INTERVIEW: Ellie Moon
May 9, 2018
Written by Walter Strydom
Ellie Moon is an actor-writer whose debut play, Asking For It, made waves in Toronto last year. The play – a documentary theatre piece focusing on the fall out after the Ghomeshi scandal – is a critical evaluation of the various ways in which sexual consent is understood personally, culturally, and legally.
At the age of 24, Ellie is fast becoming a recognized voice in the Toronto theatre community. Her passion for the theatre is driven by a desire for intimate connections — ”with my collaborators and with audiences” — a notion that is also at the core of her writing.
Currently working on a commissioned play for the Tarragon Theatre, and gearing up to play the Emmy in A Doll's House, Part 2 at The Segal Centre in the fall, Miss Moon doesn’t allow the setting sun to deter her from her passion. “Fortunately, there are so many artists in Toronto who wear many hats,” she says, “and even more artists in Toronto who are deeply wise and generous and always arm me with a great deal of perspective for which I am grateful.”
We spoke to Ellie about the stories she’s passionate about and projects she dreams about late at night.
What I call her, Ellie's new play, will be debuting at Crow's Theatre this coming November.
Tell us about your approach to plays in general. What gets your attention? What stories do you like to tell? As an actor and as a writer?
“This is hard to answer — I’m definitely still figuring this out. At the moment, I’m interested in the complexity of moral judgment and action and the question of what it means to have and yield power. I expect this will all change a lot though, possibly by tomorrow. I think I’m also interested in loneliness and cycles of care. I can feel a play coming on in that vein.”
Your new play, What I call her, will be debuting at Crow’s Theatre in November this year. Calling the play “post-MeToo,” what inspired you to write it?
“It’s the first thing I’ve written entirely and completely without any plan before I started writing, so I have to work backwards and speculate now. The play is “post-MeToo” because it presupposes a world in which women have power. The protagonist is powerful in the moment in which you meet her, but in her past, she has felt deeply powerless.”
“I had a lot of conversations about what people consider to be boundaries and violations of boundaries, as I was working on Asking For It. Then, bizarrely, Asking For It closed and the whole world was talking about this with #MeToo. I became struck by how often I heard people say that they could understand why something they experienced as benign was considered abuse by someone else, but they still felt their experience was benign and wanted the right to classify it as that without being described as in denial. I began to think about how the same experiences are processed so differently by people, for reasons that we can name, like our personal history, and reasons that are far more mysterious. In that vein of mystery, I began to think of how many people have different experiences within the same family. I think that’s how I got here.”
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