All the Rage

by Brad Fraser

  Vivien, who’d already seen the show, appeared in the rehearsal hall wearing a chic camel-coloured ensemble, her riot of curly blonde hair writhing around her head as it always did. She said in her plummy English accent, “We’re all very proud of you, Brad. This is an amazing accomplishment.” Then she hugged me and I began to cry. She rocked me and patted my back until I could pull myself together and thank her for her support as the sound of applause blared from the speakers.

  The reviews took days to come out and weren’t the unbridled raves I’d dreamed of. The Edmonton Journal reviewer talked about my need to tame the theatrical devices raging in my system and bemoaned my merciless assessment of his generation. Alan Hustak, who had directed Zastrozzi, gave it a qualified thumbs-up on CBC Radio and referred to me as “an abrasive young talent.” The university paper gave us a rave. This was my first experience with reviewers as a writer and director, and the mixed response would be a hallmark of my future career. Eventually a review would come out, written by U of A English professor Diane Bessai, that was both critical and constructive. It ran in the Canadian Theatre Review and helped to spread word of my show and my potential. Diane became one of my most astute critics and ardent supporters. I had many stimulating encounters with her over the years.

  But those first reviews made me fucking miserable.

  Unknown to me, attendance at the show had been building in the second week. Vivien told me they were amazed at the number of young people coming to a theatre known for catering mostly to the violet-rinse set. At Flashback people stopped me to say how blown away they’d been by the show. Stephen Heatley had me in to speak to one of his university theatre classes, and it was clear to me that most of the people in the class had been affected by it—even if they hadn’t liked it.

  On closing night I finally went back to see the show and was astounded by how the cast had claimed it. They were truly living within the framework of the play, and it was theirs now. Sitting among the audience, I finally felt proud of what I’d done, regardless of what anyone else thought about it.

  I rewrote the play after that production but for all the wrong reasons. Instead of working to make it closer to what I’d hoped to write, I tried to integrate and answer everyone’s criticisms. In doing so, and in cutting most of the profanity and sexually explicit material, I wrote for approval. No one who read the rewrite liked it. Everyone talked about how it had lost its rawness and spine. They were right.

  Shortly after we closed, the actors went through their withdrawal depression, weeks after I’d gotten over mine. This crash is almost inevitable for anyone working on a show, partly because of the loss of creative activity and social interaction that comes with the theatre, and partly for being out of work again. I got a call from Gerry Potter, who’d recently founded Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre as artistic director. I knew Gerry from my first year at Banff. He told me Paul Thompson was in town, had seen the show and wanted to meet me.

  I said, “Who the hell’s Paul Thompson?”

  Gerry filled me in. Paul Thompson is often credited with being one of the originators of collective creation, as it was known then, and was one of the founders of Theatre Passe Muraille. Today they call collective creations devised/documentary/verbatim theatre. It can take many forms but usually asks performers to also be writers, to do exhaustive research with authentic subjects, which they then share with the rest of the company to form some sort of theatrical presentation. The most successful have always had a strong director or writer behind the scenes to shape and curate the material.

  I remembered reading in the papers about his collective show I Love You, Baby Blue, a collective lampooning sex in Toronto, after it was closed by the cops and the entire cast arrested for nudity and sexual content. The case was huge news across the country because it challenged Canada’s obscenity laws and won. After closing to deal with the court case, the show reopened in a larger house and did enough business that Theatre Passe Muraille could rent its own building.

  The immense success of Paul Thompson’s next show is said to have bought the building. That show was Maggie and Pierre, about Canada’s Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, and his wild-child wife, the former Margaret Kemper, bad girl and Rolling Stones enthusiast. It was co-created with, and performed by, one of Canada’s most wonderful theatre-makers, Linda Griffiths, who played both Maggie and Pierre during the one-person show. It had just completed a successful national tour the year we did Mutants.

  When I met Paul on campus for a coffee, I was confronted by a smallish, elf-faced man with a heavy white beard and plenty of white hair—an odd combination of hobbit and Gandalf. He was in his early forties then but I swear he looks the same forty years later as he did on that day in 1981. He had a chaotic energy, leaping from subject to subject, listening and not listening in equal parts.

  He’d seen the show and was blown away by its intensity and the authentic performances he thought I’d drawn from the amateur cast. I asked him if he wanted to do the play in Toronto. He shook his head and told me it was a promising play but wouldn’t fly there. “Let it go,” he said. “It’s your first play. Leave it behind. What are you working on now?”

  The truth was I wasn’t working on anything, as in addition to my day job I’d started working at a new gay bar called Boots ’n Saddle. But I lied and said I was well into the first act of a new play. Paul asked what it was about. I threw out an idea I’d been toying with for a while, about two boys in a mental home. One of them, a jock from a well-to-do family, had attempted suicide. The other, a smart-mouthed street hustler, had tried to kill someone. The hustler character also believed, perhaps truthfully, perhaps not, that he had the power of a werewolf.

  Paul Thompson’s eyes lit up. “When can I read what you’ve got?”

  “Oh it’s pretty rough right now,” I said. “I’ll need a few weeks to get the first act done.”

  He said, “Send it to me as soon as you’re finished. I’ll talk to the artistic director at 25th Street Theatre in Saskatoon. They’ve been doing some risky stuff.”

  We parted with a handshake, and I raced home to my typewriter to bring this bogus play into existence.

  PART FOUR

  WOLFBOY

  IN THOSE EARLY DAYS I WROTE without a net. No outline, only a vague plan, a concept and a lot of fumbling around on the page. Such was my technique.

  I was great at writing David and Bernie, the wolfboy and the jock. Annie, the ghost girl who haunts David, and even his rather one-dimensional father basically worked, but I’d decided to ape my love of Equus a little too closely and added a psychiatrist character who, like Dysart in that play, works to get the truth of the dramatic event from Bernie. And, just to increase my likelihood of failure, I’d decided the play would have a three-act structure in the classic mid-twentieth-century American way.

  I banged out the first act in a couple of weeks. It was thirty pages of mostly interplay between David and Bernie, fun to write, and only hinting at the complications to come from the secondary characters. I didn’t even bother to rewrite these first thirty-five pages before sending them off to Paul with only a cursory hand edit.

  Around this time I met my first boyfriend, which was a great relief because Cam had been dumped by Lorne and found his own apartment and another boyfriend, while I’d had none.

  My boyfriend worked as a cook on a ship in the Arctic Ocean for four weeks straight, then had ten days off to come home. When we met, he was in the last few days of this furlough and crazy to party. We left Flashback together that night and spent the next three days smoking pot, drinking beer, eating pizza and exploring one another. It was heaven.

  When he returned to work on that ship at the North Pole, I spent the next four weeks missing him. I also wrote the second act of Wolfboy (which was then called Die Lycanthrope, my nod to Die Fledermaus, the opera that had been one of the inspirations for my hero Batman) and sent it off to Pa
ul Thompson.

  The boyfriend returned from the ship and we had a heartfelt reunion. Nothing is more endless at the age of twenty-two than a four-week separation from someone you desire and hope you love. Between my shifts at the bar and his catching up on his life, we didn’t have time to truly reconnect until the weekend, and when we did it was an epic food/blow/sex party. He told me he loved me. I told him I loved him. Then we blacked out.

  And after that? I wish I could remember. I know we saw one another a few more times but just kind of mutually lost interest. There was no big scene. No dramatic breakup. It was as if, after that night of partying, everything else was anticlimactic.

  Paul Thompson contacted me after reading the first two acts of Die Lycanthrope and loving it. A short time later I heard from Andy Tahn, then artistic director of 25th Street Theatre. He also loved the play and wanted to produce it in the upcoming season. He sent me a telegram contract that I pored over exhaustively before signing the last page and sending it back. The play was contracted to open in mid-October, which was just a few months away.

  Randy read every scene as it came out of my typewriter. We talked about the characters, their motivations, where it should go, what it all meant. I hoped he’d play the suicidal jock and I’d play the hustler. At Thompson’s suggestion I added the part of a naive young nurse, Cherry (named after the Cherry Ames student nurse books my cousins had read as girls) for Hilda to play. Paul had loved Hilda in Mutants and thought she had a lot of promise.

  A month and a half later I got on a commercial airliner for the first time to fly to Toronto to meet the director and some of the cast who would join me in Saskatoon. Layne Coleman, someone I had no familiarity with at all, had been hired to direct, and I was coming in for casting “approval” and to work with him on the third act.

  I was excited. I’d taken a leave of absence from the gay bar, cashed in all my retirement benefits from the telephone company and art shop, and was flying to Toronto at someone else’s expense with $400 in traveller’s cheques carefully hidden in my carry-on.

  Randy drove me to the airport that day. We didn’t hug before I went through security because men didn’t show affection to one another at that time, so we shook hands instead and looked into one another’s eyes with excitement and fear. I’d tried to get him cast as Bernie but I don’t think Paul thought much of his acting in Mutants, killing my dreams of us becoming a famous theatrical duo.

  Layne picked me up at the airport with his girlfriend, Karen Woolridge, who was playing the ghost girl Annie. As we drove into the city I asked if the large body of water we were passing was the Atlantic Ocean. Karen barely managed not to roll her eyes as she said “Lake Ontario.” I felt like a total hick.

  I was deposited at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Charles Street East, half a block from Church Street. Despite the elevated name, this was a theatrical hotel, cheap and relatively clean. It had a large room with a queen bed, bath and kitchenette. I’d packed my ginormous ghetto blaster into my hockey bag along with my favourite cassettes and most of my wardrobe, so I was set up for four days of hard work and hard fun.

  After I unpacked I lay down on the bed for a snooze, and was just nodding off when something hit my chest. I opened my eyes and saw my first cockroach—sitting next to my nipple. It must have fallen off of the ceiling. I freaked out, flicked it across the room, grabbed a shoe and obliterated the roach, then called the front desk, outraged. “A cockroach just fell on my chest,” I said in my most wounded voice.

  There was a brief pause before the desk clerk said, “You’re aware you’re staying in downtown Toronto, right?” I thanked him dryly and hung up. My childhood amid vermin had not inured me to bugs.

  After grabbing a burger at a McDonald’s on Yonge Street I stocked up on some Stoned Wheat Thins and grapefruit juice from the Becker’s, along with a dozen beers from the Beer Store that I stowed in the tiny fridge, and set out to discover gay Toronto. I’d done my research in the pages of The Body Politic, Canada’s national gay publication which could be bought at any newsstand next to the porn and had a list of places I wanted to check out.

  I headed south to St. Joseph Street and checked out Katrina’s. It was obviously too early for much action and I think it was a Tuesday night, which holds little promise in any city to this day, but the DJ, a swarthy hot moustachioed white guy with a South African accent, took a shine to me and offered me some pot if I had someplace we could share it. I said my hotel was just a few blocks away. He turned the booth over to another guy and we headed back to my hotel room to get high. I couldn’t believe how fast I’d gotten lucky.

  As we smoked the joint, he perused my cassettes, which ranged from Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen to Soft Cell and the Kingston Trio, and became decidedly less flirtatious. By the time we were high he could barely wait to get out of the apartment. I said goodbye and faced the hard realization I’d just been rejected for my taste in music.

  Undaunted, I next went to Buddy’s, in an alley off Gerrard Street, where I met a gaggle of friendly, middle-aged sweater queens and struck up a conversation about local bars. When one of them warned me against going to the Barn because of its “overt leather overtones” I decided that was probably the best place for me to check out.

  The Barn was a small, hot bar with a tiny dance floor, great music and the most interesting group of characters you could find in Toronto on any night of the week. I found the “overt leather overtones” were mostly mild. In those days the Barn was above a piano bar with a geriatric clientele, but the club would eventually take over the entire building. It was cruisy, and the guys ranged over every physical type and age, skewing slightly toward the over-thirty set. This was the bar the glamour boys showed up at after an evening at the stand-and-model bars if they were serious about getting laid. This would remain my go-to bar in Toronto for the next twenty-five years. No matter where I’d been earlier, I’d almost always end up at the Barn for last call.

  I was cruised a lot and was a bit intimidated by how aggressive an act it was at the Barn—none of the passive-aggressive “I’m cruising you/I’m not cruising you” I’d learned at the Edmonton bars. I alternated between being flattered and repulsed and, at the end of the evening, went back to my hotel with a hottish thirty-fivish hairy guy who was drunkenly friendly.

  The next morning I grabbed a fast-food breakfast and walked to Theatre Passe Muraille, where the reading would be held. Gradually the cast arrived and I met the actors. Stuart Clow and Angelo Rizacos were cast as David and Bernie. Bob Collins had been cast as the abusive/regretful father, Karen Woolridge played David’s dead friend Annie, and Jo Ann McIntyre was cast as Dr. Sherrot. Someone must have read in for Cherry, since we wouldn’t see Hilda until we got to Saskatoon.

  They read the first two acts. The David/Bernie scenes really sizzled. The David/Annie scenes were properly provocative, and the boys with the young nurse scenes were fun. But the Bernie and his father with Dr. Sherrot scenes, which were as plentiful as any other subplot in the play, were forced and derivative. Even worse, there was not yet a third act to end the play.

  At the end of the reading everyone was complimentary and intrigued. Bob Collins, wearing a nearly floor-length coyote fur coat and an outback hat, said, “So what happens with this weird vampire kid and the jock? Do they fuck or what?”

  That was exactly the dilemma I was wrestling with as I worked toward the end of the play. Did they fuck or what?

  Layne and I went for something to eat after the reading and talked through the possibilities. Then I went back to the hotel and worked diligently through the next few days. I gave the material I’d already written a heavy edit based on that first day’s reading—there’s no better way to spot the overwriting in an early draft than to hear the words spoken aloud—and pushed into the third act.

  I stopped writing late in the evening, when I’d head out for dinner and another gay bar to explore. After Edmonton
with its three bars, the excess of choice in Toronto was overwhelming. I learned quickly that if they weren’t interested in fucking with you, guys in Toronto bars had little interest in talking to you. The clone look had taken over, and everyone had a moustache and muscles packed into white wifebeaters and 501s. I had a moustache and bad posture. I was not immediately comfortable in these more competitive bars. It wasn’t until after at least two beers and forty-five minutes that I’d stop feeling hideously self-conscious and relax a bit.

  After checking out whichever bar was happening that night and sometimes picking up, sometimes not, I’d go back to the hotel and write until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, finishing the final scene of the final act after two days. In that version David blew Bernie, leading to Bernie’s realization that the whole relationship had just been an extended gay grooming. Bernie returned home with his father, and David started to howl like a wolf, then stopped, said “Fuck it,” and walked off the stage. Blackout.

  The ending didn’t work for Layne at all. He said it was all fuck and suck and who-loves-who and not very exciting. And he was right. The ending was a bit of a queer ambush from a play that skirted the issue for most of its playing time. I had no idea of where to go and he could do little to help me.

  Perhaps if I’d had an experienced queer dramaturge or director to help me find a way to fuse my sensibility, which was still very homoerotic without being homo-explicit, and my subject, which was the struggle for intimacy in a world that encourages only the most mundane kind of contact, things might’ve been different for Wolfboy, but such a person wasn’t available to me at the time. That Layne was not that person is not his fault. He did everything with and for my flawed writing that he possibly could.