RED LIKE FRUIT Comes to Soulpepper Theatre

This spring, Soulpepper Theatre in partnership with Luminato Festival will present the Toronto premiere of the newest offering from Governor General’s Award-winning playwright, Hannah Moscovitch, RED LIKE FRUIT, on stage at Soulpepper’s Michael Young Theatre May 28th through to June 15th. (Media night: May 29th)
 
From Halifax’s acclaimed 2B Theatre and directed by 2B Artistic Director Christian Barry, in RED LIKE FRUIT we meet Lauren (Michelle Monteith) - a journalist covering a high-profile case of domestic violence who, as she digs deeper, finds something inside of her starting to crack. She begins revisiting events from her own past—memories she thought she understood but now sees in a new, unsettling light. Unable to trust her own recollections, she turns to Luke (David Patrick Flemming), asking him to narrate her life. But as he pieces together her story, an eerie question looms: why did she ask him in the first place? 
Articulated with Moscovitch’s signature sharpness and emotional depth, RED LIKE FRUIT is a taut, psychological unraveling of power and gender that interrogates the role and impact of men’s voices in women’s stories and delves into the many contradictions and complexities of complicity, consent and traumatic memory in the post #MeToo era.
 
“Hannah Moscovitch is one of the most masterful contemporary playwrights of our time and we couldn’t be more thrilled for her to make her Soulpepper debut with RED LIKE FRUIT,” shares Soulpepper Artistic Director Weyni Mengesha. “Throughout her career she has proven to be one of the sharpest and most unsparing examiners of the experience of women that there is. RED LIKE FRUIT fearlessly continues those explorations and proves again why Hannah is one of the most acclaimed and produced playwrights in not just Canada, but around the world.”
 
“A prolific feminist playwright, one of Canada’s finest, Hannah Moscovitch cleverly exposes the power imbalance that exists for women every single day of our collective lives,” says Luminato Festival Artistic Director Olivia Ansell. “Her ingenuity as a writer is fearless and life affirming. Luminato is thrilled to co-present this important 2B Theatre production with Soulpepper.”
 
RED LIKE FRUIT was first premiered in the spring of 2024 at Halifax’s Bus Stop Theatre with a production that also starred Michelle Monteith and David Patrick Flemming.  The play was shortlisted for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize just as the World Premiere production was entering rehearsals.  
 
Responding to the acknowledgement from the Blackburn prize Moscovitch said, “I’m the type of writer who likes to explore the world lovingly, but with a knife. With RED LIKE FRUIT what I’m exploring with the knife is myself… I think about my life as a document that I have redacted, because there are parts that are uncomfortable…so I take them out. But then if pages and pages of my life are censored, then my life just becomes f***g incomprehensible doesn’t it - to you, to me. {RED LIKE FRUIT} is an effort to restore the redacted pieces of my life.”
 
Joining Moscovitch and Barry on the creative team is production designer Kaitlin Hickey. RED LIKE FRUIT is on stage May 28th to June 15th (Media night: May 29th) with performances Tuesday through Saturdays at 8:00pm and Saturday and Sundays at 2:00pm at Soulpepper’s Michael Young Theatre (50 Tank House Lane). Tickets are on sale now. 

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