Hannah Moscovitch Tackles Tough Questions About Consent in Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, With the Help of Hugh Jackman

There are precious few artists that are as adept at navigating the emotional topography of modern morality as Hannah Moscovitch.

Hailed as one of Canada’s foremost playwrights, Moscovitch has built her career by not simply offering answers to fraught societal quandaries, but by artfully—and often painfully—reframing the questions themselves. Her work lives in what she calls “the middle”—a place where the boundaries between agency and exploitation, power and intimacy, are porous.

"There are silences in our culture around women’s discomfort," Moscovitch shares, reflecting on her enduring artistic attraction to the not-right-but-not-illegal gaps in modern morality. "I'm trying to bring art into the world that represents women's experiences, so that we will have some sort of a place to bring our questions."

Moscovitch's acclaimed play, Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, has made its way to New York City, playing Off-Broadway at Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre through June 30. Led by Hugh Jackman and Ella Beatty, the production marks the inaugural offering of Jackman and Sonia Friedman’s new producing initiative, TOGETHER, alongside Audible Theater.

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes centers on a relationship between Jon, a famous novelist and literature professor (played by Jackman), and Annie, one of his 19-year-old students (played by Beatty). They meet, they circle each other, and they fall into something that cannot comfortably be called love, though it resists being labelled assault. Both parties wholly offer consent, both verbally and physically. Jon is self-aware enough to know that the optics—and even the ethics—are grim. Meanwhile Annie is often articulate, and occasionally in control. Still, the power differential is absolute. Their relationship—undeniably consensual by legal standards—is freighted with power imbalances, subtle manipulation, and social ramifications that extend far beyond the bedroom.

As a play, Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes doesn’t roar, it rustles—like paper brushing against bare skin in a too-quiet room. And then, suddenly, it cuts. “The relationship is certainly professional misconduct on his part,�� Moscovitch says. “Most universities bar it for a reason. There’s just too much influence.�� Still, she pushes against a black-and-white reading. “Consent has happened,�� she insists. “So it’s in the middle between those two poles.��

That middle is where Moscovitch thrives. Her work—much like Annie’s experience—does not adhere to the traditional victim-perpetrator binary. Instead, she explores how society judges women’s choices, and often, how it infantilizes them.

Annie is a fascinating example of Moscovitch’s layered female protagonists. Her women defy the passive roles too often handed to them, instead engaging in choice, introspection, and contradiction. In Sexual Misconduct, Annie is not a victim in the traditional sense. She consents. She enjoys the sex. And yet, Jon's actions are, undeniably, misconduct.

When Moscovitch began work on the piece in 2014, she had no idea the social reckoning that was coming. “When I was writing this play, I thought audiences would despise Annie,�� Moscovitch confesses, shaking out her long salt-and-pepper hair as it forms a veil around her face. “I grew up in the era of Monica Lewinsky, and everyone labelling her a whore and a marriage wrecker. I thought audiences would side with Jon, primarily. But then we did a reading at Seattle Rep in 2017, just before the #MeToo movement took off, and that was the first indication that that wasn’t how the audience was going to see it. So many women stayed afterwards and wanted to share how they'd had a similar experience, and they didn't know how to think about it.��&�Բ��;

The audience identification with Annie didn’t necessarily mean that Jon had suddenly turned into a villain, however. “This is Jon’s story. As far as the audience is concerned, they’re within his perspective.�� And, of course, there is the choice to cast Hollywood Good-Guy Hugh Jackman for the New York premiere.

The decision to bring this particular play to New York with Jackman is significant. Often cast as Hollywood’s paragon of decency, Jackman embodies in the public consciousness the image of the Nice Man: kind, generous, devoted, with an eager smile. To see him step into the role of Jon, a character who is—at best—morally complicated, forces an audience to look again. What if it’s not the visible monsters we need to be wary of, but the men we trust most? What if it’s the men like Jon—thoughtful, charismatic, deeply regretful—who do the most damage?

Hugh Jackman and Ella Beatty in *Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes* Emilio Madrid

Jackman’s involvement is no gimmick. It is a doubling-down on the play’s core question: Who do we protect, and why? His presence demands the audience re-evaluate their instincts, and allegiances. When he enters the stage, applause immediately follows. When he breaks the fourth wall to directly address different audience members as stand-ins for his lecture students, eager giggles can be heard. And when he kisses Beatty for the first time, you can practically hear the collective jaw clench. Moscovitch, for her part, is thrilled with the choice. "Everyone in this project is incredibly ethical," she said—a statement that, while simple, feels increasingly radical in a theatrical landscape often clouded by scandal.

With this role, Jackman joins a new lineage of men reckoning with their complicity—both onstage and off—but with a rare degree of introspection. The fact that he is not just acting in the play, but also co-producing it through The TOGETHER Project alongside Sonia Friedman and Audible Theater, reveals his commitment to this story. That commitment extends to accessibility. TOGETHER, as a company, is founded on a radical premise: to bring world-class theatre to wider audiences, including those for whom the prohibitive cost of a Broadway ticket often means exclusion. “It’s really moving to watch people be like, ‘Oh fuck, I can see this,’�� Moscovitch says, visibly touched. ��'I can afford $35.' You want your work to be accessible to people. You don't want the cost to be prohibitive," Moscovitch shares. "It’s a gorgeous gesture on the part of everyone involved. They want to make something that can be accessed, regardless of price."

Financial barriers aren’t the only form of access Moscovitch is reaching for. The suffocation of silence, and the way it can cause a person to hide from themselves, is at the front of her mind. Moscovitch’s career has long orbited themes of gender, power, and silence. But Sexual Misconduct has become something of a personal vortex for her—a well she keeps returning to, compelled by its seemingly endless depths. “It just feels like this bottomless pit I’m in,�� she admits.

Her work thrums with feminist inquiry but never reduces itself to slogan or screed. Perhaps it is simply in her blood. “My mother is a feminist, who wrote feminist nonfiction as part of her career. I grew up in the '90s, when feminism was out of fashion, and that really affected the lens with which I saw the world. There was this disconnect between what I was experiencing culturally, and the lens my mother had given me. The inconsistencies in our culture were just so clear to me, and writing them out was the only way I knew to figure out what they meant to me.��

For the following, there is something elementally heavy about Moscovitch's voice—ancestral even. “There are so many pieces of our lives as women that we are taught, culturally, to never speak of. Truths that can't really be spoken, which means you can’t really figure it out, or process what it means for you. I mean, for instance, it isn’t normal to say to people ‘when I was 17, my cousin fucked me.�� There's all sorts of things that are unacceptable to say, and yet they define a lot of my experience." It is through her work that Moscovitch is exploring her own traumatic past, processing it through these stage characters: "There's something in me that's constantly trying to figure out how to be a woman in a world where it is considered radical to be un-silenced. Even within this play, it's me, trying to figure out how these things continue to happen. I’m sitting in the grey zone of relationships, trying to turn on a light.��

Ella Beatty and Hugh Jackman in *Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes* Emilio Madrid

In Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, she delves into a recurring motif in her body of work: the agency of young women, especially in the context of relationships with older, more powerful men. She has heard every side of the debate. She’s been in rooms where people claim Jon did nothing wrong. She’s been in rooms where people rage at him for not doing more to stop it. And she’s heard, especially from younger generations, the thorny question: When is consent not enough?

"If someone is really mentally ill, can they be giving consent, or are you just taking advantage of them?" she mused. "If they're depressed out of their minds, can they consent? When is a person unable to make decisions for themselves? And when is someone else in the right to take away that power of choice?" These are not rhetorical questions. They are Moscovitch’s invitation to consider how feminism must evolve in a time when the line between empowerment and manipulation has never been more difficult to parse.

Indeed, Moscovitch’s willingness to dwell in these zones of discomfort is what gives her work such emotional voltage. Her plays are often filled with women who do not see themselves as victims, even as they are acted upon. They are full of men who do not see themselves as predators, even as they exert coercive influence. In this play, as in life, everyone is complicit.

"I always feel like women should have choices. That's what feminism is to me... the choice to choose. You get the choice," Moscovitch shares. In spite of that idealized desire of choice, however, she also recognizes how those choices are framed, constrained, and conditioned by power structures that do not always announce themselves. As she puts it, "choice doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Everything is still coming from something."

Ella Beatty in *Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes* Emilio Madrid

As Jon shares in the opening of the play, there is often a stock characterization for these types of relationships in media: “Wasn't there something deadly about the ‘young girl�� as an object of fiction? Wasn't it where writers went to expose their mediocrity? Because wasn't it so often the ‘young girl�� who was grossly underwritten, a cipher, a sex object, reduced to a cliché by lust-addled men?��&�Բ��;

Moscovitch took care to invert this trope, all the while exploring its origins. “I've spent a lot of time around other writers,�� Moscovitch laughs. “There’s a kind of pleasure in writing them, because I know the archetype of the confident, middle-aged male writer. They’re very clear to me, the Jack Kerouac’s and the Ernest Hemingway’s.��

As directed by Ian Rickson, Annie is both her own individual, and a blank vessel into which Jon pours himself: a tool for his own self discovery, rather than an individual already brimming with her own opinions and energies. “It's written into the play that she's blank. That blankness could be youth, but also, because it's through Jon’s point of view, I was always aware that there was going to be an opacity to her—because of how Jon saw her. He was writing onto her, essentially, like she was his canvas. And then, Ella and [director Ian Rickson] are just brilliant—the way she is always around, subtly building the show around Jon while she’s also being subtly objectified…every gesture fulfills the final promise of the play.��

That final promise, which we won’t spoil here, turns the entire story the audience had been watching on its head. Moscovitch is naturally mum on any definitive answer or interpretation, instead espousing that “it was important to me that the ending could be interpreted in different ways. I don't want to shut anything down. But, in my mind, there's a kind empowerment, or a taking back of what happened as they figure things out...There’s power in processing your experiences into art.��

This fierce interrogation of agency and power has also found its way into Moscovitch’s screen work, most recently in the lush and vicious world of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire (where she is a writer and co-executive producer). Now deep in prep for the show’s third season, Moscovitch has helped reimagine Anne Rice’s cult classic series through her own nuanced lens. In particular, her work on Claudia—a girl who becomes a vampire, which effectively traps her in a pre-teen body—echoes many of the themes in Moscovitch's plays. Her voice has shaped Claudia significantly, crafting moments not drawn from the original novels but designed in the writers�� room.

In the episodes that feature Moscovitch as lead writer, Claudia endures some significant-yet-familiar trauma at the hands of older, more powerful men. “One of the great joys of writing with Rolin Jones' [the Pulitzer-nominated showrunner] is that he hired me specifically to utilize my particular talents, and engage my affinities as a writer. I don't think anyone at this point is confused about the darkest shit being mine,�� Moscovitch lets out a full-throated laugh. “Anything that’s complex, relationally, and tied to the uglier parts of desire…this show allows me to work in the same zone that I am in when writing for the stage—only, of course, there’s a massive difference in what we can actually show the audience. Everything I am writing for Interview is an extension of the incredibly messy, fucked-up dynamics between human beings that are my favorite canvas.��

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Moscovitch’s collaborative work on the series demonstrates her continued investment in stories that center female agency in the face of impossible constraints. Claudia may be a vampire, but she is also a young woman navigating autonomy in a world that infantilizes her. In many ways, she is Annie’s spiritual cousin: a figure of contested consent, of sharpened vulnerability. And as for the much-anticipated third season, Moscovitch has her eye on another incredibly complex woman: Gabrielle, Lestat’s mother and one of Anne Rice’s most beguiling characters. "She's fucking great," Moscovitch shares, laughing. "She’s my favorite character all along."

As if the current New York run, the filming of Season 3, and the raising of her son didn’t have her hands full, Moscovitch is also preparing a new play, Red Like Fruit. It's premiering at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre as part of the Luminato Festival, before heading to the Traverse in Edinburgh for the famed Edinburgh Fringe. Thematically adjacent to Sexual Misconduct, the play promises to go even further. “It’s my most vicious, most experimental play,�� she says, gleeful at the prospect of unleashing it on unsuspecting Fringe-goers. “We’ll see if they embrace it. Or if they’ll puke into the bushes outside the theatre.��

Moscovitch’s plays are not easy to sit through. They ask us to hold contradiction in our laps like a hot stone, to question our empathy, to doubt our moral instincts. And in doing so, they offer catharsis—not the kind that comes from resolution, but from recognition. She is not interested in delivering verdicts. She is interested in telling the truth, or at least asking what truth means when power clouds perception. Her art lives in the space between damnation and salvation. A lack of certainty, ultimately, is what she offers. A place for our questions. And in the darkness of the theatre, in the stillness between lines, something extraordinary happens. Not an answer. But the profound realization that: We are not alone in the asking.