by Brad Fraser
Chicago had a chip-on-its-shoulder prairie attitude I recognized. I did my usual architecture tours and neighbourhood walkabouts. I went to the Chicago Art Institute and fought back tears of some undefined emotion that made my chest tight as I toured its exhaustive collection of impressionist masterpieces.
Late one night while I was lying in bed listening to music, I became aware of another, discordant sound. I pulled off my headphones and realized the fire alarm was ringing. I leaped out of bed and pulled on my clothes. I could hear approaching sirens. I opened the door and peered into the hall. There was a thin haze of smoke in the air. I grabbed my jacket and key and left my room.
As I moved into the hall I saw there were probably fifteen to twenty elderly people wandering around in confusion while making quietly alarmed sounds. My impulse was to run to the stairwell, but my comic-book-imposed morality said, “Brad, you have to help these senior citizens.” After all, that was what Superman, Wonder Woman or Batman would do.
I clapped my hands to get their attention. I knew there were emergency stairwells on each side of the building. I arbitrarily chose the exit to the right and called for everyone in the vicinity to follow me. The smoke was getting thicker. It was clear the seniors had been looking for someone to take control, and they fell into line quickly as I led them to the stairs and ushered them down the seven stories to the lobby. All around us we could hear people shouting in confusion. The lights in the stairwell flickered. The reek of smoke was everywhere.
I finally got them to the door to the lobby and pushed the handle only to discover the emergency exit was locked. I banged on the door, but there was no response from the other side. I yelled for the seniors to turn around, we had to go back up one floor. There were cries of frustration and confusion. I herded them through the door and down the hall to the stairs on the other side. I felt like I was in the fucking Poseidon Adventure.
This time the door opened onto the lobby and the seniors all pushed past me and streamed out of the hotel without an acknowledgement of any kind.
I went up to a nearby doorman, pointed to the emergency exit door and yelled, “That fucking door is locked!”
He looked panicked. “What?”
“If the fire had been worse we’d all be dead.”
He paled and nodded to indicate the head of security, who was speaking to the head fireman. “I’ll let him know,” he said. I joined the other hotel guests on the street. Eventually we were given an all-clear and sent back to our rooms.
* * *
—
Although I was there for early previews, I never saw the opening. They still had two weeks to go when I had to fly back to Edmonton to direct another Teen Fest show, a musical I’d been working on called Prom Night of the Living Dead.
Remains opened to what could be called, at best, grudgingly acceptable reviews by most of the local critics. No one was full of praise for the show. The producers were disappointed because they’d wanted raves to carry them into New York. Optimistic publicists kept reminding us we had “excellent pull quotes” (out-of-context quotes from mixed reviews that made the critic’s opinion sound better).
On the phone Shain said to me, “Let’s wait and see.”
I was the reigning Edmonton media star when Robin Phillips took over as the artistic director of the Citadel Theatre while we were rehearsing for the Teen Fest.
Canadian arts institutions had to that point invariably been placed in the hands of usually mediocre English or American talents with a moderate resumé, because anyone Canadian would’ve seemed unqualified to them. While some, like Tyrone Guthrie in establishing the Stratford Festival, John Neville in his leadership of various regionals, or Christopher Newton and the opportunities he’d give to the Canadian actors and directors at the Vancouver Playhouse and the Shaw Festival, actually contributed something to the cultural fabric of this country, far too many of them were men of dubious talent whose privileged birthrights had elevated them in a new country to a level they would not have been afforded in their own. For most of its history these sorts of losers set policy for the Canadian arts. It was only near the end of the twentieth century that Canadians finally started taking control of their own national arts organizations, although our sad national inferiority complex is still too evident today.
Robin Phillips had a spotty history in Britain for direction and had made a wan impression as an actor in the 1972 Joan Collins vehicle Tales from the Crypt. After some time as the AD of the Chichester Festival in England, he had arrived in Stratford and taken over the festival, where he’d achieve great acclaim from the critics, who, it must be said, tended to be a rather provincial and fawning lot of Caucasians. Whether the questionable Canadian press contingent were accurate in their reviews of his work at Stratford, I don’t know. I do know that by the time Robin arrived at the Citadel, his career was winding down or he wouldn’t’ve been in Edmonton.
Everyone working at the theatre was summoned to individual meetings with La Phillips. I was hoping we’d like one another a lot and he’d hire me to direct in the season, and went in with my charm button turned up high. Robin greeted me from the other side of his desk with a sweet smile. We chatted brightly. I asked how he was finding Edmonton. He congratulated me on the success of my Remains. I could feel something—a barely concealed vibe of resentment and condescension. Finally he said, “The thing is, Brad, we have a bit of a problem.”
This took me off guard. “Problem?”
He leaned across the desk with a slow, thin-lipped smile. “Yes. You see, The Mousetrap”—the perennial Agatha Christie production that was currently running in the Shoctor Theatre where we were scheduled to perform—“has been doing awfully well at the box office. So well, in fact, we have to cancel both your technical and dress rehearsal to add two extra shows which will make us a lot of money. I’m sure you understand.”
I said, “You realize we’re opening a musical featuring fifty young, amateur actors with four trucks”—large moveable set pieces—“and five traps”—trap doors in the floor for exits, entrances and effects—“as well as numerous microphones and both live and synthesized orchestrations that will require hours of practice?”
Robin tented his fingertips and gave me another iguana smile. “It’s only a teen festival, darling. No one really cares.”
I gave him an equally reptilian smile as I said, “I care. The creative team cares. Those kids care. We’ve been working on it for months. You’re not going to take our tech time away.”
Robin said, “If you’re not happy with that we can always fire you.”
From the look in his eyes I knew he was used to people who capitulated. I said, “I’m going to get the cast and we’re going to leave now. We’ll come back when you’ve got a better offer.” I gave him a friendly smile, returned to the rehearsal hall and told the cast and crew exactly what had happened. Then we walked out of the theatre together.
I knew the pre-sales for the show were high and that the cast wouldn’t go on without my consent. In the long run the theatre stood to lose more money from cancelled shows at the teen festival than they did by losing an extended performance of The Mousetrap.
After three days the Citadel’s producer sent me a diplomatic letter suggesting my meeting with Robin had been a misunderstanding and that we should speak as soon as possible. I wrote back that if that fat has-been was willing to apologize, I could probably convince the cast and crew to return. No apology was forthcoming, but we came to a compromise that lost none of our technical time because it was moved and they got one extra show. This could’ve been solved in the original meeting if Phillips hadn’t wanted a dickdown. I’m not sure why he chose to approach me that way, but I had made a mildly powerful enemy in Robin Phillips.
To occupy my mind while waiting for word on the possible New York production, I waged a war with him in the Edmonton media. The entire local arts-writer clique h
ad basically bowed down to him as he made abundantly clear what he would tolerate (flattery) and what he would not (valid criticism). While they were almost all guilty of this, the main reviewer for the Edmonton Journal basically crawled up his ass and stayed there for the duration of Robin’s time at the Citadel. At one point he had me banned from attending the theatre. I ignored his ban gleefully.
A couple of days after Prom Night of the Living Dead closed, I got a phone call from Shain, and two days later there was a story in the papers saying that the producers of Remains had secured more backers in New York and the play would open off-Broadway at the Orpheum Theatre in September. It was huge news across the country.
I spent the intervening months polishing The Ugly Man, being a local celebrity and having the occasional dalliance with homosexuals travelling through town. The annual arrival of the Ice Capades tour was highly anticipated by local tops in the same way grizzlies anticipate the spawning of salmon.
Randy and his wife had, by sheer happenstance, rented a bungalow just like mine a few blocks away. I called him the night before I left for New York and asked him to come over. We drank beer and I poured out my fear of failure, of being made fun of.
He put his arm around my shoulders and said, “Birdley”—which he only called me when he was drinking and wanted to be affectionate—“you’ve been working for this from the day I met you. You can do it.”
“I’m scared.”
He pulled me closer, ran his hand over my nearly shaved head, tapped my chest with two fingers and said, quoting my own words from Wolfboy back at me, “If it’s not scary it’s not worth doing.”
* * *
—
I arrived in New York in mid-August 1991, when the entire city was wilting beneath a heat wave that made everyone bitchy. The producers had found me a hideous one-bedroom sublet in Hell’s Kitchen, a festival of shag carpeting, dusty bookshelves and furtive cockroaches lingering just always on the edge of your vision, with a small bedroom that led to a smaller bathroom.
We rehearsed in a thirties building on Broadway about halfway to the theatre, which was in the East Village. There was no air conditioning, and the giant fans that had been set up did little to alleviate the fetid humidity that permeated the city. Most of the actors couldn’t wait to take their clothes off. Derek sat shirtless, sweating like an angry cave troll, smoking and waving his hand, calling out to the frustrated actors in his dry English accent, “No. No. For fuck’s sake, no. Stop talking. Think about what you’re saying.”
We took our breaks on the wide stone ledge of the gigantic windows that overlooked the avenue, fearlessly ignoring the thirty-storey drop. I get retro-vertigo thinking about it now.
There had been changes to the cast since Chicago. The cast we finally opened with in New York had Scott Renderer as David, Lenore Zann as Candy, Kimberley Pistone as Benita, Clark Gregg (Marvel’s Agent Coulson) as Bernie, Sam Rockwell (later Oscar winner for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) as Robert, Michael Connor as Kane, and Michelle Kronin as Jerri. I had done a number of small but significant rewrites between Chicago and New York and they were integrated into the new production.
Stage Manager George Boyd was a rangy Texan with a grizzled beard and beautiful laugh lines that ringed his face. He was a showbiz veteran as well as a rare survivor of his generation of New York theatrical gays. He was also my pot connection, and we’d usually get high together after rehearsal. He was an old friend of, and staying with, Marge Champion, wife and dance partner of Gower Champion. Marge and Gower had been stars of stage and screen as one of America’s most accomplished dance couples for decades in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Some of my fondest memories of this time are of the evenings George and I would meet in Marge’s mid-town condo—on the fiftieth floor of a seventies building that was beautifully appointed in that “gilt and mirror” way New Yorkers love so much—getting high while George regaled me with stories of New York during its pig-slut years in the seventies and early eighties, before AIDS.
One night I asked him, “How many did you lose?”
George said, “All of them.”
I tried to hand him the joint but he waved it away and stared out the window.
The publicist had me doing interviews all over town. I finally appeared in Blueboy magazine, the gay equivalent of Playboy, achieving a seventies gay dream just before the mag failed, wearing torn jean cut-offs, heavy socks and high-tops, a green T-shirt and bad hair—perfectly exemplifying the beginning of the 1990s.
The rest of the time I had to myself, but I didn’t have much money. Thankfully, Tad showed up.
When a Canadian gay dude gets a gig in New York that includes an apartment, you can be sure his erratically seen flight attendant friend will make an appearance. Tad had relocated to Toronto just before I moved back to Edmonton, and though we spoke on the phone quite often we hadn’t spent any real time together in a couple of years. He had fallen in love with a former model, and nursed the model as he slowly died of AIDS. I had not seen him at all through that period.
I was happy to have a friend to explore the bars and sex scene with. At that time, the only scene was basically J’s Hangout near the West Side Highway, a dark, unlicensed (you could bring your own beer) check-your-clothes-and-suck-cock-all-night-long kinda place. I went once but it wasn’t really my scene. Tad was there every night.
When Remains finally went into three weeks of previews at the Orpheum, Tad saw the first public presentation of the play in New York. Like a great many of my truest friends, Tad had no connection to the theatre at all. The only theatre he’d ever seen or been interested in was mine, because I forced him to go. People like Tad were the ones whose opinions I valued the most, because I knew they would give me their unvarnished truth.
Of Remains he said, “Wow, Brad, you made me feel like we were back in Edmonton again.”
Previews were not without their tensions, and the producers were a bit spooked by how the early audiences were reacting. Were there meant to be that many laughs? I assured them there were, that the play was constructed to constantly challenge the line between comedy and tragedy, between commentary and exploitation. Derek knew what he was doing, but most of the cast were slow to catch on. A number of the actors were playing with radically different acting styles and, in doing so, were sacrificing the rhythm and precision of the lines and exchanges to their own “method” acting styles, which doesn’t work with my stuff. It was driving me crazy, although Derek kept telling me not to worry; he’d get them all on the same page before opening.
The night before Tad was to leave we did a bar crawl and ended up trolling a couple of the gay porn theatres on Eighth Avenue. On the way back to the apartment, Tad insisted on stopping at a twenty-four-hour deli for something to eat. He took his turkey sandwich back to the apartment and ate it as we had a final beer. “Want some?” he asked, brandishing the half-eaten sandwich dripping mayo. I waved it away. We finished our drinks and staggered to bed.
I’d only been asleep for a few hours when there was an urgent knock at the bedroom door. “What?” I said.
Tad raced through the bedroom to the bathroom and slammed the door. I heard him groan like a woman going into labour, followed by the firehose gush of his bowels. When he was finally done, the apartment smelled like an outhouse filled with florid corpses, making my eyes water..
“You okay?”
Tad moaned, “I think I’ve got food poisoning.”
He was meant to leave later that day, but called in sick. Because he needed constant access to the bathroom, I moved him into the bedroom and slept on the hide-a-bed in the living room. We were both hoping it would clear up in a day or two.
No such luck. After five days the apartment was becoming a depressing place to hang out in. I tried to tempt him with soup, crackers, fruit and other light snacks to keep his strength up, but he could only handle wa
ter. He seemed to be losing pounds a day. One night I was wakened by his voice. I sat up in bed listening as he had an unconscious, garbled discussion with his recently dead partner. Eventually he slept, but I didn’t.
One night I went to a party promoting the show at the Limelight, the legendary nightclub in a historic Catholic church, notoriously run by Canadian Peter Gatien, who would get into all kinds of legal trouble a short time later. I was obligated to attend this event regardless of how Tad was feeling. I didn’t have money for big-time nightclubbing, so I was primed for a good time, as the party was on the house.
The entire cast came, the DJ made some announcement, tickets were given away, and I was introduced to a great many people who were impressed to know my play was opening off-Broadway. In those days we smoked weed in New York bars and on the streets unabashedly, and I was pretty lit after a few hours.
The reporter who’d interviewed me for Blueboy was there, commiserating as I told him about Tad wasting away in my sublet. He took my hand, said, “Come with me,” and led me across the dance floor, through a doorway and up a series of stairwells that led to the top of the steeple. When we got to the door at the top of the stairs, he smiled and motioned for me to go through as he left.
I walked into a long, narrow passage that followed the apex of the roofline. It was dim but not dark, and I could make out rooms on either side of me, open to the passageway, in which groupings of people were lounging, drinking, shooting drugs and generally being as New York as fuck. Gay, straight, male, female, trans, all ages, all races, everyone was represented. As I moved down the corridor the activities in the rooms became more sexual. In one room a man had a woman over his lap. Her pants were pulled down and he was lightly smacking her ass while she sucked the cock of a guy sitting right next to them and staring into space indifferently. On the other side a tall drag queen was ass-to-crotch grind dancing with a butch woman with pierced nipples. An open doorway was ahead of me and a dark room beyond it. I stepped through.