Warning: Hannah Moscovitch's Bunny lays female desire bare

It's a play that begins with an audience advisory: this story contains mature subject matter. Lots of it.  

Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch (East of Berlin, This Is War) joins guest host Gill Deacon to discuss Bunny, her new Stratford Festival play about intellectual, socially-awkward Sorrel; a woman who has a strong sexual appetite, but also struggles with shame.

"I wanted to write a character that represented women I know, of my generation," says Moscovitch, adding that the play is about being scared, and being sexual — and being scared of being sexual. Far too often, she says, female characters are expected to repress their sexual desires while making a choice between just two men. 

But Sorrel's story — which begins in high school and ends decades later —  is much more complicated than that. 

"Female sexuality is still so transgressive," says Moscovitch, adding that far too many characters must first get drunk on love or alcohol. "You do something sexually good and you win, or you do something sexually bad and you lose." 

Moscovitch, who recently won Yale's prestigious Windham Campbell prize for literary achievement, is more nuanced... and has also worked out the mechanics of sex in a canoe.