The complex story of a relationship between a university professor and a 19-year-old undergraduate student is being told in Hannah Moscovitch’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes at The Belfry. Director Michael Shamata says the play—which runs until Sunday, April 24—is a good life lesson.
“It’s a good play for students to come to,” says Shamata.
The topic is very current, and the play has a twist at the end—a good one, promises Shamata.
“It’s all told from [the professor’s] point of view, so he essentially narrates the events in this relationship,” he says, “how it starts and what’s going on in his life, and he kind of explains to us how and why he got into this relationship.”
In the play, the professor’s third marriage has just fallen apart, and he takes the audience through how he ended up in the relationship with the student.
“He kind of takes us through step by step how he fell into this and his attempts to stop it, his failure to stop it,” says Shamata. “It’s a unique way of addressing… all the issues around relationships. It’s not illegal, she’s 19, but probably inappropriate.”
The play is unique in that the story is being told from the professor’s point of view, not the student’s.
“I think we usually hear more often the person who we might say is being taken advantage of, we usually get that point of view,” he says.
Shamata says that what makes this play interesting and complex for the audience is that it’s set up so the audience likes the professor.
“He’s very likeable, he shares a lot of the details of his life,” says Shamata. “He’s not a terrible human being, so it sets up a situation where we as an audience have to struggle with what we think about him… We like him but he’s doing these things that he knows he should stop, but he doesn’t stop. And so in a way we’re kind of invited into it from what is going on in his head, so that we’re not initially just looking at the fallout from it. We’re looking at the way it started, the way that it continued. There are red flags along the way that he chooses to ignore or doesn’t observe. So it’s kind of easy to go, ‘Okay, I understand why, I can kind of see why,’ but nonetheless at a certain point we have to go, ‘This is wrong.’ And as much as we might, I don’t know if I would say that we would identify with him, but we identify, I think, with a lot of the things that are happening in his life and I think we understand how he gets into it.”
Shamata says that the play’s complexity stems from the idea that good people can do bad things.
“How could an intelligent, adult, experienced… how could he fall into this, how could he allow this to continue, how could he not take care of this young girl’s emotions, and how could he be irresponsible?”
Shamata feels that people who see the play will be thinking about it long after it ends.
“An audience on their way home from the theatre will be wrestling with… Although it’s not particularly predatory on the surface and yet this young woman, in the end, has been treated in a way that should never have happened,” he says.
Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes
Various times, until Sunday, April 24
Various prices, The Belfry Theatre
belfry.bc.ca