Ever since #MeToo became a hashtag and a movement, forever altering the way we frame, discuss, and spotlight sexual abuse and harassment, ask yourself: When was the last time—if ever—you found yourself sympathizing with an aggressor?
Yet here we are off-Broadway at Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, listening to the confessions of famous author/rock-star college professor Jon Macklem, and we’re immediately charmed. Partly, it’s because we’re hearing the story almost entirely from his perspective—a surprising, and daring, choice. It’s also because Jon is played by the immensely appealing stage and screen star Hugh Jackman in an all-too-rare nonmusical appearance. (Sexual Misconduct is the first production of Together, a partnership between Jackman and producer Sonia Friedman; it will soon run in rep with Jen Silverman’s Creditors. For every performance, Audible is selling 25% of the tickets for $35, and giving another 25% to TDF to distribute free to community groups.)
Later this month, and on scattered dates throughout the year, Jackman will be back in song-and-dance mode, belting out hits from his movies Les Misérables and The Greatest Showman at the 6,000-seat Radio City Music Hall in his concert From New York With Love. But for now, he’s at the 400-seat Minetta Lane Theatre, digging into Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s provocative two-character drama, which premiered at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in January 2020.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
It’s a terrific role for him: a self-deprecating, self-aware prof who admits he tries—perhaps too hard—to adopt a “casual, jokey style” in his lectures. No notes, just riffs. He believes that “learning is a seduction,” and muses about “the erotics of pedagogy,” but also knows “that was the sort of thing you couldn’t say out loud without getting fired.” He feels himself turning into a literary cliché, “racking up ex-wives like a maniac, like Charles Bukowski or f–king Jack Kerouac!” When he starts sleeping with 19-year-old Annie (Ella Beatty, late of Lincoln Center Theater’s Ghosts), one of his writing students, he acknowledges “the horrible predictability of it all.” At one point he even calls himself “a total piece of shit!” Plus, he never really looks like a predator. (If there is such a thing as a traditional predator look.) “Do you know you’re coming onto me?” he asks Annie. “Do you know you’re hitting on me?” And when their relationship—let’s call it how Jon sees it—comes to its inevitable end, we genuinely believe he’s sorry; those are real tears in his eyes.
Jackman and Beatty don’t have sizzling, barn-burning sexual chemistry, but that’s not required here. What’s important is that you believe the attraction on both sides: that Jon would look at her and see a student, an aspiring writer, who idealizes and worships him; that Annie would yearn for the attention and approval of this hugely successful and handsome older man in a position of power. Beatty’s wide eyes and open face are like a blank canvas—her Annie is inscrutable, sometimes frustratingly so, but ultimately, she appears as Jon wants her to appear. “She was, in short, the age-old object of fiction,” he says in a moment of casual cruelty.
As for how Annie sees him, she’s a bit more magnanimous, calling their affair an “exchange.” Don’t go into Sexual Misconduct expecting an Oleanna-style war of words; Moscovitch’s characters are far less confrontational, and her style is much subtler. You’ll hardly notice the slick flip of the script in the final scene.
Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes opened May 8, 2025, at the Minetta Lane Theatre and runs through June 18. Tickets and information: audiblexminetta.com
