Opera Glasses, s04e07 – Hannah Moscovitch: From Playwright to Librettist

She walked into an asylum on purpose and the world couldn’t ignore what she found. We’re joined by award-winning Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch to talk about 10 Days in a Madhouse, her opera with composer Rene Orth, and the real investigative journalism of Nellie Bly, who pretended to be “mad” to expose the brutal conditions inside a women’s institution in 19th-century New York.

We start with Hannah’s route from actor training at the National Theatre School to a life built around making new work, then follow her jump into opera through Tapestry Opera’s LIBLAB. She explains why opera voices feel physical in the room to her and how contemporary opera lets a writer lean into poetry, stylization and emotional intensity. If you’re curious about how a libretto is written, how composers and librettists collaborate, or why music can deliver meaning faster than words, her craft talk is full of usable insight.

From there, we dig into the story engine of 10 Days in a Madhouse: what Bly discovered and how the system swept up women for reasons that had nothing to do with mental health. Hannah also shares a sharp opera-writing principle she lives by, the creative power of a women’s chorus, and what it takes to make a bold structure like reverse chronology land with an audience.

If this conversation sparks something for you, subscribe to Opera Glasses, share the episode with an opera-curious friend, and leave us a review so more listeners can find the show. What’s a real-life story you think deserves the opera treatment?

All episodes of The Opera Glasses podcast are hosted by the editor of Opera Canada, currently Michael Jones after Elizabeth Bowman hosted seasons 1 and 2. Follow Opera Canada on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Visit OperaCanada.ca for all of your Canadian Opera news and reviews. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello and welcome to Opera Glasses, the official podcast of Opera Canada magazine. It is my real pleasure today to be speaking with someone that I've never met before. This is Hannah Moscovich. Hannah is a great Canadian playwright. I actually first became familiar with her work in some very small one-act pieces that were done at the Summer Works Festival back in the mid-2000s. I'm thinking about the Russian play in particular. But since that time, Hannah is a much awarded Canadian playwright. She won the 2021 Governor General's Award for English language drama. She has been nominated for and won awards in New York and in Edinburgh at their fringe festival. She is a really truly great Canadian playwright. And we're speaking with her today on the Opera Glasses podcast because her opera, which she wrote with the composer Renee Orth, is set for premiere this month in Toronto, at least for its Canadian premiere. So I wanted to explore how all of this came about, why someone goes from writing plays into exploring opera and what where the attraction lies. And I thought this is also the first time that I think that we've had a librettist or a playwright on the Opera Canada on the Opera Glasses podcast. So I'm really pleased to speak with her today. Welcome, Hannah, and thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. It's really great to have you. Um

From Actor Training to Playwriting

SPEAKER_00 1:48

why don't you start by telling the listeners a bit about your background, how you started being a writer, why you got into playwriting.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Oh, sure. That's a long time back. So yeah, I went to the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal. I trained as an actor. But I think, you know, I had mistaken loving text for inhabiting character. And I wanted to be a writer all along, but I didn't have language for that or couldn't articulate it when I was a teenager. But it was clear, I think, to everyone, except for me, that I wanted to have a hand in the creation of work and be a primary creator. And yeah, I wanted, I had a vision and a voice, and that's what I wanted to do. And so I started writing plays. I served for a long time in Toronto, five, six years before I got anywhere as a writer. And then I started doing my own work and producing it at festivals like Summerworks Festival. And then more established theater companies started commissioning me, and I became an artist in residence and had a career as a playwright. I've ended up working across mediums. I mostly work in television and film these days. And uh I wrote four operas, the last of which was with Renee Orr.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

Four operas is quite an accomplishment, but I'm I'm going to go back one one step further. So you wanted to be a writer, you wanted to work with text, but you were at the National Theater School as an actor. Did you ever think about writing fiction, about writing short stories, about writing novels? Was did that ever appeal to you?

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Yeah, I think so when I was younger, but then I think, you know, I got I got tricked into this because I went to the National Theater School. That was what I knew, and I had spent years and years of my life um just being on stage and being around the theater. That was what I started writing for. But since then, yeah, I've like written um in a variety of mediums.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

You you were an actor, you went to the National Theater School. Were you interested in the collaborative process? Because I would imagine that creating a play is a much more collaborative process than sitting at home by yourself and writing a novel, recognizing, of course, the editing process and people involved in that. But certainly writing a play feels much more collaborative to me. Is that something that appeals to you or appealed to you?

SPEAKER_01 4:30

Yeah, I mean, you are just one of a number of different, I mean, a novel is an object. You know, what I do in theater is it's a temporal spatial medium, like opera. So you're in a massive, many different directional collaboration with many people to create something that's going to communicate with the audience. So it feels so different to me. Then and all the mediums I work in include that. They include some performance element and they involve a massive, massive collaboration. You know, I could be wrong, but I think writing a novel is a whole different situation.

Training at Tapestry Opera's LIBLAB

SPEAKER_00 5:09

Now, you took part in Tapestry Opera's Composer Libretus Laboratory, the Lib Lab, which is a great program that they run every summer where people who are composers and writers who want to experiment in this opera form participate and do a one-week marathon training session, basically. What made you go to the tapestry program? Why, why did you think about going there?

SPEAKER_01 5:39

It was pretty simple. Like I just got asked to do it. Yeah, it was a while ago now. I think it was like in like I think it was 2008 or 2009. It was a long time ago. And uh I I was I was curious and I was restless in theater and I wanted to try out other mediums.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

And what what what are the what were your takeaways from that week? What did you learn particularly?

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Uh, I really liked that music carried emotion. She seems really simple, but it was what I liked about it. And I liked that that there was something other than my words to offer an audience and that would communicate meaning with the audience. Um, and I liked the collaborators I met. I liked Lemby Beecher, who I ended up writing three operas with. And I and I found the world of opera really surprising. It wasn't anything like theater or TV and film. It was, it felt very distinct.

SPEAKER_00 6:42

And what made it distinct, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 6:45

It felt like there's an emphasis in the writing on poetry and the poeticism of language, which I appreciated. It allows you to write something stylized rather than grounded in realism. And then I think I was endlessly surprised about what constituted a libretto. It seemed like you could write something that didn't have a story in it and just poetry, and that was a libretto, or you could write something that was like a full melodrama with like lots of murdering and raping, and that was also a libretto. And so it seemed like there was something about the medium that was not being dictated by story, as I understood it, that the whole medium was being dictated by, I think, music. And so that that creates this unbelievable freedom because nobody gives nobody cares what you write.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

One of the really great things about the Lib Lab is that they have a group of singers who participate with you the whole week, who who do a remarkable job of learning these excerpts that are practically created overnight and then performing them for you a couple of hours later so that you can hear them and get feedback. This probably was your first experience, your first encounter with opera singers. Is that correct? Mm-hmm. It was. So what did you learn from the singers?

SPEAKER_01 8:15

I think I just found the music beautiful and that there was and that it felt like forceful, that there was something forceful within it that I was interested in that felt like provocative or interesting to me, like the degree to which they were instruments themselves, or that they were like just what they were able to do just felt supernatural to me. And I liked the feeling of the sound of their voice like hitting my body physically or biologically in some way. I just like what that felt like. Yeah. And I and I really did like that there was, you know, if you work in theater, then your work is to sort of support performers' performances. But if it felt like an opera, the main thing was you were supporting the vision of a composer. It felt like there was a different orientation within the medium to who I was beholden to, who I was communicating with.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

And

Moscovitch's First Operas

SPEAKER_00 9:12

you met a composer at the Lib Lab with whom you then wrote three operas, is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Lembeat Beecher, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

And and tell me about those works.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Uh most of them were so they were all different. We wrote we wrote one work called I Have No Stories to Tell You. And that was a commission from Gotham Opera when it used to be an opera company. It's defunct now in New York City and with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So it was staged at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was quite beautiful. We wrote, we wrote another one called Sky on Swings that was with Opera Philadelphia about two women who fall in love but have Alzheimer's. Um, and then we wrote another one called Sophia's Forest, a dark fairy tale combined with an immigration story.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

Sophia's Forest had its Canadian premiere, is that right? Yeah, was it the Vancouver City opera production its first?

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Uh that was its second. All of my operas, I've had this secret American opera career that nobody in Canada has known about. I've just been working on operas down in the States, just turning them out. No one knows why. I've just been up to that for about 10 years.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

So you've had a secret American career in opera. But I know that Sophie's Forrest was performed by City Opera Vancouver uh last, I think last summer in its Canadian debut. And another of your pieces has a Canadian debut coming up. Now I'm going to try to get all of the credits right as I as I list this. So um Ten Days in a Madhouse is being presented by Tapestry Opera in collaboration with Luminato and with the Canadian Opera Company. The opera itself was co-co-commissioned by Tapestry with Opera Philadelphia in the States. So I assume the work has already been seen in Philadelphia. Is that correct? That's right, yeah. And how was that production? Were you happy with it?

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Oh, it was beautiful, yeah. So it was Joanna Settle, the director, who is um going to be in Toronto remaking her production in uh in Philadelphia. But I'd worked with her on a couple of operas before with Lendby Beecher. So she's a collaborator of mine who I really love. Um, there was a a number of people working on that production who are brilliant artists, and so I felt really lucky.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

And what

Background to 10 Days: Nellie Bly and the Asylum

SPEAKER_00 12:04

can you tell us about this opera? What about its story and about the genesis, how it became an opera for you?

SPEAKER_01 12:11

So, Opera Philadelphia, because I had been working with one mate, um, they introduced me to Renee Orth, um, who is the composer of Ten Days in a Madhouse, and she knew about Nellie Bly, and so she referred me to Nellie Bly's book, Ten Days in a Madhouse. And so Nellie Bly was a pioneering investigative journalist uh who lived in the 1860s. Well, or this is took place in the 1860s, and she pretended to be mad so that she could go and visit an insane asylum and see um like what the circumstances were of women. It was a an insane asylum for women, and so she could go in and see on the inside, as an insane person, what the circumstances were of this insane asylum.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

And that's yeah. That's fascinating. She wrote a book about this. It's her book.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

Nellie Bly's book. It's called Ten Days in a Madhouse. She's a historical figure, um, American, and this occurred in New York City. And yeah, so she went into this madhouse, and mostly what uh what she discovers is a nobody can tell the difference between people who are insane and people who are not insane, because as soon as she got in there, um, she acted sane and she tried to convince people she was sane, but they didn't believe her. And then the circumstance was the circumstances within the insane asylum were such that she saw that they would drive anybody insane. So even if you went in and you weren't insane, you would be insane by the time you got out, or the the circumstances within it would drive you insane. The circumstances were appalling.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

I'm fascinated because I certainly don't know Nellie Bly's story. Um, but the idea of an investigative a female investigative reporter in the 19th centuries, working in the 1860s, is is fascinating to me. Were were there others? Do you know of other women who were doing this at the time?

SPEAKER_01 14:17

No, and in fact, there weren't even men really doing it. Like it was a whole she pioneered a whole new form of investigative journalism where you put yourself in those circumstances in order to report on them. And so she is, you know, before any terminology exists to describe her, she is a feminist and she was doing something, and she was sort of, she went in and then she spent a lot of, you know, she advocated for the women who were in there who were being treated horrifically and who weren't insane. Or at least if they were, it was only because of where they were. And it seemed to be just sort of a collection of women who were being thrown in the garbage because they were poor, or because they had were grieving, or because they were English second language, or because they were racialized, or because of racism. You know, so it just seemed like it was this holding pen for all these women people didn't want. It had nothing to do with madness or non-madness. And so she exposed that.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

As a result of her reporting, did any of these conditions change? Did anything happen at that institution? So are you able to tell us the end or is this a spoiler? I suppose it's not a spoiler if we can all look it up.

SPEAKER_01 15:27

If it's you can Google it, you know, like it's really readily available. But yeah, no, uh uh a lot changed because of what she did and how she reported it. And it was undeniable because she had gone in and she was reporting from the inside. She didn't talk to people, like she didn't talk to the doctors and the wardens and the she became one of the she became one of the mad women, and then she reported on what it was like to be within that asylum from the inside. And so nobody, everyone had to listen.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

That's really quite amazing. And so

What Makes a Story Right for an Opera?

SPEAKER_00 16:01

when Renee Orth, who's the composer, sent you to this, did you did did the operatic possibility strike you immediately?

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Well, you know, in a weird way, I trust her instincts more than mine about what's going to be operatic. Like, I'm a writer, I'm not a composer, so I can't, in some ways, you know, someone said to me, and it was like maybe the most helpful thing someone ever said, was, and I can't even remember who said it, but they said, like, you have to imagine that every line you write is being screamed. Does it work if you scream it? Like every line that you write for opera has to be screamable. And I was like, oh, that's a really helpful way to think about it. So everything has to be at some heightened level. And it felt for sure like that level of having to pretend you're mad and then also kind of be in there with a bunch of people who were on the spectrum of mad to being made mad, to being uh totally mad because of their circumstances, all of that collection of people that that felt very choral and and mat and uh screamable, you know, like all of that. And so it all felt really worthy of, you know, trying to figure out in an operatic form.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

This is a slightly larger opera because I just received notice from Tapestry about the chorus of women. So I so I know that you actually have a female chorus of I'm assuming residents in the madhouse, is that correct? Yeah. Was this the first time you had written a piece that included a an ensemble in that way?

SPEAKER_01 17:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

How is writing for a collective voice different? Or did you do that at all?

SPEAKER_01 17:52

Uh I did. I mean, they do, they have they they they perform as a sort of chorus. Um there was like huge pleasure in it. And one of the things that it's possible to do in opera, I mean, you can do it in other writing, but it it just sounds like noise, or unless that's what you intend. But in opera, obviously, you can have everyone speaking at once, and it it sounds amazing. And it like there's like there's different levels to it. There's like noise that becomes music, and you can like you can encompass within music many people who are behaving and and being and talking in many different ways, and it all works in a way that it wouldn't necessarily work if you just did it in a play. And I, because I'm newer to opera, like that just those are like when you switch, when you switch mediums, you go, oh, like what are the like fun things I can do in this medium that I can't do in my own? And that's one of them. You're like, oh, that's possible now. I can just do that. I can have like eight different women who all have different versions of non-madness to madness, and they can all be doing it at the same time, and that's gonna work.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Music, of course, is an art form that exists through time. You know, an audience has a really set time to understand everything that you're trying to convey that the composer is trying to convey. Does that set up does that create challenges for you?

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Well, it forces you to essentialize and to write minimally. Like you have to do something different than you do in a play. You know? Like you you you uh it feels like I abbreviate to a certain degree, or I go right to the essence of it. Like it has to be essentialized, or it has to be like f you know, like you you jam everything in in a good way. Like you're like in this scene, all this has to happen, you know, so that there's space for the music. And just even like practically uh the lib the libretti I've written are short.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

How does that work?

How Moscovitch Works with Composers

SPEAKER_00 20:01

How do you work? You've worked with two different composers. Did you do you work separately from them? Do you prepare bits and have them respond to it? Do you talk with them? What's what's the process for you of creating an opera?

SPEAKER_01 20:16

Well, for me, you know, because I've come into the medium and you know, I'm I'm trying to figure it out, and I know I'm up in their medium and they know a lot and I know a little, and I'm trying to help them with whatever it is they're doing. So I spend a lot of time at the gecko talking to them, and like Renee Orr's strongest impulse was that it towards Nellie Blight and that the upper would run backwards, that we would see it going backwards in time. So we would start at the end and get all the way back to the beginning. And so her impulses towards that, it's sort of like on me to make it work. Like, I'm like, okay, well, that's her initial impulse. That's what she wants to go after. Now I'm gonna do all the things that I know how to do, which is like technically deliver story, but also like theme and content and character, like all of the pieces, and I'm gonna figure that all out with her and for her. But I'm also going to like talk with her a ton about it all the way along. And like it takes like a bunch of conversations up at the get-go to for us to all get on the same page about what we're doing. And then like a first draft and then a bunch of conversations. Because I know that once she sets it, then she said it, and then it becomes much more difficult to maneuver. And so we want it, you know, but that just takes like tons, like you just have to be like really good at articulating your process, really good at listening to what they need and what they're after and what their impulses are. And like from my point of view, I spent a lot of time like articulating like what running it backwards was gonna do and like what the pitfalls of that were, and like what I thought we were gonna have to do in terms of staging and production to make. That work.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

That's that's actually a really challenging stage technique. And it I can think of a number of plays that have been written in a backwards chronology, but you have to, it's it must be challenging to pick up, okay, so I have to tell the audience this so that they understand where this came from, but also then can see it. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 22:23

Yeah. Well, and I mean, what what is so for me as a writer, the pieces I need are like, why are we doing that? What's the story of telling it backwards? What's the intent of that? Why are we doing that? And then, like, can the audience follow that? Because it's so it's actually counterintuitive. All stories goes forward. And so, you know, or you jump around in time, but to just like do a straight running it backwards, you can, but usually there's some real collision of form and content. Like you're running it backwards for a real reason. So then you have to get really like clear about what all of that is before you can execute it well.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

So you were clear about this structurally, but you also must have been very clear about the characters as as you were writing them, as you were figuring out who Nellie Bly was or is in your stage presentation. Because, as you said, you essentialize, which means that if you're only going to hit the really specific point, so much of the character development has to come from the work that the composer's doing. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Completely.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

So all of that needs to be really fixed and clean in both of your heads so that you're writing the same person.

SPEAKER_01 23:41

Mm-hmm. And I think it just meant that there were so many conversations, like, you know, Renee lived in Philadelphia, but you know, she's a Texan girl, and I dragged her up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and she hung out with me for like weeks. She nearly died in the snow. Because, you know, she was like, What is this? You know, she spent a lot of, we spent a bunch of time together trying to sort of figure this out. And like, you know, and like a lot of it is also just like us kind of, you know, she comes, she has her aesthetic ideas, and I have mine. And we're trying to like make them uh, you know, make them it seamless between us.

SPEAKER_00 24:22

Now you have the same director as the the original production in Philadelphia. And how much of the cast is returning of your four principal singers? Is are any of them, or is it a fully new cast this time?

SPEAKER_01 24:37

I think it's a fully new cast. You see how out of it I am. But you see, like so so much has changed since Renee and I started writing this. Like, just so you know, we started writing it like really properly in 2018. And we were meeting before that in 2016 and 2017. And at the time, Renee had no children, and now she has three. So that is how long it's been that we have been working on this. And you know, we we worked on this before the pandemic. Like we met on the other side of the pandemic, and then we remet at the end of the pandemic. That's like it had this massive long period of us working on it. And in that period of time, because of the pandemic, I more or less stopped writing theater and I started to only write TV and film. So all of this stuff has changed in our lives. Um, and so I'm like so messy about the dates and what's going on now.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

That's okay. That will only come across as charming in a podcast.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

I have no idea what they're doing.

SPEAKER_00 25:45

Um have you have you and Renee revisited the piece before this new production, or are they doing exactly the piece as you wrote it for Philadelphia?

SPEAKER_01 25:53

Aaron Powell We're not. We we feel I think we feel like we're like that's that's kind of it, you know? Like, and we tried really hard to make it be itself as good as we could ahead of um the Philadelphia production. And then I think we feel like there's we're just not gonna mess with it.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

Aaron Powell

Toronto Premiere and a Final Hope

SPEAKER_00 26:13

For our listeners, I will say that Ten Days at a Madhouse, which is a Tapestry Opera, an Opera Philadelphia production and commission, is being co-presented by Tapestry, the Illuminato Festival, and the Canadian Opera Company in association with To Live. It's playing at the Bluma Appel Theater in Toronto between June 16th and June 21st. For more information, you can visit tapestryopera.com. Are you going to get out to see this production, Hannah?

SPEAKER_01 26:44

Yeah. Yeah, of course. I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but it's a short flight to Toronto, so I'll go see it, of course.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Wonderful. What are you working on now? It's primarily film and TV, is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 26:58

Well, so I have a premiere coming up of um, so the show that I've been working on is called The Vampire Lestat, and it premieres June 7th on the AMC and Netflix, I think. And so I'm working on that, and I have a production or sorry, I have a commission of a play with Sonia Friedman, and I've been working on that. And I have a film with Rhombus that Sandra O will star in. So I've been working on that. So yeah, I'm I'm uh yeah, I'm working on a bunch of things.

SPEAKER_00 27:28

So you're very busy, but you have found a way to make a very good living, it sounds like, as a playwright in Canada. So congratulations to you.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Yeah, as a playwright in Canada, but as a TV writer in the States.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

Well and opera writer in the States. But but but fair enough. It's it does allow you to do to work in different mediums, and that must still be exciting for you, the idea of how you write differently for different media.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

Yeah. I it it's been really good for me. I feel like I've learned a huge amount about writing in general by switching mediums.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

Well we are all very excited to see the Canadian premiere of Ten Days in the Madhouse, and I wish you great luck for it and and great love for the future. As a f as final words, I'm going to ask you, what would you like an audience seeing this opera of yours to take away? What would you like them to come out of the theater thinking or feeling or intending to do?

SPEAKER_01 28:33

I think that maybe I want them to think that sometimes the world is terrible, but it can be better.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

Which sounds like a really great message to end. Thank you so much, Hannah, for taking the time to chat with us at Opera Glasses. And thank you, of course, to our listeners. This is episode seven of our fourth season already. We will likely have one more special episode during the summer. Uh, but other than that, I'm really thrilled to have met you, Hannah. This is my first time meeting you, although I've known you for 20 years. And so it it it's really been wonderful to meet you and to hear about Ten Days in the Madhouse. I wish you all the best. Once again, this is Michael Jones with the Opera Glasses Podcast, the official podcast of Opera Canada magazine. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.