Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes – 13 June 2025

Brilliantly framed, Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes imagines a sexual relationship between a professor and a teenage student. The professor (Hugh Jackman) spoke about himself in the third person, in a quasi-introspective way, while the young girl, Annie (Ella Beatty) did not speak much, but rather moved around the space and was lit (Isabella Byrd) from angles that showed the significance of particular moments. When Beatty spoke, she seemed far away, lost in reflection, and less emotional, whereas Jackman, as the centerpiece, made the audience laugh and seemed to be trying to prove that he was likable despite what he had done.

At the very end of the play, it is revealed that Beatty’s character wrote the play the audience has just watched from the perspective of the professor who abused her as her way of processing what happened. It was a consensual relationship, but the objectifying nature of how her character moved and the disconnected way in which she spoke made it seem as though her primary exploration was one of whether or not she could give consent. This angle she reveals makes everything clear—how paralyzed she felt in the presence of a highly likable, influential professor and how clearly she thought she saw him. Yet she wanted him to be a good person and felt cognitive dissonance from puzzling through whether or not that was mutually exclusive with sleeping with a student. She painted his intentions as good and coming from a place of love, his reason for ending the relationship to be coming from a duty to his wife, and his reason for refraining from contacting her to be coming from his pride in her success.

Looking back on the play, there were moments that stood out where Annie said something beyond her years. For instance, when the professor went to end the relationship, she said something about knowing she was sleeping with a married professor and not expecting it to last. He became emotional and distraught, but she remained stoic and confused. It’s hard to imagine that this is what a real 19 year old would say at this level of rejection—it’s one of the moments that hints that the audience is actually watching her interpretation of his perspective and not an objective, outside perspective on the events as they occurred. It’s amazing how Annie’s character paints herself as simultaneously strong and victimized. This show holds space for many ways in which that can be true, while also portraying her as the ultimate victor—she gets to write about it, reclaim it, and memorialize what happened.

The title, Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes is clever, speaking not just to a middle class income and lifestyle, but also to “classes” as in “coursework” and the “middle” of a story being the important part, despite the primacy and recency effects of the beginning and ending respectively. Sexual misconduct is something that happens between college coursework, but in the end, it’s where you got in to school and what you got out of your diploma that matters. This play is a powerful voice uplifting the lessons of college—not in school, but in life.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.