Rebecca Parent and David Patrick Flemming in the 2b theatre production What a Young Wife Ought to Know, by playwright Hannah Moscovitch.Timothy Richard
Playwright Hannah Moscovitch was sitting in the audience during a performance of one of her shows at the Crow’s Theatre in Toronto, anonymous in the crowd, when something both expected and unexpected happened: A man fainted.
The show was stopped, and paramedics were called.
The incident didn’t stun theatre staff, partly, because it wasn’t the first time someone had fainted during this particular play: By the time the show had finished its run by early April, the incident has repeated itself no fewer than seven times, with the last taking place (rather dramatically) during the final show.
But at the same time, there was a confounding element. Chillingly, the man fainted at precisely the same moment in the show as others had before: a scene in which an actor describes a self-administered abortion using a catheter in exacting detail.
This surreal string of events is a first in Moscovitch’s celebrated career as a playwright. But it is by no means a standalone. People faint at the theatre all the time.
In fact, fainting during live performances has a long and peculiar history of its own, in some cases matching the strangeness and alarm of on-stage spectacles.
Moscovitch’s show, What a Young Wife Ought to Know, a 2b theatre production, set in Ottawa in the 1920s, is no exception in this regard. She says the timing of each collapse at a pinnacle moment in the play created an eerie “meta” effect.
“The show ends up having to stop, just as there’s a death that’s happening on the stage,” she explains. As audience members are left in suspension mid-story, they’re immediately thrust into questioning what is happening – in real time – to the person who’s fallen in the darkened rows of the theatre,” she says.
“It creates mass confusion.”
Moscovitch was reluctant to publicly discuss this real-life drama unfolding over the weeks of the show until now, and understandably so: If she had, she would have been distributing spoilers to her own work.
The moment in question takes place early in the first half of the show and involves a graphic description of an abortion, but doesn’t show it. In the scene, a character describes performing an abortion on her sister: she pushes the catheter until she feels “something give.” The audience later learns the young woman’s uterus was punctured in the process.
Remarkably, Moscovitch says that not a single person who fainted blamed the content, instead pointing to recently having been sick or exhaustion.
“Nobody is saying ‘the show made me sick.’”
In contrast, some examples of fainting in the theatre are curiously lighthearted, as in the case of a 53-year-old man who fainted during Bette Midler’s Hello Dolly on Broadway in New York. He refused treatment from medics, announcing “I’d sooner die than miss Act 2!”
There does seem to be more consistency, however, in audience members collapsing during live theatre that delves into graphic bodily harm.
In 2016, five people fainted during a production of the late English playwright Sarah Kane’s Cleansed at the National Theatre in London. Reviews describe harrowing scenes of violence and torture.
Last year, a stage adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 featuring Olivia Wilde and Tom Sturridge at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre (a transfer from London’s West End theatre), stirred audiences into a frenzy. The show which also involved extreme torture scenes, prompted vomiting, screaming at actors on-stage, fist fights – and fainting.
And in stunning resemblance to Moscovitch’s work, a theatre-goer attending a different show in Sydney, Australia, also collapsed during a scene depicting self-induced abortion. American playwright Ruby Rae Spiegel’s debut show Dry Land (written when Spiegel was just 16, she’s now 23) tells the story of a teenager attempting to end an unwanted pregnancy in the change room of her high school.
“Some people find the abortion scene very shocking but a lot of people are hopefully finding it honest,” Spiegel told the Australia Daily Mail after the incident.
Fainting, or syncope as it’s known in medical parlance, is defined as a temporary loss of consciousness, usually related to insufficient blood flow to the brain.
But beyond noting being “overwhelmed,” it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why people faint at the theatre.
It’s something plastic surgeon Dr. Jason Williams chose to research from the vantage point of his own stage: the operating theatre.
“The triggers may vary,” he found, “but emotionally charged, high anxiety, surprise or unexpected situations seem to be common settings.”
Williams says audience members fainting in reaction to a highly emotional scene in a play is not unlike what happens in the operating room.
His study found 40 per cent of medical students experienced syncope or presyncope (lightheadedness) in the OR. He himself recalls feeling “powerless” when, as a medical student, he began to feel as if he might pass out witnessing a simple procedure.
“I’ve seen many people hit the ground over the years … usually we see it coming and catch them.”
Watching a surgery with trained specialists in a sterile environment is one thing. But even simply imagining an ad-hoc procedure outside of hospital, is quite another, Moscovitch observes.
“Any surgery that’s happening without a surgeon is viscerally upsetting,” and she says there may be more to it than just that, when the content deals with women’s bodies and trauma.
“Because it feels dark, it feels unknown.”
After the fainting incidents during her own play, Moscovitch was surprised to find herself having a similar reaction as she watched an episode of the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace recently on a plane. The scene showed a botched abortion.
“Without even realizing – honestly – I paused at that moment to give myself a break.”
Since then, she’s been thinking a lot about the shared physical response audience members had to her work.
“We don’t like to go into the mystery of what’s happening in a womb. There’s something in it … there’s a horror to it.”
Moscovitch couldn’t have predicted the phenomena that took place during the show’s run at the Crow’s Theatre, let alone her own reaction, simply watching a television episode.
Playwrights directly intend to evoke response from audiences: discomfort, questioning, catharsis, insight and wonderment, all in intentional, curated measure. Signs of success in the theatre itself may come as laughter, the sniffling sound accompanying crying, gasps or silence. But Moscovitch says this was different.
“People actually aren’t able to be in their bodies anymore … which is just beyond.”
Considering the intricacies of human experience, in all of its mystery, and delivering it into narrative cohesion is a playwright’s task. It seems this latest experience may find its way into Moscovitch’s next work, in one form or another.
“Sometimes I wonder if we understand our emotions at all, they way they move through us.”