Brad Fraser reflects on his life in theatre and loved ones he's lost along the way in his memoir All the Rage
This interview originally aired on March 26, 2022.
One of Brad Fraser's childhood dreams was that he was the illegitimate lovechild of Wonder Woman and the Empire State Building.
That's Fraser's imagination at work. He used this gift, along with a passion for pop culture, to become one of Canada's most celebrated and controversial playwrights.
His plays include Wolf Boy, Poor Super Man and the international hit Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. In that work, Brad delved into sexuality, intimacy and violence — which earned him the moniker of the "bad boy of Canadian theatre."
Fraser writes about all these experiences in his 2021 memoir All the Rage. He spoke with Shelagh Rogers about his journey in the world of Canadian theatre amid the terrors of the AIDS era.
Influenced by comics
"During my childhood, comics were a huge influence because we moved around so much that there really was no continuity. Whereas other children had neighbourhoods and playgrounds they went to, my consistency came from the spinner rack in whatever store happened to be nearby to where we were living, where I could find the adventures of Superman and Batman or Wonder Woman.
Pop culture literally was my neighbourhood when I was a child. That's where I found my comfort and sense of place.
"Pop culture literally was my neighbourhood when I was a child. And growing up, that's where I found my comfort, my safety and my sense of place."
Finding a safe place
"I quite often think, 'Why am I so different from the people I come from? Why am I not like my family? Why do I not think like them? Why did I never think like them?' And the only answer I can come up with is the fact that I knew that I was different. Even before I knew I was queer, I knew there was something different about me. And so that difference, and in a sense that rejection from the family, forced me out into another world and made me find a safe place and find people who were like me and places where I could feel comfortable to be who I am.
Even before I knew I was queer, I knew there was something different about me.
"I've talked to a lot of other queer people of my generation and even younger ones who have had the same kind of experience. It's almost like nature has to create that black sheep in every group because somebody has to go against the grain — somebody has to question the prevailing hegemony, someone has to agitate the things that we're supposed to believe and ask why we believe them and why do we do that.
"A lot of those people historically have been people who have discovered great breakthroughs artistically, scientifically, socially — in a lot of different ways."
Discovering theatre
"There were these were high school students doing a musical in a black-box theatre where, with a few garments and a couple of sticks, they created an entire world. I had never seen anything like that before. I had never seen an entire universe created out of just what the actors were doing and these very small, minor design concepts.
"And that fired my imagination. I thought to myself, 'When I go into that black box, we can go anywhere in the universe, and that is an incredible power. I want to learn how to use that power and tap into it.'"
Changing the landscape
"I was asked by the Walterdale Theatre — where I'd been working for a number of years as an actor and a stage manager, a designer, all kinds of things — to write a play. I wrote the play. No one gave me any kind of parameters for it or anything, and when they finally read it, they went, 'We can't do this, there's people swearing and there's guns and there's all this stuff going on,' and the board was going to cancel it.
"So I went in and I told them, 'You can't do this. You cannot cancel this play, or I will sue you' — which was quite a ballsy thing to do because I didn't have a lawyer or any money at the time. But thankfully, a number of the the adults who were with the theatre as well stood up and defended me and they voted in front of me. I won by a narrow margin and the play was produced. It actually went on to be their highest-grossing play of that season.
Canadian theatre was, I like to say, like being dead. It was not very interesting.
"Canadian theatre was, I like to say, like being dead. It was not very interesting. There were lots of plays about things happening on farms, which, even though I grew up on a farm, I couldn't really relate to.
"And then there were a lot of unfunny downtown Toronto comedies going on and then a lot of very earnest historical plays. Of course, there were good writers there. There were all kinds of people who were doing daring and interesting stuff, like Alan Friedman and Sharon Pollock and people who were pushing the barriers, but they were still pushing them from a kind of academic, heterosexual point of view.
"I wanted to come in with the exact opposite of that. I didn't want the work to be academic. I didn't want it to be heterosexual. I wanted to put people on the stage that I never saw on the stage. And those were really people from the background and class that I came from."
Mourning friends
"Writing this book was very emotional and very difficult. During the period where it was all actually going on, my career was taking off and I was so busy. At the same time, so many people were getting sick and dying — I didn't really feel like I had any time to mourn the people I was losing, or to really deal with the sorrow that I was feeling. I found it was much easier to deal with if I kept it as anger.
I felt with writing the book, there was a kind of letting go — finally, I could release these people from my heart and I could move on.
"So for me, it was a kind of exorcism where I was finally letting go of these people that I had loved and carried with me for so long. I felt with writing the book, there was a kind of letting go — finally, I could release them from my heart and I could let them go and I could move on, which I hadn't been able to do while the crisis was actually going on."
Brad Fraser's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
