'What A Young Wife Ought To Know' is a gut-punch of a play
CBC Podcasts | Posted: January 15, 2019 7:40 PM | Last Updated: February 22, 2019
PlayME’s newest podcast drama takes us back to a time before birth control
What choice did women have in a time before birth control?
Inspired by a series of frank letters found at a garage sale, acclaimed playwright Hannah Moscovitch transports us to 1920s Ottawa in her play What A Young Wife Ought To Know.
In a time before sex education and easy access to contraception, we meet Sophie, a young working-class wife who is grappling with a series of tough choices — choices she must make mostly in the dark. No one in her world seems able or willing to give her answers. Not her strident older sister Alma, or the handsome stable hand Jonny or the doctors that frown at her increasingly desperate questions.
The play, freshly adapted as an audio drama for PlayME, takes an unflinching look at love, sex and fertility. Sophie's struggle sheds light on what can happen when women lack knowledge about their own bodies and are offered abstinence, even in marriage, as the only path to family planning — at least for the poor.
PlayME co-creator Chris Tolley says Moscovitch's piece is "a perfect example of what theatre does best, taking big, provocative, and even political ideas and examining them in minute, personal and intimate ways."
As debates over reproductive rights continue to rage around the world, the play confronts painful realities at the ground level. It is, as The Globe and Mail once described it, "more than a compelling history lesson."
Listen to What A Young Wife Ought To Know below, in three parts:
Memorable quotes
- "Love is a strange sort of madness that comes over ya. Makes the future go dark. So you don't think how all the babies are to be fed on 17 dollars and 25 weekly." — Sophie, little sister, on falling in love
- "You'll turn lunatic like Mrs. Henney and pull your skirts up and go running along the streets yellin' 'sweet Jesus and the angels' with your bits jiggling up and down." — Alma, big sister, on the cost of falling in love
- "My heart is gonna break from widening so much." — Jonny, on meeting his first child
- "I said doctor, you and your wife have only the one child. How are you preventing it? He said: separate beds. Also, gardening." — Sophie, on asking how to prevent pregnancy
- "Family limitation and all of that. That is what the upper classes are tryin' on us now. See, they don't want to pay us a livin' wage and so they say oh, family limitation, tell that to the poor. That'll keep 'em quiet." — Jonny, on wanting more kids
About the playwright
Hannah Moscovitch is an internationally acclaimed playwright whose work has been produced across Canada as well as in the United States, Britain, Ireland, Greece, Japan, Germany, Austria and Australia. She is no stranger to audio fiction; she was a writer for CBC Radio's Afghanada. Moscovitch has been the recipient of numerous awards for her work, including the Trillium Book Award, the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play, the SummerWorks Prize for Production, both the Scotsman Fringe First and the Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Festival, and the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize.
Cast and crew
The podcast features the same cast as was featured in the original Halifax-based 2b theatre company production that toured Canada and which Toronto's Crow's Theatre presented in March and April, 2018.
- Director: Christian Barry
- Sophie: Liisa Repo-Martell
- Jonny: David Patrick Flemming
- Alma: Rebecca Parent