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by Hannah Moscovitch, directed by Christian Barry

2b theatre company, Streetcar Crowsnest, Toronto

March 29-April 7, 2018

Alma: “Don’t let a man lie on top of you”

With What a Young Wife Ought to Know, the prolific and successful Hannah Moscovitch has written what may be her best play so far.  Many of Moscovitch’s plays have seemed to derive their characters and plot from a concept Moscovitch wishes to explore rather than that concept appearing to arise naturally from the characters’ interactions.  This is true of East of Berlin from 2007 up to the recent Infinity of 2015.  Young Wife, in contrast, immediately feels different – more a realistic story and less an intellectual construct.  By means of three characters Moscovitch gives us picture of women’s lives in Canada in the 1920s, before birth control and before any movement that supported the right of women to have a say in what happened to their own bodies.  While the play gives us an insight into agonies women felt about pregnancy and childbirth that many of us now might think are past, the sad truth is that much of the mental and physical pain Moscovitch depicts in the 1920s still occurs a century later.

The play was inspired by the book Married Love (1918), a manual about sex, by Marie Stopes (1880-1958), a woman known for her advocacy of women’s rights and birth control who started the first birth control clinic in Britain and became the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester.  Stopes’s book was the first to note that a women's sexual desire coincides with ovulation and the period right before menstruation.  Stopes opposed abortion saying that preventing conception should be the prime goal.  Moscovitch’s story derives from her research into the trove of letters Stopes received from working-class women desperate to find information that health professionals would not provide and confirmation that lack of joy over pregnancy was not an abnormal reaction.      

The play’s focus is Sophie (Liisa Repo-Martell), a 1920s Ottawa housewife, who speaks to the audience directly as if from her time to ours about her current situation.  She finds that she has been speaking with her sister Alma quite a lot lately which is not a good sign since her sister is dead.  Sophie feels she is going mad and has the urgent need to talk to someone about her life.  She is pregnant with her fourth child, she does not want to have it and she does not not know what to do. 

The play then proceeds to show us Sophie’s past history through a series of flashbacks in chronological order, periodically interrupted by Sophie’s questioning of the audience whether they had ever done or would do what she had done.  Sophie takes us back to when she was a teenager and totally ignorant of sex.  Sophie has just kissed the postboy out of pity because of his tuberculosis and is now worried about the consequences.  Her older sister Alma (Rebecca Parent) has to assure her that a girl cannot get pregnant just by kissing a boy.  She does warn Sophie, however, not to let a boy lie on top of her and take down his trousers.  Sophie is so naive that Alma has to go into more detail to explain exactly why.

Initially, the play looks at the growing discord between Sophie and Alma over Sophie’s interest in a Irish stable hand, Johnny (David Patrick Flemming), who works at the hotel where Alma is a maid.  The way that Alma tries to demean Sophie in Johnny’s eyes is hard to fathom until we realize that Alma not only fancies Johnny for herself but has let herself get pregnant by him.  For a working-class woman, pregnancy was grounds for dismissal.  Alma tries various patent remedies, which are no more than emetics, without success and finally decides to abort herself and asks Sophie to help her.  The failed attempt causes Alma to bleed to death, leading both Sophie and Johnny to be racked with guilt.

Mutual grief over Alma’s death draws Sophie and Johnny closer together to the point that they decide to marry.  Johnny, who has left his family behind in Ireland, wants to have a large family with Sophie in Canada, but he doesn’t consider that his low wages will not provide enough to keep themselves, much less more than two children healthy.  While Sophie’s first pregnancy goes well, her second is a miscarriage and her third leads to a prolapsed womb. Though Sophie is happily married, her doctor is willing to offer no advice about birth control except for abstinence and when Sophie  asks her pharmacist about birth control, he condemns her for her lewd desires.  Sophie’s homemade spermicide leads to an episode both humorous and horrible and her insistence on not having another child leads to the inevitable debate about whether the young couple still love each other or not. 

It is the company’s completely committed acting that carries the play.  Liisa Repo-Martell gives a marvellously forceful performance.  She masterfully alternates between her calm but insistent role as narrator and interrogator of the audience and her ever-changing role as Sophie who grows from innocence to maturity to despair before our eyes.  Even though the play is short, Repo-Martell’s shy, giggly teenager we meet at the start of the play is worlds away from the worn-out, fearful woman we see at the end.

At first Rebecca Parent seems to make Alma seem unnecessarily cold toward her younger sister, but eventually Parent reveals that this steeliness is in response not to Sophie’s but to her own failings.  The change that Parent shows in Alma when Alma is sick and dying gives us a view of the underlying love that Alma has hidden too well from her sister.                       

While Moscovitch focusses on the plight of women with unwanted pregnancies, she could have usefully pointed out that in the 1920s pregnancy, whether wanted or not, was not quite the signal for rejoicing that we now tend to make it.  Most of us know that infant mortality rates were higher in the past than now.  In Ottawa in 1921 of a 1000 live births 139 children died, i.e. 13% of them.  But we tend to forget about maternal mortality rates.  In Ontario in 1921 the maternal mortality per 1000 live births was 5.1 which means that one in every 200 deliveries resulted in death*.  Just think how you would react if your doctor told you that you had a one in 200 chance of dying from an operation.  This is what a woman in 1921 would have to consider when learning she was pregnant. 

Were Moscovitch to mention the risks of pregnancy in general in this period, it would only strengthen her argument about the need to prevent pregnancies that were also unwanted.  Nevertheless, a person cannot watch Young Wife and feel complacent that modern medicine has reduced both infant and maternal mortality rates.  Without preaching Moscovitch shows clearly through the suffering of a loving married couple how lack of birth control can undermine a marriage and weaken the bond between mother and child 

Worse than that, her play depicts a state of mind that many people today both in Canada and especially in the US campaign for when they oppose reproductive rights for women.  It would be good to think a century after the world Moscovitch so vividly depicts that individuals and governments had learned from the plight of women in the past.  The fact that this has not happened makes Young Wife sadly not merely an informative portrait of the past but a terrifying picture of the world where some politicians and religious leaders wish us to return.

*From Statistics Canada at https://www66.statcan.gc.ca/eng/1922-23/192202430203_p.%20203.pdf

       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) David Patrick Flemming and Liisa Repo-Martell; Liisa Repo-Martell and Rebecca Parent; David Patrick Flemming and Liisa Repo-Martell. ©2017 Timothy Patrick.

For tickets, visit www.crowstheatre.com.