Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes

Hannah Moscovitch

• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780369102324
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre

The archetypal student-teacher romance is cleverly turned on its head for the post-#MeToo era in this striking new play by the acclaimed author of What a Young Wife Ought to Know and Bunny.

Jon, a star professor and author, is racked with self-loathing after his third marriage crumbles around him when he finds himself admiring a student—a girl in a red coat. The girl, nineteen-year-old Annie, is a big fan of his work, and also happens to live down the street. From their doorways to his office to hotel rooms, their mutual admiration and sexual tension escalates under Jon's control to a surprising conclusion that will leave you wanting to go back and question your perceptions of power as soon as you finish.

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes

One: Introducing Jon Macklem, Star Professor, Acclaimed Author.

Jon is writing. He’s struggling to focus on his work. After a pause, he closes his laptop or pushes papers away. He looks up and without hesitation speaks to the audience.

Jon: Well, he was agitated: he didn’t know why, nothing came to him.

Jon stands and picks up his Thermos of coffee, lifts it to his mouth, then hesitates.

A few weeks ago, the janitor forgot to unlock the men’s washroom before office hours, so he’d had to urinate into his Thermos. Then he’d opened his door, and met with students, and discussed their essays with them, with a hot Thermos of his own urine sitting on the windowsill.

Jon looks down at the Thermos. He looks back at the audience.

Urine was, he knew, dissolved salts with a little organic yellow colouring in it. You just rinse it out and it’s fine.

Jon hesitates, then forces himself to drink from it, forces himself to swallow, and then he puts the Thermos back down on his desk.

He’d been trying to jot down lecture notes, but he’d been too agitated so he’d switched to grading papers and now he couldn’t even fucking do that. What the fuck was wrong with him?

Pause. Jon considers. Then realizes:

And, huh, a dim image came to him. It was of a girl in a red coat . . .

Pause. Jon sees the girl in his mind . . . Then:

Could it be a fragment of . . . ? His publishers were waiting on a novel about turn-of-the-century lumberjacks, so hopefully this girl was a part of that, or . . . could be shoehorned into it? Because also: come on, a girl? A young girl? 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?

Jon looks at his watch or device.

Nearly two o’clock.

Perhaps Jon gets out an earpiece (a microphone) and puts it on.

Which meant a lecture on the death of postmodernism and the rise of transrealism with its adjacent mainstreaming of genre fiction to some ninety or so second years, so, that should really meet them where they were at.

Jon regards the audience, to see if his joke registered.

That was a joke.

Beat.

Lately he’d had to point out to his students when he made jokes, as in, “That was a joke.” Maybe his delivery . . . ? Was too dry . . . ? That or he was getting old.

Pause. He takes a last look at his notes before putting them away. Then to explain, still taking a last look at his notes:

He uh—he—he—he liked to lecture without ...