Q&A: Infinity

Hannah Moscovitch

Tarragon Theatre Playwright-in-Residence Hannah Moscovitch presents the world premiere of her latest work Infinity this spring as part of the company's current season. Developed with Volcano Theatre, the play explores the connection between love and time, and features a top-notch cast including Paul Braunstein, Hayley McGee and Amy Rutherford performing alongside violinist Andréa Tyniec.

Here, we chat with the leading Canadian playwright about her experience creating this ambitious piece.

Theatromania: Tell us about your new play Infinity. What inspired this work?

HM: Infinity is made up of two stories that wind together. There’s the love story between Carmen, a composer, and Elliot, a theoretical physicist. That’s intertwined with the sexual history of a young woman named Sarah Jean.

I was inspired by Ross Manson’s offer: to write about time. Time is a crazy topic. It’s so amorphous. It took me a long time to find a way to write about it . I wrote a lot of shitty drafts. And I was also inspired by a book by Lee Smolin, the theoretical physicist consulting on Infinity. It’s called Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. I was also interested in writing about the large systems of thought that we aren’t aware of but that shape our lives and/or ways of thinking, and about how epiphanies (in love and science) happen.

Theatromania: How would you describe the Tarragon Theatre/Volcano Theatre co-production in a few sentences?

HM: It synthesizes the work of a lot of collaborators: a composer, a choreographer, a violinist, a writer, a director, a theoretical physicist, three performers and two designers. There’s a very talented and very weird set of people working on this one.

Theatromania: How does Infinity relate to your other plays?

HM: Infinity is more personal - more confessional - than my other plays. But it’s similar stylistically to my past work (there’s dark humour) and it covers a lot of my favourite themes: the complexities and dangers of love, moral ambiguity, domestic war, broad systems of thought accessed through the personal, complicated characters who do both good and bad things.

Theatromania: What are some of the challenges of staging this particular show?

HM: The staging challenges are mostly being faced by the other artists collaborating on Infinity. My challenges are more in the realm of how to make the ambiguities that are built into the text work, ie: how to open up two or more possible meanings in the minds of audience members. That, and how the hell to get across complicated scientific ideas.

Theatromania: What have you learned from this process so far?

HM: In the past I’ve written about the children of Nazis growing up in Paraguay, or what it’s like if your sister is a psychopath, or Canadian soldiers in a combat role during the war in Afghanistan – I’ve written about places and circumstances that are outside of my experience. Daniel MacIvor called me a “research scientist playwright” at an awards event last year. And it’s true: I research a huge amount as I write. The thing is, I admire confessional work a lot – Sylvia Plath, Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knauusgard – but I’ve shied away from writing that way. I’ve learned from working on Infinity that I like to write more personally, and that writing from within your own experiences doesn’t have to be boring or horrible (for me or for the audience either). There are a couple more plays that I have coming up – Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes (in development at Tarragon) and Bunny (in development at Stratford) in particular – that are confessional. And I have a residency at Theatre Centre where I’m a collaborator on a devised project that contains confessional elements. But Infinity is the first.

I’ve also learned a lot about theoretical physics.

Infinity runs from March 25 to May 3, 2015 at the Tarragon Theatre Extraspace. Visit tarragontheatre.com for more information and to buy tickets.