by Brad Fraser
I flew to Edmonton for the screening, which was held in the movie theatre housed in the main branch of the Edmonton Public Library. We’d sent invitations to almost everyone we knew, from our past and our present. There was plenty of laughter during the show because those who knew me knew I was playing a character based on a small part of myself they knew well.
I then went to Toronto for its screening, held in the Canadian Stage rehearsal hall. The audience sat at tables and we projected the film onto a moderately sized screen set up against one wall. The audience here was mostly friends, but also business associates and professional representatives who were looking at the film as a commercial possibility.
Standing at the back of the room, I could feel the chill that descended during my scenes. It wasn’t just my performance they were responding to but also the character. Friends would later tell me they admired my brave choice to be so unsympathetic; given Danny’s major charm, I’d really felt I had no choice but to go in the completely opposite direction. I’ve never been afraid to create or portray a mostly unsympathetic character.
A representative from Alliance Films, which was the most influential company in the country at the time, praised Danny’s performance effusively to me and then added, “Of course acting really isn’t your thing.”
* * *
—
A few days later I flew to Vancouver to direct Poor Super Man for the Arts Club in their smaller second space on Granville Island. I was looking forward to this project. I’d never worked in Vancouver, but it was a city that was close to my heart and resonated constantly with flickering phantoms of John Moffat and so many other men from western Canada who had gone to Vancouver to die beginning in the early eighties. I never blamed any of them for not wanting to live out their last days in Edmonton or Calgary.
Although I hadn’t seen much of Cam since New York, we were in touch by phone every few weeks. But he hadn’t called me back the last couple of times, so I was relieved to be in Vancouver to find out what was going on.
When I called his number his long-term partner, Shane, answered and told me Cam had taken a fall and was in the hospital. I hopped a cab to St. Paul’s Hospital and found my way to Cam’s room. When I entered he looked up in wonder and said, “Brad?”
I sat in the chair beside the bed and took his hand in mine. “Hey, Cam.” Shane, who’d been on the other side of the bed, moved away to give us room.
Cam’s former steroid bulk was gone. He was like the Cam I’d first known except emaciated rather than thin, and brittle rather than willowy. He still had plenty of light brown hair, although it hung lank and dead around his face. He gave me a loopy smile through unfocused eyes and hiccupped. “Why are you here?”
“To see you, of course. And I’m opening a show.”
Cam hiccupped and said, “Your AIDS play.”
I nodded. “I’d really like you to be there for opening.” I put my hand on his forehead softly.
He said, “I’m sorry I didn’t call you back. Something was happening. It scared me. Then I fell down and couldn’t get up until Shane came home and called an ambulance.”
I said, “I understand,” and squeezed his hand. He hiccupped.
“What’s with the hiccups?” I asked.
In the doorway, Shane shot me a look that said “Don’t ask that,” but Cam said, “Brain cancer. My dad had it. One of the signs. Hiccups. Hurts. A lot.” Then, with some effort, he turned his head on the pillow to look at me directly and said, “I’ve always wanted to tell you—”
A nurse came in, announcing, “It’s time for his pain meds.” She plunged a syringe into a plastic shunt punched into the left side of his chest.
I wanted to scream “No, wait, he was trying to tell me something” but knew it would look selfish. Within a few seconds Cam’s eyes rolled in his head and his tongue made a dry clicking noise in the back of his throat. Shane moved to the other side of the bed. Cam’s hand went slack in mine as the drugs took hold.
I leaned forward, resting my forehead on his bony shoulder, and whispered, “Please don’t go.”
He fell into a laboured slumber. Eventually Shane moved behind me and put a hand on my shoulder, giving me permission to leave. I walked over the Burrard Street Bridge and down to Granville Island in a daze for a night of barbed-wire memories and broken sleep.
For the next two days we did general auditions for the show and I tried to put Cam out of my mind and concentrate on the performers I was seeing.
Then Shane called me and told me Cam had died quietly in his sleep a few hours earlier. I didn’t break down. I asked him if there was going to be some kind of service, but there wasn’t. I thanked Shane for calling and offered him any support I might give him.
Alone in the generic condo I curled into a fetal position on the bed and keened and rocked to soothe myself.
* * *
—
A few hours later artistic director Bill Millerd called me from the Arts Club to remind me he needed the names of the actors required for the callbacks after the general auditions. I assured him I’d have a list ready the next day. But when I sat down to compile it I found my brain befuddled, and it was hard to concentrate as I went through the resumés and my notes from the earlier auditions. I was in shock. I was grieving. I was paralyzed.
In the end I shattered one of the basic tenets of professionalism by calling back far more people than I needed to because my situation had kept me from properly assessing their abilities the first time. There was a major backup of actors and audition times, and the process ended up taking most of the day in a cattle-call manner that many of those auditioning took exception to after they discovered they hadn’t been cast. The theatre eventually ended up paying the actors’ union a fine for every actor who’d been kept beyond a dictated time. What was particularly galling about all of this was that big commercial producers did this sort of thing all the time without hearing a peep from the actors. They tended to take out the frustration of their general powerlessness on the smaller Canadian companies, which didn’t hire as many people or pay as much. Nonetheless, this extra cost to the theatre was caused by me and I’ve always regretted this rare lapse in professionalism.
Cam’s essence suffused every bit of my work, which was some of my best as a director. I had a strong cast and an amazing design team. The way the captions were handled on the computer and a projector were what I’d always imagined. I was comfortable with the material and knew how to physically guide the show in the space. Rehearsals were exciting.
The show opened to strong reviews and great houses. Randy came for the opening and had tears in his eyes when he hugged me afterwards. Poor Super Man ran all summer.
Back in Toronto, Danny’s editor friend had completed her cut of Parade. I felt sick when I saw how much better it was than mine. This version went on to play endlessly at gay and lesbian film festivals all over the continent for the next couple of years, but we would never make any money from it.
Whatever its deficiencies, Parade captures the Gay Village of Church and Wellesley and the Gay Pride celebration at their nineties peak. At that time there were no barriers between the crowds and the parade participants. As those barriers went up a few years later, so did the corporate sponsorships and the gelding and homogenization of what had started as a protest and a demand for recognition. Parade also features a number of important artists from that moment: Tracy Wright, Caroline Gillis, Sky Gilbert, Allegra Fulton, John Frizzell, Gale Garnet and many others.
* * *
—
I flew back to Sydney, Australia, this time at my own expense, to experience their gay Mardi Gras, which was legendary across the globe. Dante and Marcus had had an acrimonious split, which put a definite crimp into my hopes for the holiday as I liked them best as a couple. While there I was also working on my newest script, which was to be a radio play.
I had been co-commissioned by the CBC and the BBC to write a radio drama. I wanted to write a show that skipped through time, juxtaposing the most important moments in a relationship between a young, promising cartoonist and an older philanthropic political leader. The politician was HIV-positive, the cartoonist was not. It was loosely based on my experience with Grayden.
This was to be my bookend to Poor Super Man. Where that play was about everything that was honourable about the queer community’s response to AIDS, Martin Yesterday would be about all of the most reprehensible qualities of a community that had been fighting for its life and identity from the very beginning, while now facing a threat few other communities could even imagine. I wanted to take some risks and say some intentionally unpleasant things.
I should’ve read the signs when, while in Sydney, just as I was adding the final touches to the last scene, a strange black stain appeared in the upper left corner of my laptop’s screen and slowly began to spread outward. I desperately and repeatedly pressed the save command until the screen was black and the computer stopped humming. It was dead. The two weeks of work I’d done since arriving in Sydney, essentially the last act of the script, had been lost. It would have to be recreated when I returned home to Toronto, where I had a dated backup on a floppy disk.
A few months later, back in Toronto, we taped the show at the CBC Radio studios on Front Street. Hillary Norish, who’d originally commissioned the script for the BBC, was there to direct, Danny MacIvor played Matt, the main character, and a stellar cast supported him. When it was finally broadcast, not much attention was paid—it was radio, after all—but it was nominated in London for a Sony Radio Award (and did not win).
I was getting low on money, so I arranged for another round of meetings and pitches in L.A. The failure of the Remains movie and the oddness of Parade had dimmed the lustre of my star, but I was still hot enough to get meetings at the major studios. I would gain a couple of jobs that got me paid, although nothing was ever made.
Tad had stopped speaking to me a few months earlier, and I was hurt and baffled by his refusal to return my calls. I reached out a number of times and got one of those mild passive-aggressive responses that let you know your overture was ineffective.
Randy also withdrew from me around this time. That was natural in a sense, as I wasn’t making much money at the time, and I knew he felt Parade had been a lot of work for no payback and I couldn’t argue that. He sent me the company cheque book and records, suggesting I take control of my own finances.
There was a tension growing within me and with those around me, and I wasn’t sure who was at fault.
* * *
—
Sarah Garton Stanley had taken over Buddies in Bad Times Theatre after Sky Gilbert surprised everyone by resigning from the theatre he had started. I’d met with her and left her a copy of the radio version of Martin Yesterday, saying I’d like to adapt it as a play. She called me a few months later and asked me if I’d be interested in directing the script at Buddies in the 1996/97 season. I accepted immediately. I’d tried over the years to get Sky to produce my work with no success. Finally I’d been asked to work at Buddies.
I threw myself into reinventing Martin Yesterday for the stage. If it was going to be done at the largest gay theatre in North America, then I was going to make it the gayest show I possibly could.
The press around the world and especially in Canada had dubbed me a “bad boy” early in my career. Initially I’d welcomed the title. It was gangster. It was James Dean. And I was being a bad boy with Wolfboy and Chainsaw Love, intentionally pushing boundaries that kept people from examining too closely my ability (or not) to create two hours of sustained entertainment through the writing alone. But after that I had taken the craft and discipline of writing a play and creating for the theatre very seriously. I pushed barriers, particularly concerning sexuality and gender, with defined intentions that usually came from challenging our ideas of what could be said and done in the modern theatre.
Again and again certain critics had dismissed my work by criticizing the very things about the experience I’d set out to do, to wit: if my intention is to offend or challenge upper-middle-class white people who share the same education and viewpoint, and if that is exactly what happened, then, from my point of view, I did not fail. I would eventually understand that being their “bad boy” diluted my power, it minimized my message, it kept them dominant. It characterized me as a child.
I wanted Martin Yesterday to be the most honest play I could write. I didn’t want any of Poor Super Man’s strategic sentimentality and careful modulation of sexual content. I wanted to create something that accurately reflected the gay world that many of us were living in, with all of its squalor and questionable behaviour. I wanted to talk about the self-hatred and abuse of emotion I saw in our community, and I wanted to talk about the straight world’s control of how we felt about ourselves and each other and how we let them get away with it by co-operating in their societal narrative rather than creating our own.
Twenty years earlier, With Love from Your Son had been denied the production that had been promised when it had won the Alberta Culture Playwriting Competition because of its mild gay content. Now, this Buddies production of Martin Yesterday was going to be my response to the psychic trauma I had carried since that decision and so many other transgressions I’d had to endure because of my sexuality.
I intended to respond to every homophobic slight, attack and insult I’d had to deal with from the corporate media throughout my career in the most entertaining and challenging manner I could muster. I knew I was flirting with disaster but figured I’d finally earned the right to take some profound chances.
In the end I cast my usual blend of people I’d worked with before, and brand-new actors found in auditions. As has almost always been my experience, the designers and technicians were a dream team who had done their homework, listened to my challenges and come back with solutions that allowed them to elevate whatever I’d asked for with their considerable thought and talent. We had ample rehearsal time and a healthy budget, and I intended to take advantage of both. The actors were uncertain of the material. It was a challenging rehearsal period.
There’s a scene in the radio play where Martin tells Matt he’s HIV-positive while they’re riding on a roller coaster, and I wanted to find some version of that for the stage. After considering a number of possibilities with the designers, we went with my original proposal—rear projection. Since we were using video elsewhere in the show, I had a designer create opening credits and background video for segments of the show based on ideas we’d tossed around. I knew that showing World War Two newsreel footage of bodies being bulldozed in Nazi death camps would be controversial—it occurs when Martin talks about killing his best friend to save him further suffering from AIDS—and so I embraced it.
I also decided I would at last address the criticisms of insecure male pundits that male nudity in sex scenes was never convincing. We used lifelike dildos that were not only erect but rigged to ejaculate. Most of the sex scenes were played in careful lighting, and the effect was quite convincing. But getting the desired effect did take some work. The first time one of the fake dicks was tested in rehearsal—it was large enough to read at the back of the house—the shot went all the way across the stage at eye level. I laughed so hard I fell off my chair. We tried a number of liquids to suggest semen, but in the end it was plain water that made the most convincing cum when properly ejected under the harsh lights of the stage.
* * *
—
There was a great deal of fuss in the press about the show before the opening, and it wasn’t restricted to Toronto. I learned that a tour operator in upstate New York was offering trips to see the show, including B&B accommodation. When I was at the Barn after rehearsal one night, another gay playwright who was opening a show passive-aggressively congratulated me on “suckin
g up all the publicity.” I smiled and flexed my tits at him.
Sarah Stanley and an invited audience watched the first tech/dress run, which is where the production tries to bring all the elements in the theatre together, lights, set, sound and performers, before opening night. It was a bit of a nightmare. The tempo I establish for my productions, which is brisk and nuanced, demands the performers be in control of all elements at all times in order to tell the story properly. However, any show in front of a first audience is terrifying, and it always throws the actors into an adrenaline frenzy, with the result that they race through the play. This is completely natural, and the actors often need four or five performances in front of audiences before they become fully in control of the cadence and rhythm of the overarching narrative. Sadly, though, we rarely get four or five previews, so I’ve had some very rocky opening nights.
In her office afterwards Sarah said, “How does the audience get in?” I had no idea what she was talking about, and my face showed it. She gave me that smart, sly smile she’s known for and said, “It’s all so fast and hard. There’s a lot going on. It never rests, so in parts it gets tiresome because there’s been no space for me to get on board.”
I thanked her and spent a sleepless night thinking about what she’d said. I’d sat with the audience and could feel exactly what Sarah was talking about. The audience hadn’t been engaging with the narrative in the way I hoped.
In rehearsal the next day I shared Sarah’s note with the cast and said, “Guys, we’re doing a play by one of Canada’s queerest playwrights in the world’s queerest theatre. I know it’s scary and I’m so grateful you’ve all been brave enough to come along, but we know these people. Sometimes we are these people. Don’t judge them. Find the noble, likeable parts of their personalities and enjoy them, but do the same thing with their selfish, unlikeable side. Just let them be human.” The actors, who’d felt the same response, agreed.
