A question looms heavy over “Red Like Fruit,” the post-#MeToo era play by Hannah Moscovitch, now running at Soulpepper as part of the 2025 Luminato Festival. It haunts every line of this taut, 75-minute drama. And it slowly eats away at its audience.
Why is this woman’s story being told by a man? A man about whom we know nothing.
The story at the heart of “Red Like Fruit” is really Lauren’s to tell. An accomplished journalist, she’s covering a high-profile case of domestic violence within the Liberal party. But as she digs deeper, interviewing her sources and typing up her investigation, she becomes retraumatized by some long-buried memories from her past.
Lauren (Michelle Monteith), however, doesn’t recount her own story. Instead, she writes it up and tasks a man named Luke (David Patrick Flemming) to narrate it on her behalf.
As he does, Lauren sits in a chair on a raised platform, listening intently to his words, her words. She mostly wears a blank expression. But occasionally, her demeanour changes. She winces. Or she recoils ever so slightly. Or she gently nods, as if in recognition and in agreement.
The setup of director Christian Barry’s gripping production almost recalls a jury trial. Lauren sits on the stand, with Luke standing off to the side, acting as this trial’s prosecutor. But rather than Luke drawing out her testimony, it’s he who’s giving voice to it.
Luke subtly — perhaps even unconsciously — manipulates Lauren’s words. At first, he carries an air of flippancy, even condescension. Then a softer, more sympathetic side gradually emerges.
“Red Like Fruit” is initially disorientating, particularly the decoupling of Lauren’s story from her voice, subverting the trope of the unreliable narrator. It’s a slow burn, too, with key information delivered piecemeal. But what emerges is so painful and gripping that the audience’s patience is eventually rewarded.
What makes this new play brilliant, however, is not merely the story itself, but how that story is told. Moscovitch forces her audience to confront their own prejudice. She asks us to question who we believe — and why. Do we believe Lauren’s story? Or do we believe Lauren’s story only as it’s told by Luke?
Simmering underneath the surface of this play are many uncomfortable truths. In particular, I thought about how so many stories of domestic abuse and sexual assault are told in the media by men, who, like Luke, so subtly shape and mould the narrative. So rarely do we hear from the survivors themselves.
At its best, Moscovitch’s play implicates the audience, as well, interrogating our complicity in the pervasive culture of silence that spurred the #MeToo movement.
By the show’s conclusion, that overarching question that hangs over the work needs no answer. Why is this woman’s story being told by a man? We know why, painful as the truth is.
