by Brad Fraser
This happened at the same time a professor was fired for daring to do a production of Remains at a university in Montreal. Suddenly I was in the headlines again, this time for being censored. While Canadian artists did nothing to support the Montreal prof, the theatre artists in Cincinnati were not so reluctant. They spoke out volubly against the artistic director’s decision, and Mark assured me some grassroots action was about to happen. I told him if he didn’t get the play back on track, the premiere production would be in either Edmonton or Toronto, since theatres in both cities had made bids on the show.
DC Comics had gotten wind of all the press and Great North received a letter from them reminding us they held the trademark to Superman—despite the name being used by both Shaw and Nietzsche years earlier. It was a hassle, but ultimately we were barred from using the name Superman but free to air whatever commentary about Superman we wanted to. That’s when I decided to call the show Poor Super Man—“Super” and “Man” had to be separated for legal reasons, although almost every producing theatre thereafter would overlook this legal proviso and call it Poor Superman, as would many in the press.
After a few weeks of waiting while Shain back-and-forthed with the Cincinnati AD and the board, the artists scheduled to work at the theatre throughout the season wrote an open letter threatening to withdraw from those shows if the theatre followed through with their cancellation of the production. Management realized they could not come out of this debate looking good and relented. Mark was ecstatic; that kind of publicity can’t be bought.
I had sent an earlier draft of the play to Canadian Stage, which was Toronto’s biggest theatre with both an A (large) and B (smaller) house and a generous budget. It was being run by Bob Baker, who’d run the Phoenix Theatre in Edmonton ten years earlier. He’d had no interest in my work then, but I was hoping the success of Remains might have gotten his attention. It had. The theatre’s dramaturge, Iris Turcott, set up a meeting with me.
She was unconditional in her love for the play, and she had a number of canny observations and questions that helped immensely in the early development of the script. I would work with Iris on every play I wrote for the next twenty years. We also became great friends. She had a huge effect on my life and work.
Canadian Stage did the first reading of the Poor Super Man. It was in the downstairs space of their Berkeley Street complex, which contains two theatres that were once parts of a gas pumping station. No one had heard the play before and only Iris and a few others had even read it. We hired a group of actors I trusted and invited a few people to watch. Bob Baker and a few other theatre employees were also there.
Everyone in the room had been personally affected by AIDS in some way and their attention was intense. Right as we got to the part of the play where David’s out drinking by himself while Shannon commits suicide and he is listing the names of all the men he knows who have died of AIDS, at a moment when we were all lost in our emotions, a thin black bar appeared on the back wall of the stage, from floor to ceiling, and began to grow wider.
I thought I was hallucinating. Then I realized everyone else in the audience was stirring in their seats. The actors had no idea what was going on because they were sitting with their backs to the wall as the blackness grew wider and wider. We were suddenly looking into the street, where rain was falling from a dark sky. A hard wind whipped into the room. There was a rumble of thunder and a few seconds later a flash of lightning in the distance. No one knew what was going on or how to react.
The stage manager made an annoyed noise. “What the hell?! Those doors are never unlocked.” She got up from her chair, and rushed to the large double barn doors on the back wall of the theatre. One of the actors helped her close the door. The stage manager locked the doors and returned to her seat with an apologetic smile. “I have no idea why that happened.”
I said, “Maybe our friends we lost are joining us for the end of the reading.”
I could tell everyone present, like me, felt the theatre was suddenly filled with ghosts.
The actors finished reading. There was no applause. No commentary. Actors, theatre staff, my friends, we all sat there in a prolonged moment of silence, too moved to speak.
I finally cleared my throat, wiped away my tears and thanked everyone for coming. Then they all applauded.
Ben Henderson in Edmonton, who’d taken over running Theatre Network, had agreed to a co-production of the show with Gerry Potter at Workshop West. I would direct. The show would open a few months before a co-production between the Manitoba Theatre Centre (which had a huge hit with Crow’s production of Remains a few years earlier) and Canadian Stage’s second space to be directed by Derek Goldby. Shain was meanwhile fielding expressions of interest from various theatres all over the world.
* * *
—
Producing the Poor Super Man in Cincy had its issues. The theatre was called semi-professional because no one was paid except the playwright and director. The acting talent pool was limited. Theatre is often a compromise, and this production was full of compromises when it came to casting and technical ambition.
Opening night, knowing I might be facing cameras and reporters, I didn’t smoke a joint when I left the hotel I’d been living in for the last three weeks. Laurie Brown and a CBC crew had been shadowing me for an upcoming story, but I’d asked them to leave me alone before the opening.
As I strode up to the theatre I could see a large crowd gathered in front of the steps as well as many camera crews. All the major networks were there, along with a smattering of Christian protesters with signs condemning my lifestyle and my writing. Helicopters circled overhead and far more cop cars than can reasonably be expected at a theatre opening were in evidence. There were armed guards at each side of the entrance, which had a storey-high banner on one side emblazoned with my face and name along with the title of the play.
I thought, “Fuck, girls, it’s only a play,” and skipped up the steps and through the doors before the people with microphones registered my presence.
Mark was pacing in the lobby, a slightly crazed gleam in his eye. He said, “The vice squad is coming.”
I laughed. “That’s amazing!”
“Someone read the preview in the paper and complained that we were producing pornography.” He threw his arms around me, whispering, “Thank you for this play.”
I hugged him back and said, “Thanks for doing it.”
The ushers opened the doors to let the surging crowd and the vice squad into the theatre. The entire experience was intoxicating, and the energy among those presenting it and those experiencing it was mystical. The members of the vice squad who were asked to comment afterwards all remarked on the power of the show. Not one of them had an issue with the ass-fucking scene, which I’d saved for act two so no one could walk out. Context is everything.
After the opening party and a few beer and joints I walked back to the hotel through the dark, mostly deserted streets with this strange sensation of both tugging and releasing in my heart. I stopped and leaned against a wall. I started to cry. I let it go, sinking to a squat in the street, one hand over my eyes, the other on the sidewalk keeping me steady. I sobbed like a crazy drunk for a long time.
That night I slept the deep sleep one attains only after the dead have left them alone for the first time in a long time.
PART FIVE
POOR SUPER MAN: EDMONTON/MONTREAL/TORONTO
THE PRESS RESPONSE TO Poor Super Man was highly encouraging. Most of the reviews were solid raves, and there were a lot of them from the major American media outlets—but not a single reviewer from Canada. The naysayers were, as usual, straight people who didn’t believe a relationship like David and Matt’s could actually happen. Time magazine gave it a rave, and Poor Super Man, like Remains, appeared in their list of top ten plays of the year.
Back in Toronto I was spending my days taking m
eetings, writing endless drafts and working out; my nights were spent hanging out with the Davids (Gale and Wright), Tad or any of the new friends I’d made since becoming famous—there were many of them at this point and they came and went with casual ease. I smoked a lot of weed, I drank a lot of beer and I took a lot of E for my nights dancing at the clubs around town where I was known to the doormen and always waved past the lineup.
The look had changed: the eighties’ 501s and polo shirts had been replaced by shaved heads (putting me well ahead of the curve), muscled bods, army boots and heavy socks worn with short shorts and an ironic T-shirt.
AIDS wasn’t killing people as fast. New drugs were prolonging lives and helping alleviate the symptoms of opportunistic diseases. Some guys developed terrible side effects, like buffalo hump and facial wasting. Some of them were prescribed steroids to counter the weight loss and wasting and ended up with better bodies than those who were negative.
There was a sexual split in the community as well. Many of those who were positive wanted to have bareback sex with other positive guys. Doctors warned against this, as the virus had strains of different strengths, but many said when you’re facing a death sentence, it was worth the risk. Meanwhile, those who were negative and wanted to stay that way were vigilant about using condoms. People were fucking like crazy again, and every warehouse party had a designated sex area, the baths were doing business like they’d done in the late seventies, a number of the bars had dark rooms/back rooms, and the foam-and-underwear raves were hotbeds of hard cock and playful sex. (With my newfound public self I avoided public sex places.) Rates of new infections plateaued and even fell in some areas where safer sex was constantly promoted.
Generally, with the partners I met, I didn’t ask about their status unless they volunteered that information, because if there was fucking it was with a rubber, so their status was irrelevant. During that period I refused to give an answer if an interviewer asked about my HIV status, saying whether or not we were infected, we were all affected.
The panic in the community had subsided and even the straight world had learned it wasn’t that easy to pass on HIV through casual contact. I don’t think people’s families rejected them less for being gay or being sick, but I do know the medical community became more responsible. The community had developed tactics and hospices for dealing with the sick and the dying. We had learned. We had organized.
I kept track of the loss of old friends and acquaintances through a column called “Proud Lives” that ran in every issue of the free gay biweekly Xtra! and featured the pictures, names and life dates of those who’d passed. I recognized someone in almost every issue.
ACT UP, a radical queer protest group started by Larry Kramer and a group of other radical gays in New York, had been staging large public demonstrations and protests in order to get potentially life-saving drugs expedited through the approval process, which ordinarily took many years, if there was a chance they would spare someone’s life. They were militant, angry and exactly what was needed at the time. From publicly shaming homophobic politicians to opening their veins and spraying blood on those who wanted them dead, ACT UP changed the way treatments and medicines are tested and approved for people with life-changing diseases in a manner that would benefit everyone in society, whether suffering anything from breast cancer to heart disease.
Their tactics informed our behaviour, and those of us who survived the eighties saw ourselves as seasoned warriors who’d seen the worst years of the disease and the worst behaviour from the straight majority with their hostility or indifference. We were not about apologizing and we were not about hiding. And we were taking advantage of every moment life gave us.
The survivor’s guilt I’d been feeling since the beginning of the plague kept surfacing. Late at night I’d lie awake in bed thinking about the ones who’d died, the ones who were positive, and wondering how I was not one of them. We had shared every intimacy and yet I was healthy and thriving, doing better than I’d ever done in my life, living the dream I’d always held in my heart while losing those I cared about most.
I suppose it was this constant sense of loss and grief that kept me from becoming a total diva as my fame grew and productions and contracts kept rolling in. To be sure, I was full of myself and very pleased with everything that was going on, but I’d always been something of an asshole and I don’t think that amped up perceptibly with the changes in my life. I was very impatient, as I’d always been. I didn’t like to be kept waiting and I didn’t like being treated as if my time was less valuable than anyone else’s. I was punctual. I was professional. The reputation I had in some quarters for being “difficult” came only from my willingness to call out mediocrity and ask for more. If I’d been straight I’d’ve been known as “uncompromising.”
* * *
—
I’d delivered the commissioned script, based on the magazine story about the wayward Canadian journalist, to Alliance and they were less than impressed. Coming from the theatre, I was used to people reacting badly to an early draft, listening to their concerns and then rewriting to address those concerns. I learned quickly that this was not how the film world worked. They simply passed on the screenplay and future drafts of it. There would be no notes and no opportunity for me to improve things.
I didn’t dwell on it too much. Many films got written, few of them got made—and I was working on a couple of spec scripts, which I took with me to L.A. when I flew down late in the fall of 1994, meeting Randy, who was now living in Vancouver. We may have been separated by the continent but we remained on the phone with one another a couple of times a week. He was then developing the business that would eventually take over his career, but at that time he still looked after my money, which tended to ebb and flow dramatically. Randy set up enough credit to see me through the rough times.
The producer of the recent hit Tina Turner biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It had liked my samples. He had a deal with Touchstone Pictures, a Disney subsidiary, and I met with his people on the Disney lot. I also met with a number of other studios and was given a large number of novels and galleys of unpublished work that the studios were looking for pitches on.
I was approached by NeWest Press in Edmonton who wanted the rights to Remains, which had recently come up after having lapsed with another publisher. They would publish both the play and screenplay version of the property as a flip book, and also wanted to publish The Ugly Man as well as Wolfboy/Prom Night of the Living Dead in one shared volume. It was odd to go back to Wolfboy after so many years, but I cleaned the script up and finally cut poor Dr. Sherrot, who’d never lived up to her potential as a character.
I was getting tired of living like a gypsy. I missed my cats and I was hoping to make enough money to get my own place somewhere. I was looking at all the potential Hollywood properties very seriously, writing up proposals and pitches to adapt the most interesting as films and running them past Randy and Shain over the phone for their feedback. I eventually narrowed everything I’d been given down to three projects. The first was an American remake of Wim Wenders’s sublime Wings of Desire, a movie so good and highly regarded it had nowhere to go but down. The second was some kind of adaptation of Georges Franju’s 1960 atmospheric horror movie Eyes Without a Face, but I found the source material wasn’t quite as rich as I’d hoped. Third was an adaptation of a novel that combined elements of both the others called Beauty, by Brian D’Amato.
This book was right up my alley. It was a smartass combo of Bret Easton Ellis and Mary Shelley. The lead character was a surgical/mystical genius who uses his abilities to turn his girlfriend into the most beautiful woman in the world and a huge movie star. As expected, things go wrong, with many horrifying complications. I loved the satirical scary/funny tone of the book and sat down to write up a treatment for it as a feature.
A few weeks later I delivered it to Shain to look over and then flew to Edmonton
to start rehearsal for Poor Super Man. I went there a week early to prep and visit family and friends. A few days before we started I got a call from Shain, who’d just spoken to my L.A. agent and the Touchstone people. “They loved the treatment,” he enthused. “They want you to come in and pitch it.”
“I’m in rehearsal,” I protested.
“You’ve gotta jump on these things when you’re hot, Brad. They’ll cover everything.”
“Do you think we can cram it in on my day off?”
“Let me see what I can arrange,” he said.
The next morning a FedEx package arrived with an itinerary and a plane ticket. Everything had been arranged for our day off.
I got up at 4 a.m. and was picked up by a limo for the nearly hour-long drive from downtown to the Edmonton airport. From Edmonton I flew to Salt Lake City, and from Salt Lake I flew to L.A., where another limo was waiting to drive me to the Disney studio for the pitch meeting. I’d been through my notes multiple times on the plane and felt comfortable.
My handsome L.A. agent was waiting for me at the studio and accompanied me into the boardroom, where eight studio executives sat looking at me expectantly.
I smiled at them and delivered my pitch carefully, starting with a breakdown of the book’s plot and how I would change it for film. I spoke for about twenty minutes, taking them through the story from the comedic beginnings to the shocking ending. When I was done they all applauded. There were a few questions but nothing profound. I thanked them all for their time. They thanked me for taking the trip.
I shook my agent’s hand outside before getting into my limo. He said, “That was one of the best pitches I’ve ever seen.”
I thanked him, got into the limo and repeated the entire process in reverse, arriving back at my hotel in Edmonton at 4 a.m. There was nothing to do now but wait for a response, and I was grateful to have a show to keep me occupied.
