by Brad Fraser
Our first preview was a fundraiser for the local AIDS network and was packed to the rafters with a queer and queer-friendly audience. I sat on the top balcony in the worst seat of the house, where few could see me, my palms sweating, heart pounding.
There was applause as Michael Dobbin took the stage for the traditional pre-show chat (which I always found unbearable whoever was doing it), but his turned out to be far different than the usual patter. The original 1931 Frankenstein film opens with a scene of a stern gentleman coming out from behind the curtain to warn the audience, on behalf of the producer, that they are about to witness images that might horrify them and now was their chance to leave. That’s basically what Dobbin did. He warned the audience that what they were about to see would not be to everyone’s taste and, if anyone wanted to change their mind now, the box office would happily refund their money.
Had this been done as a marketing ploy it would’ve been brilliant, but he was sincere. If Susan’s apologetic production couldn’t make it to the stage, he’d come out and apologize for the play before it even began.
No one took him up on his offer.
The house lights dimmed and the stage lights rose on the cast doing their chorus bit. Then Kate as Benita, in a Louise Brooks wig and S&M gear, standing at the top of the two-storey metal-and-leather set, started the urban-legend monologue that opens the play. I could feel an electricity in the house. Everyone was in a state of intense collective listening. There were a few titters at the end of her speech, but when the next scene started, with David arriving at the apartment and calling out, “Honey, I’m homo,” the theatre exploded with laughter and the ride began.
Initially the cast was thrown off by the laughter. They’d had bleakness drilled into them for so long they were completely unprepared for the blinding flashes of light the humour brought to the show. They adjusted quickly, and after a couple of scenes they, like the audience, like the playwright, were riding the roller coaster that was Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love experiencing its first audience.
Every actor in the show rose to the occasion, and, as I knew he would be, John was the perfect David McMillan. He managed to be defiant and broken, horrible and lovable. He caught all of the character’s nuances, turning in a masterful performance.
After that preview, the opening seemed incidental, but it went equally well, despite another huge blizzard that made me late for my own premiere.
At the start of every show Dobbin came out and offered the buyers their money back if they wanted to leave. No one ever left then, but Pete reported to me that there had been a number of walk-outs at the midway point in act one where Candy kisses her lesbian friend Jerri. This delighted me. I’ve always felt that theatre the right people walk out of is theatre that matters.
Reviews were mostly positive. The reviewer at the Calgary Herald was particularly taken with it and gave it a rave. Some were troubled by the nudity. Some dismissed my obvious pop-culture influences. The Globe and Mail, as would become tradition, was sniffy, including a homophobic comment about “homosexual wish fulfilment” that straight white male reviewers were still getting away with in those days. Most of them refused to acknowledge that a physical love could exist between straight and gay men. My experience exposed their lies, but, worse, they never called their straight counterparts out for the endless plays by het men that involve a lovely young woman falling in love with a middle-aged man who has no redeeming characteristics at all.
A few days later, the folksy, much-loved, Peter Gzowski interviewed me for As It Happens on CBC Radio and asked, with a snide tone, “And what about the critics who have called it ‘homosexual wish-fulfilment’?” I replied, “I’m writing about the interesting straight men, not guys who write reviews. Sexuality is far more contextual and varied than the boring straight people like to believe.” For the first time in the interview he looked down at his notes to find the next question.
There were also those who denounced the show. This was Alberta, after all, and some in the Bible belt didn’t appreciate this dark faggot shit in their local theatre. This chorus of protesters who felt it necessary to denounce the “lifestyle” of my characters—“lifestyle” being code for gay—would become a constant refrain anywhere the play was produced, and continues in some places today.
The other thing that became clear during this limited run of the play, and with my later plays, is that the people coming to see the show in large numbers were not the usual demographic that goes to the theatre. Most were younger, hipper and willing to spend their money on something that spoke to them.
Reactions to the play among those working in the theatre were varied. A lot of the old guard were flummoxed by the show’s popularity. There was something about it that threatened them, which probably had to do with every character in the play being under thirty, but also had to do with a traditional sense of class decorum within the theatre which I’d just roughly butt-fucked with my play.
I have never for a moment regretted anything I did in that situation and never again had a premiere production where I didn’t have approval of the director.
The final show was on the last day of the festival, a cold Sunday afternoon. Pete had gone ahead to prep before the show. I walked to the theatre.
As I approached the Centre for the Performing Arts, I noticed a long lineup outside the building. It was people who’d come hoping for a ticket to Remains. As I passed by, some of them called out to me to get them a ticket. I shrugged apologetically. I’d just smoked a joint and was high as a kite. This was not what I’d expected.
The theatre was a madhouse as people roiled in the lobby waiting to get into the theatre. A Sold Out sign hung in the ticket window. I gave my seat up to someone in line and climbed to the third balcony, hoping for a place to hide in the shadows and see my show.
There was no hiding. The house was literally standing-room-only, so I was forced to stand at the railing with numerous other people as the house lights came down and the stage lights came up on the last Calgary performance of the play that was about to change my life.
ACT TWO
PART ONE
REMAINS: EDMONTON/TORONTO/MONTREAL
AS FUN, ROMANTIC AND NARRATIVELY satisfying as tales of overnight success are, they have been non-existent in my life. In the case of Remains it was a particularly slow burn. Despite the flurry of controversy and press that had accompanied the opening, things were decidedly not spiralling beyond my control.
Most of the theatres known for producing Canadian work were less than supportive of the script. Many of the artistic directors expressed discomfort with the play’s lack of adherence to the constantly shifting, frequently classist neo-con/lib hegemony that had only recently been established in academia and was worming its way into the theatre.
This school of thought, which essentially tries to dictate a series of social rules for the populace rooted in a perceived hierarchy of privilege based on race, gender, sexuality—anything but class, which those who can afford to attend university like to steer clear of—while also ignoring context and nuance, was relatively new at the time but had already infected most liberal arts programs and government-funded theatres. Their excuses for rejecting the play were that it was too (if they were a feminist theatre) male, too (if they were run by a straight person, male or female) queer, too (if they were run by a “survivor” of something) violent, too (if run by a gay person) homophobic and so on.
To my greatest surprise even Theatre Passe Muraille passed on the play. Decades later, someone who’d been in on the decision admitted it was because some found the play too gay.
I was less surprised when Urjo Kareda also passed on it for the Tarragon, because I’d already seen his reaction to the show in Calgary. It had been at a matinee performance; I’d just dropped something off to Pete in his dressing room, hung around to watch curtain call, and walked out into the theatre after I
thought the audience had left. Because of his bad knees that required him to use double canes, Urjo usually sat on an aisle in the front row and remained seated until everyone else had gone. I nearly bumped into him as I was leaving. We greeted one another.
“Well,” he said, “you’re hot in the west,” lips pursing slightly with disapproval.
I extended my arm. “Do you need any help getting out of the theatre?”
He laughed at my bitchiness and winked at me.
I jerked my thumb to indicate the stage and said, “This play’s gonna be hot everywhere. You should do it.”
He laughed derisively as I exited.
I’d met Jim Millan in Calgary the year before. He was connected to the One Yellow Rabbit group and we’d all spent many nights after the shows laughing and swilling beer until the proprietor threw us out of the bar. Jim had been a supporter from the first public reading of Remains, and after its success he began to propose a production at Crow’s Theatre, which he had founded in Toronto. Jim’s confident self-promotion made my judgmental Scottish side nervous, although I also found him charming and quite fun. However, I remained noncommittal.
Knowing my residence at Alberta Theatre Projects was at an end and unlikely to be renewed after everything that had gone on with Remains, Pete and I had both been seeking employment in Edmonton, and we scored.
Not only was I to direct the script he’d written for the Citadel’s Teen Festival, but Northern Light Theatre had commissioned us to adapt The Revenger’s Tragedy, a seventeenth-century blood-and-gore genre script. I called my buddy at Chianti and secured a couple of waiter shifts a week, and we sublet the Calgary apartment and moved into Pete’s very junior one-bedroom apartment near the university in Edmonton.
We were in that apartment when Pete found out he’d been invited to be part of the acting company at the Stratford Festival the next summer. He was elated. So was I. But there was this thing we both had when the other got something we weren’t part of that was tinged with competitive professional jealousy. Although we always sold ourselves as a team of writers, we’d both had other irons in the fire before our merger, and a number of those came to fruition during this period.
Between waiting shifts and partying, Pete and I put the finishing touches on his script for the Teen Festival. Blood Buddies was written by Pete with significant input by me. The exact plot now eludes me—something about gangs in schools on which we hung a number of issues we wanted to talk about, including being a gay teen, sexual assault and bullying. There were over twenty characters, ranging through all shapes, sizes and races. The climactic moment was the gang rape of one of our female protagonists and her bloody revenge on the boy who’s led the attack. There was also a gay bashing and an overweight lesbianish character who terrorized all the men.
Because we’d been offered the large Shoctor Theatre, a space I’d dreamed of working in since my first trip in high school, I encouraged Pete to make the script as wide-ranging and theatrical as possible. This was my first chance to direct something with such scope, and I wanted to learn as much as I possibly could.
The designer, David Skelton, my most frequent collaborator throughout my career, came up with an amazing two-level set surrounded by backstop wire. The “furniture pieces” on the floor were rusted metal drums and boxes. His model had a bleak, dystopian feel that fit the show perfectly. He’s a brilliant designer, and working with him is always challenging and rewarding.
We had an endless week of casting, enduring hours of painful auditions each day to discover some amazing talent here and there. I tended to cast the quirky kids and anyone who was any sort of minority, visible or not. I knew the good-looking ones generally got the parts even if they weren’t as skilled. I always wanted to give the underdogs a chance.
Pete left for Stratford a few days before rehearsals started. The night before he left we discussed everything that had to be done with the play while he was gone.
My directing approach, reinforced after my experience with the vagaries of teenage commitment with Tomoko Sato’s Josh’s Plane in Calgary, can best be described as somewhere between Bob Fosse as depicted in All That Jazz and Erich von Stroheim. I laid out all the rules at the beginning of the process, and I mercilessly fired latecomers and those who didn’t do their homework to make it clear to the cast that I wasn’t dicking around.
The thing I love about working with new actors is teaching them my theatrical vocabulary, which is both technical and intuitive. I was learning to combine my high school teacher Billy Bob’s physical staging with Paul Thompson’s process of making the artists responsible for their own choices rather than always looking to the director to tell them what to do. It wasn’t easy, and it took a lot of reinforcement, but I’d learned that if you give the performers a strong physical structure for the show, and also keep working with them to get inside their characters, they almost always get it enough to serve their function within the production.
When Pete had negotiated his contract with Stratford he’d insisted on an allowance to come home for the opening of his show. I was eager to show him what I’d done, and after sitting through a dress rehearsal he was very excited about the opening.
That first high school audience of eight hundred were shocked by what they were seeing. The cast was shocked to discover they were shocking their peers. There was some inappropriate laughter and commentary from the spectators, which disturbed the actors. When, during the gang rape at the end, certain male members of the audience were yelling “Do the bitch!” I knew we were in trouble.
After the show Pete looked at me in shock. I assured him the next show would be the one. Then I went back to the dressing rooms to assemble the cast and remind them that they were the ones who were supposed to control the show whereas tonight they had let the audience control them.
For the second show, the cast was entirely in control. The rhythm of the piece, the pauses, the syncopating of characters’ voices and objectives were all clear, and when the lights came up many in the audience were openly weeping. The failure in the first show had galvanized us for the second.
Pete was ecstatic. That was the show he’d hoped to see. Before he returned to Stratford we made arrangements to sublet his place so I could travel out to stay with him for the last six weeks of his contract. This time in Stratford would allow us to do the requisite research and analysis of The Revenger’s Tragedy so we could adapt it before we returned home.
* * *
—
I turned thirty that summer and threw a huge party for myself called the Black Cotillion, at the home of one of the cooks from Chianti. A great many people came and it was legendary; family members, Beverly friends, folks from PA, endless restaurant workers, the gays, the straights, drag queens, people from Calgary and Toronto, it was a microcosm of my life to that point.
The next morning I was hungover and depressed. I had always told myself that if I hadn’t made some kind of mark in the theatre world by thirty, I’d go back to school and take something that would give me a real job to take me into the future. Was it time to sacrifice myself to something I could make a secure living at?
That’s what I was considering when Gerry Potter from Workshop West called to tell me he had decided to program Remains for the following winter and wanted me to direct. I accepted and thanked him emphatically. I’d genuinely been thinking the play, like most Canadian plays, wouldn’t have a second production.
Shortly after that Jim Millan called. He also wanted to commit to producing the play the following winter in Toronto. After speaking with Gerry, we decided Jim could premiere the show and our production would open a month later in Edmonton. I received small advances from both theatres when the contracts were sent, which, not having spoken to my agent in a few years, I ran past the Playwrights Guild of Canada before signing. It was an embarrassingly small amount of money, but it would offset the time in Stratford, where I wouldn
’t be earning anything.
Although our reunion was tender, Pete’s gruelling schedule of rehearsals, performances, classes and workshops meant we’d do little more than sleep together for the first couple of weeks. I played the dutiful Stratford wife, ensuring dinner was on the table when he got home so we could have a few hours to chat and watch TV before retiring. I went to all the shows Pete was in as well as a couple of others we got discounted tickets for.
One of those shows was director Kelly Handerek’s production of The Changeling, which, just like the show we were adapting, was a Jacobean revenge tragedy. Since I was already steeping myself in the period and the style, I decided I would let those influences inform my next play. For my follow-up to Remains I stepped as far away from its influences as I possibly could and adapted The Changeling for a contemporary audience.
One of the main criticisms of Remains within the theatre community was that the characters weren’t “likeable” enough. I had no idea what this meant, because for me characters, like people, were often likeable and unlikeable simultaneously. I never looked at characters in my shows through the lens of likeability, but rather in terms of complexity and nuance. Who’s likeable in Hamlet? Who’s likeable in Oedipus Rex? Memorable characters are rarely remembered for their likeability. The Canadian theatre’s obsession back then with likeability drove me crazy, so I decided I would challenge it with a play driven almost exclusively by plot. All the characters would serve the storyline and none of them would be “likeable.”
The Ugly Man is one of those titles that came to me along with the idea for the play. I originally subtitled the script “A Gothic Horror Melodrama,” as it was meant to be a stylized satire with pop-culture references in a framework of Jacobean structure.
I’d created characters that were more or less analogous to certain characters from The Changeling. Villain/anti-hero De Flores was replaced with Forest, the mysterious stranger with the terribly scarred face, and the patriarch was replaced with complex Barbara Stanwyck–style anti-heroine Sabina. The young suitors from the original became doomed, likeable Acker, his shy half-brother with the cleft palate, Leslie, and their sexual mercenary boyhood friend Cole. True to the source material, there was a comic maid named Lottie.