100% that Moscovitch: One of Canada's most acclaimed playwrights is reaching a whole new audience

Hannah Moscovitch is one of North America's most acclaimed playwrights. But it wasn't until the fall of 2022 that she became "viral."

Since the mid-2000s, she has written 18 plays and librettos to virtually universal acclaim. They've won her theatre awards, Yale University's Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in 2016, and the Governor General's Award for playwriting in 2021. She first entered the TV writing world 10 years ago — but it was the fact that she was known as "the dark princess of Canadian theatre" that made her the perfect fit for AMC's Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, according to showrunner Rolin Jones.

When episode five, "A Vile Hunger For Your Hammering Heart," aired in October, viewers got to see Moscovitch's talents for blending emotion, eeriness, and brutality up close. By then, Vampire had garnered a fervent following from fans of Anne Rice's 1976 novel and the 1996 film adaptation by Neil Jordan, as well as audiences who appreciated the explicitly queer relationship between the two central characters, vampires Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) in the show's adaptation.

• The 200 most iconic queers in cultural history, part one

In the episode, the simmering emotionally manipulative relationship between Lestat and Louis — an allegory also made explicit by the show's interpretation of the duo's connection — erupted into a destructive, messy, gory brawl, which ends when Lestat reveals that he can fly and drops Louis from hundreds of metres in the air.

Viewers were immediately split by the violence: some saw it as the natural progression of the relationship, others felt betrayed by the villainous turn of Lestat. But anyone who knew the previous work of the episode's writer, Moscovitch, knew not to be surprised when things went from pleasurable, to tense, to downright frightening — and, most importantly, emotionally moving.

Moscovitch's biggest early hit, which premiered in 2007, was a short play called East of Berlin about a man who falls for a Jewish woman while grappling with his father's work with the Nazis. This became a telltale sign of Moscovitch's tone: sweet and brutal, with a hint of irony and humour. Later plays like What a Young Wife Ought to Know, a one-woman monologue about the financial, physical and emotional toll on women without access to birth control, have taken more direct political tones. She gets personal in The Secret Life of a Mother, which is gruesomely detailed in its descriptions of miscarriage and birth, as well as Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, the real story of her Jewish Romanian grandparents fleeing war in 1908 set to klezmer music (which will hit its 400th performance on its current tour). 

"[East of Berlin] blew me away. From that point on, I followed Hannah's outstanding career from afar," Toronto-born and L.A.-based actor, writer and Vampire producer Adam O'Byrne tells CBC Arts via email. "I immediately thought of her. I gave Rolin East of Berlin. I remember he replied to the email with, 'Well, this was pretty f--king great!' And that was that."

As season one was created during the pandemic, Moscovitch joined a virtual writers' room with colleagues from around the world, including Keith Powell ("Toofer" from 30 Rock), Alan Taylor (director of The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones and Thor: The Dark World), and Swedish screenwriter and director Levan Akin. "I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that [our writers] are among a handful of the best dramatic writers of our generation," says O'Byrne. "So she obviously brought her immense talent to the room."

Now an executive producer on Interview with the Vampire and living in Los Angeles with her young son and husband, Moscovitch is already starting on season two of the show, which will take her to sets in Prague, Paris and New Orleans. During the pandemic, when work was wiped clear from stages around the world, TV writing became a professional and creative shelter for Moscovitch. But after the audience and critical acclaim of season one of Interview with the Vampire, her TV career is taking off.

"I wouldn't have gone and written on it if I didn't feel like it was gorgeous. I love how it's queer-explicit and love the adaptation. I loved it and I'm happy the world does too," Moscovitch, 44, says from L.A., where she is also developing a series called Little Bird with Jennifer Podemski for Crave and another TV adaptation project to be announced soon.

But while she's succeeding in television, she's also reaching a theatrical milestone with the world premiere of the stage adaptation of Fall On Your Knees, the 1996 novel by Ann-Marie MacDonald. The two-parter epic will first run with Toronto's Canadian Stage before touring to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, the Grand Theatre in London, and the Neptune Theatre in Halifax. 

MacDonald and her partner and collaborator Alisa Palmer, who is directing the production, first approached Moscovitch about the idea of an adaptation over 13 years ago, when the playwright was 31 and still at the start of her career.

"She is somebody who's got the skill, the stamina and the smarts to be able to see a project through this magnitude," says MacDonald. "This requires such a work ethic, right? This is not for the faint of anything."

"She was already a very promising playwright when we started working together. I pat myself on the back saying, 'Yeah, you chose the right horse there.'"

But at the time, it was the largest project Moscovitch had ever taken on — and the first time she was tasked with adapting an existing story. Moreover, she had a personal connection to the book: she read it at 19 while in theatre school, and recalls a memory of a time where she was so engrossed in reading it, she didn't realize the water in her bath was burning her legs. 

"It felt so big and adult, and what I understood as being above my circumstances at the time. It was just a very, very long process of trying to figure out how to adapt a novel to the stage, and especially a novel of this proportion, with this many generations," she says. "But on instinct, I knew I could work with this material — that it's close, in some ways to my own. Just because it's got that mix of humour and darkness."

That blend is also what drew in the play's director, Palmer, who also first heard of Moscovitch through her breakout, East of Berlin. In fact, Palmer was initially put off by the script, thinking that anyone who could dive into such complex and dark relationships, and do so with Moscovitch's edge of humour, would be nearly impossible to work with on an immense project like Fall On Your Knees. 

"But when I met Hannah, she was quite the opposite — a bright shining star of an imagination with a huge work ethic and incredible discipline," Palmer says. "She has an accessibility of mischievousness and a sense of humour. She's very attuned to the harder truths of life but also how humour and love weave in with that."

In both of her major literature adaptations — Fall On Your Knees and Interview with the Vampire — Moscovitch has found her strength in combining these two seemingly opposing forces.

"Ultimately, the message of the play, to me and likely to anyone who's read the book, would be that love is more powerful than hate," she says. "Love is much more powerful than homophobia and bigotry. Love is even more powerful than death."