by Brad Fraser
Pete was hired to do a show at the Phoenix Theatre just as I was casting Young Art. The dynamic of our relationship had changed radically since we’d left Calgary. Earlier we’d been a writing team who worked together, but that had evolved to his mostly working as an actor and my being hired for writing projects on my own. We still got along well, but that creative thing that we had enjoyed so much and done so well together barely existed anymore. He was becoming more withdrawn. These silences weren’t sullen. They were sad. I kept waiting for him to say something.
We also remounted our production of Remains in my old workplace, the Roxy Theatre on 124th, which had recently been purchased by Theatre Network. I found it literarily unlikely that the place where I wrote in high school, dreaming of being a well-known writer, was about to house a production that would help make me exactly that—and yet there we were.
The theatre had barely been altered from its cinema days; basically there was now a stage where the torn screen used to be. It still had the same worn hardwood floors and the greyed, frayed seats still smelled of decades of cigarette smoke, bodily secretions and the decaying horsehair that filled them. There was no sink or dressing room backstage, but we got the show up and squeezed another well-sold month out of it.
One night after Pete got home I opened each of us a beer, switched the TV off and sat in the chair across from him—a sure sign something serious was going to happen, as we usually sat side by side on the couch. I said, “I know something’s wrong.”
He nodded, looking miserable.
I said, “Just say it.”
He said, “I love you. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you. But living together like this—I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Are you seeing a woman?”
He shook his head. “No. It’s not that. It’s—” He took a deep breath. “People are saying I’m only with you because you’re doing so well.”
“We’re suddenly concerned about what people say?”
He laughed. Then he began to cry. Then I began to cry. I moved to the couch, took my place beside him, and we held each other and wept. Then we climbed into bed and clung together, pretending to be sleeping as we considered the future.
The next morning we were extremely careful with one another. We went for breakfast at the greasy spoon at the Ambassador Hotel down the block. As we tucked into our bacon and eggs I said, “I want the cat.”
He nodded. “It’ll take me a while to find a place.”
“Will it bother you if we live together until then?”
“Will it bother you?”
“We don’t have much choice.”
“Are we going to tell people?”
I said, “Why don’t we save that until you’ve moved out?”
He nodded and we finished our breakfast, sharing different sections of the paper as the other finished with it as we always had.
My heart was fragmenting.
PART TWO
REMAINS: CHICAGO/NEW YORK
FOR THE NEXT FEW MONTHS Pete and I got on with our careers while renegotiating our relationship. Luckily we were both busy. He slept on the futon in the office. The only time we saw one another was when one of us stumbled in late after rehearsal and drinks, accidentally waking the other to briefly apologize.
Young Art was the opposite of Blood Buddies in that it had a much smaller cast and more obviously relatable themes. A number of the kids I cast in the show were performers who’d distinguished themselves in the previous years, and the seven of them became a cohesive team despite their varying levels of experience and expectation. The three juvenile leads worked beautifully together.
The Rice Theatre at the Citadel was an intimate, malleable space that could be configured any number of ways. We made most of the audience feel like they were sitting in Merlin’s lair, implements and items from different time periods and realities heaped all around them. The kids ate it up, screaming with laughter and horror when the characters’ minds were transferred to the wrong bodies and Art and Lance almost kiss. The reviews were enthusiastic and it was a hit.
That spring, our adaptation of The Revenger’s Tragedy opened and we did a bit of press together. The phone rang one afternoon; it was an arts reporter from the CBC who wanted to interview me. I reminded him the show had been adapted by both Pete and me. He said, “Yeah, but we have limited time and, frankly, Pete’s not news. You are.” I protested, but the reporter doubled down: it was me they wanted to talk to.
Pete was looking at me when I hung up. “What’re you gonna do?” he asked.
I grabbed my jacket and said, “I’m going to do my job,” and headed out to do the interview.
When a trendy downtown publicist put together a bohemian tour to New York relatively inexpensively, I leaped at the chance to go, and Randy joined me. This was pre-neo-liberalism/Disney NY, and we were just a few blocks from Times Square where Broadway and squalid danger lived side by side. The entire city smelled like someone had pissed in a cup of sugar and then set it on fire.
The first thing we did was visit the Empire State Building, which was something of a square thing to do in those days so there were no lineups. I marvelled at the beauty of the deco design and was inspecting every nook and cranny for a long time before we even took the elevator to the top. In my childhood dreams I’d always imagined myself to be the illegitimate love child of Wonder Woman and the Empire State Building. From the observation deck we could see the stunning Chrysler Building, the Flatiron, every landmark in the city. I had an architecture-inspired chubby for most of the trip.
We saw a number of Broadway shows after lining up at half-price TKTS in the morning, the best being Tyne Daly starring in Gypsy—a musical even a straight guy like Randy could love because it had strippers—and the worst being The Phantom of the Opera, which I’d insisted on seeing to look at the tech and design. We snickered all the way through it.
In the afternoons we saw the sights or visited museums and art galleries. MoMA had a Francis Bacon retrospective I wanted to see. At night we cruised the clubs and bars, straight and gay. Randy was particularly impressed when I took him to the Stonewall Inn and told him about the riots that had started the gay rights movement. We drank to excess but were surprisingly well-behaved. He had a wife at home and I was terrified of AIDS, signs of which were everywhere. This was the most time we’d spent together in a couple of years, and we got along well.
* * *
—
I arrived back to find Pete had moved out and that I’d been accepted to an apprentice director program at Stratford. Pete would take care of Spooz while I was there. The Stratford experience was a bit baffling because everyone we were supposed to work with was much too busy to actually do work with us. Still, I took advantage of the classes and workshops and learned as much as I could.
The one bright spot to the entire experience was Susan Wright, who was starring in a number of shows while living in Brent Carver’s house right along the river. I saw all the shows she was in, and few stage actresses have given me the kind of immense pleasure Susan did. David William, who was running the Stratford Festival at the time, once referred to her and her sister Janet as “acting continents,” and I knew exactly what he meant. Often I’d go over for a late bite to eat and a lot to drink. As with so many alcoholics I’ve known, Susan’s drunkenness went through stages. The early stage was bright and fun, the medium stage was heavier but often brilliant with observations and insights, and the late stage was either bitterness and bile or maudlin self-pity. I’d go through all of them with her as she finished a bottle of vodka and I put back a few beers.
When I got back to Edmonton I had to pick Spooz up from Pete’s apartment. We parted with a stiff hug. I went into a deep depression that would eventually worry my friends. I started going back to the gay bars, which were dire. Most of the guys I’d worked with nearly a decade earlier at Boots
’n Saddle and Steppin’ Out were sick, dying or dead. Old friends, old tricks, old nemeses, the beautiful, the plain, the loud, the quiet—the virus didn’t discriminate.
A number of people would come out to me about testing positive, casually, over a beer at the club, almost throwing it away as if to say “now you know but we don’t need to discuss it.” Sometimes we’d discuss it anyway; sometimes I’d give them a reassuring sympathetic nod and we’d change the subject. A few of the guys became quite emotional and I’d give them a hug because I knew some of them had no one else to talk to. If it felt inappropriate considering the setting and the general casualness of our acquaintance, I never let it show.
Getting laid in Edmonton hadn’t been easy when I was young, and now that I was over thirty it was even harder. In my time with Pete the gym had slipped away. I had put on weight and was not really dealing with my thinning hair. Sam, a baton-twirling drag queen buddy of yesteryear, had become a popular stylist, and I went to him whenever I could afford it. As he tucked the cape around me and snipped his scissors together playfully he said, “So what are you doing this time?”
I said, “My hair’s really thinning. What do you suggest?”
Sam leaned over to whisper into my ear, “Start working out again and develop a better personality.”
I would take his advice to heart.
Getting my body back into shape took a lot longer than the haircut. Pete and I had shared a lot of bacon, waffle and whipped cream breakfasts and even more bottles of beer during our time together. I was tipping the scales at nearly 240 pounds when we broke up and was carrying most of it in my belly and under my chin. Also I was a terrible cook and quite happy to order pizza four nights a week rather than shop for groceries. I did manage to cut the calorie count down, though, and getting back to the gym really helped.
I was on the phone with Shain a lot. Already inquiries were coming in about the movie rights for Remains, since the Crow’s Theatre revival had been running at Theatre Passe Muraille and was selling nicely. Brent Carver eventually left that show and was replaced by John Moffat, who was happy to step into the part. Sadly, I was never in Toronto when he was doing the show, although he kept me apprised of the experience through our frequent phone calls.
That production would run for months before touring to Winnipeg, Ottawa and Mexico City where it garnered the usual love it/hate it response. A lot of well-known actors cycled through the cast, including Henry Czerny and MuchMusic VJ of the day Erica Ehm.
When Remains opened in Montreal, it was a big hit and things got even zanier. I never saw the Théâtre de Quat’Sous production. It was translated and directed by André Brassard, who had worked extensively with Michel Tremblay, a long-time idol of mine. Being a Western Canadian English writer with a hit show at a Montreal theatre was a real feather in my cap, and questions about other possible translations started to roll in.
I got a nice royalty cheque from that production and celebrated by buying myself a beautiful Avirex distressed-leather biker jacket for the ungodly sum of $1,000 at a trendy store. This jacket would become my signature for the next decade.
One afternoon I was writing when the phone rang.
“Hi, Brad, it’s [Well-fed female gossip columnist/arts writer for the local right-wing tabloid]. How are you?”
“Great, [Well-fed female gossip columnist/arts writer for the local right-wing tabloid]. What’s going on?”
“I hear you’re single.”
“That’s old news.”
“I hear he left you for a woman.”
“Who do you think you are, fucking Hedda Hopper?”
“So is that a no or you don’t know?”
“If you run a ‘straight actor leaves gay playwright for woman’ item I will write the meanest thing about you in the Bullet I can think of. And you know how mean I can be.”
She giggled nervously. “So, any word on a New York production?”
I said, grudgingly, “Let’s just say there might be something happening in Chicago.”
“Chicago?” Her interest was real.
“I can’t say anything else but when we’ve signed something you’ll be the first to know.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
We exchanged a few neutral pleasantries and hung up. In her column the next day there was an item about rumours of a Chicago production of Remains, but nothing about Pete. And when the time came and the contract was signed, I did call her first and give her the scoop.
Alberta Theatre Projects did a staged reading of The Ugly Man as part of its new play festival that was good enough to get Michael Dobbin to commit to it for the following year’s playRites Festival.
Life in the Arlington sans Pete was getting scary. The building had been set on fire three times since we’d moved in, and the antiquated steam heat would often go out on the coldest winter nights. Also I couldn’t live with the carpet in the bathroom anymore. So I rented a tiny bungalow on the north side of town and impulsively bought a kitten dubbed Sushi to keep Spooz company as I was away so much. They eventually became inseperable and Sushi was always Spooz’s cat, rather than mine.
Shain finally nailed down the New York deal, and the details of the Chicago tryout were taking shape. Derek Goldby, whose stunning production of Cyrano de Bergerac I’d seen at the Shaw Festival a few years earlier, was hired to direct. The main producer, Michael Frazier, and one of his three other producing partners called me to express their admiration for the play and their belief it could have a life in New York. At one point Michael said to me, “Don’t be offended but I have to ask, are you gay?”
I said, “Have you read the play?”
We all laughed. As it turned out, they were all gay as well.
A lot of names were bandied around for casting, with Brad Davis and Tom Hulce being the top contenders for David. I would have been happy with either. Davis was sexy as fuck and read as very sexually ambiguous. I hadn’t thought much of Querelle as a film, but I had loved Davis in it. Hulce had been brilliant in his Oscar-nominated role in Amadeus. Someone suggested Madonna for Benita, but that was in the days when someone suggested Madonna for pretty much anything. John Moffat’s intermittent health issues kept him out of the running. I suggested Brent, but the producers said they could only bring one Canadian in for the show and they all loved Lenore Zann (as Candy) and were going with her. I told them I thought they were making a mistake not hiring Brent. In the end Scott Renderer, who worked a lot with the experimental Wooster Group at the time, got the part.
A few months later it was announced in the press that Brad Davis was sick with AIDS. He died a short time later.
Paul Reynolds, who I had not spoken to in months because he’d sounded so weak the last time I’d called, also died around that time. Pete was working in Toronto and called to tell me as soon as he heard. Pete, more than any of the straight people I knew, saw the effects of the plague close up and was always empathetic and supportive. Eventually I thanked him and said, “I love you.” He said, “I love you too.”
In Chicago we out-of-towners were housed in the historic Roosevelt Hotel, an enormous wedding-cake-shaped late nineteenth-century marvel with huge suites that were still in original condition and mostly filled with elderly people who lived there permanently. It was a short and scenic walk to the Halsted Theatre Centre where the show would open in four weeks.
The morning I arrived, which was also the morning the Gulf War was started by the first Bush in the White House—a subject Derek had gotten into a bitter argument about with our cab driver in from the airport—we were whisked off to a press conference at the theatre. I was kind of blown away. We were sitting at a table with quite a number of press people lobbing questions at us about the play. Once I calmed down I managed to be witty and irreverent to counteract how stuffy Derek and some of the producers sounded. I also sensed a certain holding back from the reporters, a
slight edge of disapproval. When I asked Michael Frazier about it later he said, “We’re in shit because we don’t have any Chicago actors in the show.” I smiled and nodded but inside I was rolling my eyes. Opening a show in a major city without the support of the local community can be a problem.
After the press conference we were taken to the rehearsal hall for our introductory meeting with all creative and administrative personnel gathered together for the first time. This was completely unlike the play’s Canadian first-day counterpart because the sales, advertising and promotion teams got as much time to present their contribution as the design and directorial teams did. Meetings were set up for me to talk to the sales team about my ideas for customer outreach.
After finding food and drink, we reconvened in the rehearsal hall around the long table where the reading would take place. At the assigned time everyone who was required to be there was seated and ready to go, except for Lenore and Michelle Kronin, who had been cast as Jerri. Five minutes past the assigned time we were all wondering what the holdup was. Then Lenore and Michelle entered wearing nothing but high heels. The women took their seats primly and the reading began. I loved them both for doing that because they set a tone of “anything goes” for the production from the outset and made things easier for everyone, especially the nudity.