In Red Like Fruit, Michelle Monteith plays Lauren, a journalist investigating a high-profile case of domestic violence.Riley Smith/Supplied
Title: Red Like Fruit
Written by: Hannah Moscovitch
Performed by: Michelle Monteith, David Patrick Fleming
Directed by: Christian Barry
Company: Soulpepper and the Luminato Festival
Venue: The Michael Young Theatre, 50 Tank House Lane
City: Toronto
Year: Until June 15
In 2017, Martin R. Schneider and Nicole Lee Hallberg, coworkers at a resume-editing company, experimented with trading e-mail signatures and found their working experiences suddenly and radically changed.
While Nicole as “Martin” had the easiest week of her career, Martin as “Nicole” was thoroughly frustrated. Respectful clients became rude, demanding and patronizing when they thought they were dealing with a woman. One male client even propositioned “Nicole” after brief, e-mail-only contact.
Both participants posted individually about their findings; Hallberg wrote an article for Medium, but it was Schneider’s tweets that went viral and made headlines. It seemed that a story about sexism in the workplace made a far bigger impact when it was confirmed by a man’s voice.
That story came to mind as I watched Red Like Fruit, by Governor General’s Award-winning playwright Hannah Moscovitch. Under Christian Barry’s direction, the production from Halifax’s 2B Theatre Company now at Soulpepper as part of the Luminato Festival is a simply delivered and devastating tale of the background radiation of sexism and sexual assault that becomes inextricably baked into women’s identities.
Canadian playwrights Hannah Moscovitch and Jordan Tannahill stay true to their roots despite U.S. success
Red Like Fruit is arranged around a unique conceit: While the face screaming on the poster and story springing from the stage belong to Lauren (Michelle Monteith), the audience rarely hears her actual voice. Instead, she’s asked Luke (David Patrick Flemming) to speak for her, telling her story in the third person as she listens attentively, analyzing its impact on her and the audience and trying to figure out what it all means.
Why is she so angry, despite her successful career as a journalist, stable marriage and two healthy children? Why does her chest constrict as she conducts interviews about a high-profile case of domestic violence, where the perpetrator was welcomed back to the Liberal Party after some community service, and the victim’s contract was not renewed? What is the difference between “trauma” and “experiences” if they both shape us – doesn’t every teenager face strange incidents, shrug and move on?
And, ultimately, is it worthwhile to put the complex struggle into words, if no one wants to hear them?
It’s easy to see why Moscovitch’s work was a finalist for the 2024 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, “the oldest and largest international playwriting prize honoring women+ writing for the English-speaking theatre.” Lauren’s crisis, as delivered by Luke, is personal rather than intersectional, but is full of detailed, sharp observations about what it means to live and work in a world where you ultimately feel dismissed and disposable.
The political scandal Lauren investigates, not directly ripped from the headlines but inspired by recent incidents, becomes increasingly chilling as she discovers the extent of the victim’s injuries and the concerted attempt to discredit her voice.
Worse, Lauren finds it so easy to become complicit in this judgment. She scoffs at the victim’s pop-star name, as though it makes a difference. She finds the men involved morally repugnant, yet secretly hopes they like her and her work.
Monteith delivers a performance that’s haunting in its restrained economy, and which matches the economy of the production, which strips down all ornamentation in an attempt to appear as objective as possible.
Kaitlin Hickey’s set design is limited to a raised black platform with a single chair for Lauren. She’s on display, while Luke stands to the side with a music stand. Hickey’s costumes are workplace casual attire, Lauren in a fitted white button-down shirt contrasting Luke’s shapeless grey sweater, and her lighting slowly darkens and narrows to a spot that alternately pins Lauren further in place and recedes her into the shadows. It’s occasionally even possible to forget Monteith is on stage, which is kind of the point.
In Red Like Fruit, Luke, played by David Patrick Flemming (right), stands to the side as he tells Lauren’s story while she is on display.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
Lauren’s not miming her story while Luke tells it; she’s listening to it like we are, reacting to her words coming from an out-of-body location. Sometimes she seems miles away, hard and distant; sometimes, she trembles, her eyes shining bright with tears that threaten to fall but never completely emerge. When she speaks to question the proceedings, her voice, a little high, a little thin, clashes with the more assured script Luke delivers.
And when she stretches her face into that one silent scream, it’s arresting and almost genre-bending, matching the script’s turn from a realistic description of lunch with a colleague to a stylized vision of a bathtub brimming with blood – before it blinks back, as though nothing really happened.
But what did actually happen? And who are we to judge the things that have happened to us, without outside input?
Flemming’s Luke, as Lauren’s mouthpiece, has a warm, compassionate but slightly detached delivery that lets us occasionally find the humour in the societal contradictions and horrors that Lauren faces. At the same time, the house goes silent when he narrates brutally clinical descriptions of domestic violence and Lauren’s experiences with sexual assault – or was it assault?
The character is designed to be sympathetic, acknowledging the difficulty of speaking for a woman and checking in with Lauren to see if she wants him to continue. It’s simultaneously intriguing and frustrating that we never find out the connection between Luke and Lauren, or whether he has any stake in this, but again, that’s the goal.
Presented with a largely anonymous narrator, why would we trust him more with a story than the person who experienced it? Is it that he’s an unbiased, outside eye? Or is it because he’s tall, and male, and reassuring?
