Toronto playwright Hannah Moscovitch admits she likes extreme events.

Her plays deal with topics that bring out unseen and often unsavoury parts of the human personality, such as the Holocaust or the breakdown of Communism.

East of Berlin, which sold out at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre two months ago, is about the son of a Nazi sympathizer who falls in love with the daughter of a Holocaust victim.

It had the audience simultaneously laughing and "rooting for the son of a Nazi, someone who really wants the audience's forgiveness," Moscovitch told CBC Radio's Q cultural affairs show on Tuesday.

Before it closed, it was already scheduled to come back next season.

Two more of her hits, The Russian Play and Essay, are opening at Factory Theatre in Toronto later this month.

The Russian Play, the story of a destitute teenage flower-shop girl who falls in love against the background of Stalinist Russia's shifting political landscape, won the jury prize at the SummerWorks Theatre Festival.

Essay, critically acclaimed at the 2005 SummerWorks festival, explores academic and gender politics in a way that has the audience switching allegiances from one extreme to another.

"I'm interested in the view that personalities are flexible and within us there is potentiality for many different kinds of behavior — altruism to genocide, all within the same person," Moscovitch said.

She said she likes to see an audience participate and that one great way to do that is to get them to laugh.

"In the most profound and the most tragic of circumstances, we are funny and absurd. So, I'm trying to represent that on stage," she said.

Moscovitch, 29, trained at the National Theatre School in Montreal, but after graduating found she wanted to play a greater role in the creative vision of the theatre. That's when she began to write.

She admits she finds the world "complex" and likes to see how her characters behave when buffeted by the forces of history. 

"What we find is that history is an unacknowledged part of people's identity, " she said.

"People base their whole lives on ideas that were constructed in times past. … To not talk about that is to not know why you think what you do," she said.

The Russian Play and Essay open as a double bill at the Factory Theatre in Toronto on Jan. 19.