Infinity's Dora award-winning playwright, Hannah Moscovitch, shares insight about her creative process and why this remount will be different from the premiere.

With the rehearsals of Infinity officially underway Hannah Moscovitch took a moment to reflect on the creation of the play and the the breathtaking new writing which she has crafted for the script.

Hannah Moscovitch won the Dora Mavor Moore award for Outstanding New Play for Infinity

Q: What inspired Infinity?

Research! Ross Manson commissioned me to write this play in 2008, and the talks we had then helped me to form the initial ideas for the play. I then worked with Lee Smolin’s theories, he’s the consulting theoretical physicist on the project. I also worked my personal relationship to time and death into the text.

Q: What issues were you trying to bring to the forefront by writing this play?

I was interested in how habits of thought and behaviour echo down through generations. I wanted to create a project that condensed time and showed you, the audience, a significant portion of a romance between two people who were good people but terrible when together. I wanted to write about unreality, and how modernity has called into question so many of our cherished notions. I was also interested in how death intensifies our relationship to our families, legacy and time.  And I wanted to write, as I always do, complicated characters in the throws of a psychic shift. This makes the play sounds very cerebral: talking about the themes usually does that with my texts. As a writer, I like big ideas, but I want there to be big emotions in my pieces as well.

Q: When you look at the play now almost 2 years on, is there anything you would change?

Paul Braunstein, Amy Rutherford & 

Andréa Tyniec (violinist) in Infinity 

Ross and I have been emailing back and forwards these past few days, working around naps and nannies because we both have toddlers, about our revisions to the text. I love remounts, they allow me to finesse the text in a way you often can’t on a premiere, because when you’re putting it all up the first time you don’t know yet how all the elements (text, design, choreography, composition, performance) will come together. On a remount and tour you can go deeper, clearer (or more clearly ambiguous!) So anything I would change, I am changing. 

Infinity runs Jan 4-29 at Tarragon's Extraspace. For details and tickets click here.