is too personal, and the trail of blood that follows this story is a moving acknowledgment of what it means to have a female body.
Maev Beaty plays both a version of herself and Hannah Moscovitch in the play.Kyle Purcell
Just as we’re getting comfortable with Beaty’s candour, director Ann-Marie Kerr destabilizes it. Beaty suddenly breaks the action and becomes herself, talking about her own miscarriage and how, a few years ago, she described the intensity of its sadness to Moscovitch. This device recurs throughout the play, and is further complicated and enriched by having Moscovitch sometimes play herself, too: Her voice is heard via the speakers while an image of her moving face is projected onto a sheet of paper that Beaty holds in her hands. It’s a choice that lets Kerr present ambiguities about being and performing. How much of Beaty’s own experience as a new mother is she projecting onto her interpretation of her friend? Is the transparency between playwright and actor as transparent as it seems?
Camellia Koo’s minimalist set helps Kerr amplify this idea of projection. There are two aquariums on stage – one big, one small – and video footage of Moscovitch’s son are magically projected onto pieces of paper that Beaty holds underwater at climactic moments, conjuring wombs, fetuses, sonogram technology. In the act titled “Birth,” Beaty takes off her clothes and, in her underwear, climbs into the larger aquarium herself. The image is arresting.
It’s hard not to compare Secret Life of a Mother to Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, published earlier this year. The Giller-shortlisted autofictional novel, by a Canadian of the same generation, has received tons of international attention and explores similar themes of women, work and having kids. It’s a comparison that helps understand how “confession” operates as a genre – the unflinching examination of a heart and mind, in a real sociohistorical context, that the genre must pursue in order to earn its name. It’s a comparison that elucidates how Moscovitch’s play, despite its mesmerizing beginning, loses its sense of focused interrogation.
Moscovitch has a tendency to introduce an idea without really developing it. The latter half of the play focuses on the physical, with Act 2 relaying the trauma of labour and Act 3 focusing on postlabour healing and Moscovitch’s freak-out over the torn stitches in her vagina. Beaty (as Moscovitch) describes what her vagina looks like, and the audience, probably not used to hearing descriptions of postlabour (or any) vaginas on stage, doesn’t know quite how to respond. But the episode ends there as a kind of shocking anecdote, without any investigation of its emotional fallout. I felt similarly about Act 4, “Bad Mother,” in which Beaty (as Moscovitch) lists examples of her negligible parenting without giving us a sense of how they affected her or what they mean.
This reluctance to pursue the moral and psychological implications of the material reminds me of Beaty and Moscovitch’s previous collaboration, the play Bunny, in which a sexually promiscuous woman bulldozes the love and trust of those around her in the name of her insatiable libido. There’s a fearlessness and irreverence to Moscovitch’s writing that’s consistently refreshing; she can create incredibly fraught, complex and challenging ethical scenarios. But sometimes she seems to rest on their shock value, letting herself off the hook in terms of what they mean in the context of her story.
Maybe the real issue with Secret Life of a Mother is that it needs more focus and development. Regardless, it’s an engrossing and necessary work of theatre.
Secret Life of a Mother continues at the Theatre Centre until Nov. 11.
Martha Schabas