If you’re presenting a play about a middle-aged celebrated author and university professor who embarks on an affair with one of his teenage students, casting Hugh Jackman in the lead seems like stacking the deck. Renowned for his unsurpassable charisma and rapport with audiences, the Australian actor proves so winning in Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes that you find yourself rooting for his character despite his transgressions. It makes you think how much different American Beauty would have been if only Kevin Spacey had been appealing.
The play is being presented by Audible and TOGETHER, the latter a new partnership between Jackman and producer Sonia Friedman designed to create small-scale productions featuring notable performers without commercial pressures. This 2020 drama by Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch runs in repertory with a new version of Strindberg’s Creditors starring Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff, and Justice Smith.
Jackman’s charm is on full display from the beginning of the piece, in which his character, Jon, narrates the proceedings and even interacts with audience members. When a woman sitting up front began a coughing jag, Jackman (or was it Jon?) offered her some water. “No, really,” he insisted, when she looked at him disbelievingly. At the end of the show, he asked her if she was okay.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
We’re thus fully in the palm of Jon’s hand (or was it Jackman’s?) when he proceeds to tell us about his three failed marriages and his inability to make progress on his latest novel about “turn-of-the-century lumberjacks.” We watch as he mows his front lawn and goes jogging, complaining about the creakiness of his middle-aged knees. And then he has a series of encounters with nineteen-year-old Annie (Ella Beatty), one of his students who happens to live in an apartment next door to his house and who wears a very distinctive red coat.
Annie, who aspires to being a writer herself, is awestruck by her professor and Jon soon finds himself irresistibly drawn to her. When he eventually invites her into his home, he shares his discomfort with us.
“Well, this, he recognized, was very bad,” he comments, although it’s clearly not bad enough for him to stop what he’s doing.
The ensuing affair, complete with liaisons in cheap hotel rooms and the inside of Jon’s car, proves predictable in its complications, feeling very much like any number of dramas revolving around imbalanced sexual relationships. It’s only as the play progresses that it becomes something more original and interesting, with the power dynamics and eventually even the perspective shifting. That the playwright is a woman telling the tale from a man’s point of view provides a clue as to what makes Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes so distinctive, if not particularly weighty.
This stripped-down production, featuring a bare minimum of scenery, proves very effective. Director Ian Rickson avoids theatrical bells and whistles, letting his actors shine, and it’s a treat to see Jackman in such an up-close-and-personal setting. The actor doesn’t disappoint, showcasing his character’s vulnerabilities, self-doubt and even pettiness when he finds the tables turned on him late in the story. Beatty proves more of a mixed bag, proving more convincing as the younger, innocent Annie than the older, more self-confident one. There’s an overall blankness to her affect that can be distracting, but it also serves her well in some deadpan comedic moments. In any case, her work here is a considerable improvement over her recent supporting turn in the Lincoln Center production of Ibsen’s Ghosts.
Contrasted with the overblown Broadway productions of Good Night, and Good Luck and Glengarry Glen Ross that are being presented in much-too-large musical houses, this modest theatrical venture is to be commended. It’s fun to see Jackman as Professor Harold Hill or strutting his stuff at Radio City Music Hall, but watching him stretch his acting muscles from just a few feet away provides satisfactions of a richer kind.
Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes opened May 8, 2025, at the Minetta Lane Theatre and runs through June 18. Tickets and information: audible.com
