Hannah Moscovitch's New War Story

Who: Hannah Moscovitch
What: This is War at Tarragon Theatre
When: January 3 - February 3, 2013

Love + Time = x

Hannah Moscovitch's latest play to hit the stage is This is War, now on at the Tarragon. She is also working with Volcano on another fascinating project.....

Infinity is a play about a dying physicist who discovers that his concept of time, the one topic he thought he was an expert on, is eluding him. Combining research into timekeeping and physics, this work seeks to elucidate a formula to describe love, and what happens to love, through time...

Says Ross about Hannah and This Is War: "The extraordinary thing about this play - and plays like Proud by Michael Healey, or Awake, created and directed by Chris Tolley & Laura Mullin - is that they are about now - about what our country is engaged in right now - and they offer a completely different perspective on this than can possibly be gained in media, social or otherwise. It is a tremendously positive new development in the city's theatre that these plays are coming forward with such force and craft. Hannah's play is a terrifically engaging look into the world of the Canadian soldier at war, and what these men and women might have to deal with now that they're home - see it. Seriously. It's about us."

In addition to This is War, Hannah was a contributing writer on the CBC Radio series Afghanada. She recently spoke on CBC’s Metro Morning (Jan 3) about this play’s origins and on her continued motivation to relate Canadian soldiers’ stories of combat to the public back home. This is War is loosely based on an incident involving the Afghan National Army, Coalition Forces and the Taliban, that was related to Moscovitch by a war reporter who worked in the Panjwayi district where the incident occurred.

On Metro Morning, Moscovitch discussed the disconnection between the perspectives of soldiers on the ground and the discussions of politics in the media which are deeply separated from the reality of combat: “It’s appropriate in the media to talk about the politics of war, but for soldiers the event of war is completely different – it’s just removed – because once you’re in the arena of war and bombs are detonating around you and people are yelling  - you’re…trying to save your life and save the lives of the people around you.” With Canada’s combat role having concluded in July 2011, Moscovitch considers Canada to now be a post-war society. She is interested in maintaining a focus on the country’s growing population of veterans arriving back in Canada who are often confronted with arduous processes of re-integration.