Brad Fraser

Brad Fraser is one of Canada’s best known playwrights. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1959, Brad won his first playwriting competition at the age of seventeen, and has been writing ever since. Brad’s international hit play Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love premiered at the Alberta Theatre Projects’ PlayRites Festival in 1989. It has since been produced worldwide, in many languages, with highly successful runs in Toronto, New York, Chicago, Milan, Sydney and London. Poor Super Man, developed by Canadian Stage, was first produced by the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati in 1994 and has enjoyed successful runs in many cities, including Toronto, London, Sydney, Edinburgh and Denver. It was nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama and adapted into a feature film, Leaving Metropolis, written and directed by Brad. Poor Super Man, like Unidentified Human Remains, was listed by Time magazine as one of the top ten plays of its year. Many other plays have followed in successful productions. Brad has also written extensively for magazines and newspapers, including The Globe and Mail and the National Post, and for three seasons was a writer and producer on Showtime’s Queer As Folk.

Brad Fraser’s Memoir, All The Rage, is available now at your favourite bookseller.

bradfraser.net
Twitter: @fraser_brad

All the Rage: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665321/all-the-rage-by-brad-fraser/

Transcript

Welcome to episode 290 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about people in Canadian theatre featuring conversations with actors, directors, playwrights, and more.

Thank you for listening. If you’ve been listening to Stageworthy for a while, or maybe you’re a first-time listener and you’re listening through a link on the website, did you know that you can subscribe so that you never miss an episode? You can do that by searching for Stageworthy on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts, and clicking on the handy subscribe button. That way, every week, the new episode of Stageworthy will be delivered right to you.

And if you subscribe, let me know that you’re a new subscriber. If you want to drop me a line, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at philrickaby, and my website is philrickaby.com. You can find Stageworthy on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at StageworthyPod, and the website where you can find the archive of all 290 episodes is at stageworthypodcast.com. My guest this week is playwright Brad Fraser. Brad’s memoir, All the Rage, is available now at your favourite bookseller.

Just to get started, the book is called All the Rage, and it’s a memoir. As a playwright, was there anything in particular that drove you or really wanted you, that made you really think about and want to write a memoir? Well, no. I’ve been asked to write a memoir a couple of times in my life and always demurred because I felt I was too young or whatever.

But I was posting on World AIDS Day on December 1st, as I do every year. I have a whole file full of people who have died, and I post them on Twitter and Facebook, and I tell some stories and that kind of thing. And Bruce Walsh, who was the publisher at University of Regina Press, contacted me and said, you know, these stories are really great.

You really should tell them because we’re losing this history. And I thought, well, that’s a cool way to maybe not write a memoir and write a memoir at the same time. I’m writing about myself, but I’m also writing about all the people who were lost.

So it gave me a different kind of lens to look at the idea of writing a memoir through. And that being said, it’s only a partial memoir because it only goes up to the year 2000. Right, right.

That gives you room for a sequel. That’s right. But you know, this is the second time today that the idea of the loss of memory about the AIDS epidemic has been mentioned for me.

Just the fact that a lot of people who are a lot younger than I think you or I are growing up sort of thinking, oh, that must have been a really rough couple of years or something like that, when it was like a decade of people dying. Yeah, at least a decade. It was actually about two decades of people dying if you start from the beginning of the plague and then go up to where people stopped dying.

And that’s why I stopped it in the year 2000 because that’s where people really stopped dying in the same numbers they had been after the advent of protease inhibitors and different treatments and that kind of thing. Yeah. And I think that that forgetting, I mean, people do have short memories and because we often only think about what’s happening right now and that’s what’s relevant.

And so the idea that so many people in the community were dying in such large numbers is something that I think, and because it’s not considered a death sentence now as it was certainly in the 80s and up until, as you say, 2000, I think that a lot of younger people don’t understand how bad it was. No, and you know, we like to forget things particularly that were painful. You know, they say a woman never really remembers childbirth the way it happened because if she did, she would never go through it again or if we’ve been through, you know, I suffered from spinal stenosis for five years and was in a great deal of pain at that time.

And I have a very good memory, but when I look back on those years, they’re very hard to remember. And I think that our brain does something to protect us that takes away a lot of the unpleasantness of memory and kind of dulls it down. And, you know, I used to talk to classes of young people at the universities and that kind of thing.

They would read Poor Superman and I would talk about the years. And it became harder and harder to tell them the story to make them understand. So I hope that in writing the book and in evoking the people I knew and, you know, actually allowing them to be characters and the reader to get to know them, that it would bring some of that sense of immediacy of how horrible it was when people were sick and dying on such a massive level when we were so young as well.

You know, this was happening when I was in my early twenties, this whole thing started. So it really took the bloom out of the joy of gay liberation at the time. Sure.

I remember seeing a picture of, I think it was the San Francisco Men’s Choir, and it was a picture showing all of the people who were new to the choir, who were post-AIDS epidemic, were wearing a white sweater and the three survivors of the epidemic were wearing black sweaters. And so you had this massive room of white with just a few people in black. And it was like this really stark reminder of this is the kind of horrible numbers of deaths that we’re seeing at the time.

Well, yes. And it also explains why it can be so hard to remember as well, because so many people are gone. And so many people from that particular generation, you know, the men who were 10 years older than me were the first to go.

And then I think the men who were about five years younger than me were kind of the last to worry about it. But within that period, there were, you know, tens of thousands, if not millions of people lost to AIDS. And it was really dramatic, and it was really fast.

It wasn’t like people were disappearing here and there. It was like people were dying in droves for most of the eighties. Yeah.

Yeah. So a lot of the people who we would give testament to, who we would give witness to, people who would have done it, they’re dead. You know, there’s so few of us from that generation left that it’s a tremendous responsibility to bear.

And I know a lot of people in my age range don’t want to relive it, don’t want to go back there, don’t want to remember what it was like, because it was so traumatic and it was so completely horrifying. I think there’s also a perception that it’s all all right now, because through the AIDS epidemic, then we have gay rights and all of the things, all of the marriage equality and all of that. It came out of the AIDS epidemic, and that’s all right.

But that’s something that only people who never lived through it could actually think. I’m sorry. Is there a question there? No, I guess it’s not a question.

It’s really just sort of like a statement. I wasn’t making sure how to respond. Yes, that is true.

That is very true. Yeah. Just to turn towards theatre, I know that part of your story is that you grew up poor and you had an abusive childhood.

So what took you from that to theatre? What brought you to theatre? Well, that’s kind of a hard question. I guess I sort of address it in the book. I mean, creativity was always my outlet for my anger, for my pain, whatever it was, whether I was drawing or whether I was writing, excuse me, or whether I was acting, which came later on.

It took me to someplace else that allowed me to exercise my imagination. And I think that I’m a very unlikely sort of personality to end up in the theatre. I’m from the wrong class.

I’m from the wrong background. And to become a writer of all things when I come from people who are not known for their academic acumen, if you will, is quite astounding. And I think, I have to say, I believe it was my gayness that took me there.

I believe it was the fact that I needed someplace that was relatively safe for queer people to function, to be themselves, to interface with other queer people. And the theatre is better for that than a lot of other places in the world. That’s not to say that homophobia doesn’t exist in the theatre.

There’s a great deal of it in the theatre. But as it goes, it’s not as bad as other places. And also, I really have always been very good at making something out of nothing.

And for me, that’s what the theatre is. The theatre is incantations and magical gestures that we pass down to one another that create entire worlds out of nothingness, using just the imagination of the audience. And for me, that’s always been one of the most exciting things about doing anything, but particularly about the theatre.

Yeah. Was there, I mean, in terms of your introduction to theatre, was there, I assume that that was not something you did as a child. When you were older, did you stumble into theatre? Did somebody invite you to play? How was that introduction? Do you remember how that happened? Yeah.

Well, there was drama class in junior high school, and we did a lip-sync version of Jesus Christ Superstar in the eighth grade, some of the songs from it. But really, my first exposure to the theatre was a friend of mine. I grew up, certainly in my adolescent years, in an area of Edmonton called Beverly, which is quite a rough working-class neighbourhood.

And when I was in junior high school, one of my best friends actually didn’t go to the local high school. He went to the downtown high school for the arts. And he did a play in his second year, and he invited me to come and see it.

It was a small musical in a black box theatre that was done basically with hairpins and elastic bands, with the absolute minimum. And it absolutely blew me away how they created an entire world in that little black space, and how well-acquitted it was. And the next day, I went back to my high school and said, okay, I’m leaving here.

I was dropping out anyway. And I auditioned for the Performing Arts Program at Vic Comp. And the next year, I moved downtown and started going to the art school.

And as students, we got tickets to a lot of previews. It was the late 70s, so there were a lot of new theatres opening in town. And the Citadel was still there.

John Neville was running it at the time. And I saw some really amazing plays. I saw Equus that first year that the new Citadel opened, which was a Peter Schaefer play about a boy who puts the eyes out of six horses.

And we have beautiful men, male dancers, dressed as horses and acting in this play, and nudity. I was 17 years old, and there was a naked man and woman on the stage. It completely blew me away.

So I sort of came of age with this idea that theatre was something that was confrontational and that involved nudity and violence and things like that. And I thought, well, I come from that world. I should be very good at this.

You know, when you mentioned seeing that first show that was like elastics and hairpins and just put together in this black box, I’m often reminded of how in the theatre, we don’t need a lot to create. We don’t need a whole set. We don’t really need chairs.

We don’t even need costumes. We could just be wearing plain pants, plain shirt, and we could be a gentleman, a poor person, a prophet. You could be so many things just because you say you are.

There’s this suspension of disbelief that exists in the theatre. And I can imagine that would have been mind-blowing to see that simple play as a child at first. Yeah, as a teenager, certainly.

But, you know, I get asked a lot, because I do work in film and TV a lot, and people say, well, why do you keep going back to the theatre? What is it about the theatre that keeps bringing you back? And it was exactly what you just said. It’s the fact that if I write for film or TV, a scene that is set in Atlantis under the ocean full of merpeople, and they’re being attacked by an octopus, well, then we have to build all that stuff and create it through the computer, and it takes years and years to do it. Whereas if I do that scene on stage, and I say we’re in Atlantis, we’re with the merpeople, and we’re being attacked by octopus, and they’re just a bunch of actors now suddenly under a green light waving their arms like merpeople, and we have someone come and bring a giant rope out and wrap it around them, the audience will see exactly what I told them was there.

But I don’t have to make any of that. Their imagination does it. So that sense of immediacy and also that sense of no limits, that in fact the theatre can go much farther than film or TV, because again, it asks the audience’s imagination to do the work.

And I think that’s underutilized. And when you say we don’t need much to create theatre, that’s my kind of theatre. When I’ve directed with my shows and the kind of aesthetic I have, as far as I’m concerned, the less bullshit you have on the stage, the better, the less props, the less costumes, the less set, the less things you have for people to dislike or get in the way of the storytelling.

So that’s exactly what I love most about the theatre, that and the immediacy, the fact that it is happening when we’re all together in one space, breathing the same air, smelling one another’s pheromones, with an awareness of ourselves and what’s going on on the stage that I think makes it a really magical experience when it works, when it’s good. Yeah. Now, going into a theatre program and just sort of like dropping everything and going in, at the time, were you thinking, I’m going to be an actor? Or how did you make the decision that you were going to be primarily a playwright first? Or was that a decision? How did that happen? Well, I wanted to be an actor and I studied to be an actor.

I enjoyed acting. I don’t know that I was particularly gifted at it, but I didn’t embarrass myself too much. But really, in reading the plays we were doing in high school, I went, Jesus, I can write a better play than this for young people.

And that’s sort of how I got my start. My start was writing scenes and little short one-act plays for myself and people in the class. And then I eventually wrote a one-act play that won the Alberta Culture Playwriting Competition.

And I got a lot more positive reinforcement as a writer than I did as an actor. But I also came to realize that when you’re an actor, you were always at somebody else’s mercy. You need somebody else to believe in you and hire you in order to do what you do.

A writer doesn’t necessarily need that. Eventually, yes, you want someone to like the play and produce it and all of that kind of thing. But I didn’t have to rely on anyone hiring me to be a writer in order to write a play.

So it gave me another kind of freedom. And it also, I felt, gave me more power than I had as an actor. No, absolutely.

There is definitely something about acting where it does become too much about needing other people and you need permission to do it. Somebody has to make you an actor in some ways. Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love became something of a sensation.

And as a play, when you create, I mean, I think that all of us, when we create something, when we write something, in our wildest dreams, it would become a sensation. But when it started, when you were beginning to write it, was there a writing process for that play? And how was it first received before it became what it became? Well, it’s interesting because, you know, it was the play that I wrote after the failure of Wolf Boy and Chainsaw Love. And Wolf Boy had gotten quite big in terms of Canadian plays kind of playing in a number of different cities.

And then ultimately here at Theatre Passe-Muraille in 1984, excuse me, with Keanu Reeves, where it famously bombed. And I sort of, when I want to get out of the theatre, I hate the theatre. I was being taught to limit what I was doing.

So when I sat down to write a play again after a couple of years, I went, okay, you know what? I’m going to throw everything they’ve told me, everything about using one set, everything about the Terragon well-made play with five characters and a certain unity to it. I’m going to throw all that stuff out the window. And in fact, I’m going to do the exact opposite.

I am going to have seven characters in my play and they’re going to be all ages and all sexualities. I’m going to have multiple locations that we go to and from very quickly. I’m going to write short, choppy scenes.

I’m going to be as rude as I can possibly be. I’m going to be as funny as I can possibly be. And when I wrote it, it was so freeing.

It was also the first play I ever wrote where I was smoking pot while I was writing as well. And I would just knock myself out laughing so hard some nights when I was working on it. And when it was done, I felt like I had really achieved something different and something that people wouldn’t expect from me, but I couldn’t get anyone to produce it for almost five years.

There were people who liked it, but there were people who also said, oh, it’s too rude for us. It’s far too gay for us. It’s far too violent for us.

And that old sort of sod that they love at the theatre, our audience won’t like it. Well, I knew those theatres and frankly, none of them had an audience. So that was crap from the very beginning.

But finally, I moved from Edmonton to Calgary because Alberta Theatre Projects had started a new play festival a couple of years earlier. And I thought, well, if there’s any place in this country where I might get this play done, it’s there for that festival. And I went there and I introduced myself to the theatre and I got to know Michael Dobbin and Alan McInnes and the people who were there at the time.

And they were terrified of it. They didn’t want to do it. I talked them into doing a reading the year of the Olympics in 1988 in the lobby and made sure there were a lot of people there and it got a really interesting reaction.

But even when they finally scheduled it for the next festival the following year, the director quit shortly before opening because she didn’t feel like she had confidence in her and I didn’t have confidence in her. I felt like she was apologising for the play. Michael Dobbin, who was artistic director at the time, came out and actually told the audience before the show if they wanted to leave now, he would refund their money.

And they basically made that speech before every showing during the festival. And of course, if it had been an advertising idea, it would have been gold because nobody left. Everybody stayed to see what was going on.

But the first audience we had, and it was a fundraiser for the AIDS Committee of Calgary, so it was a very sympathetic audience. There were a lot of queer people there. I mean, the show started and for the first three or four minutes, there was absolute silence.

And then David walked in and said, honey, I’m homo. And the place cracked up and it became a roller coaster ride from that point of people, honestly, holding their breath and then screaming in terror or laughter or whatever it was. And after that first showing, I thought, OK, this is interesting.

This is good. This has to do something. And of course, it’s still being produced today.

It is so rare in the theatre to have that kind of reaction. A lot of times people are so polite. So it must have been pretty thrilling to have that vocal reaction.

It was thrilling, but you know what was even more thrilling? And I think this has to do with the kind of class I come from. The people who come to my shows, and this has always been true, but it was really true with Remains, are not the people who usually go to the theatre. They’re usually people who go to clubs and movies and that kind of thing.

They aren’t the genteel kind of educated types we’re used to seeing in the theatre. And I’ve always taken great pride in that. And every theatre that I’ve had a show produced at has always gone, who are these people and how do we get them to come back? Well, sadly, you have to produce more plays like the ones I’m writing, and there aren’t that many around.

That is the big hand-wringing in Canadian theatre the last few years, is where is the audience going? How do we get people to come to the theatre? And then when they do, they have no idea how to connect with them. And they don’t take the steps. They don’t try to reach out.

They don’t program for them. They’re like, how can we bring these people to the plays that we want to do, rather than the plays that the people want to see? How can we give them that they want to come and see? And we see this all the time. You see it with Trey Anthony.

You see it with John Might. You see it with writers with particular voices who get a big following behind them, who can almost pack any theatre when they’re doing something. But the problem we’ve always had in the theatre, and the thing that’s always driven me crazy, is most theatre people don’t know and don’t want to know much about what’s going on in the real world.

There’s an insularity to the theatre and to a lot of the work that’s made there that I think limits our audiences naturally, that it just says to people, please don’t come. We’re making this for people who are not like you. And that’s very unfortunate.

And it’s gotten more true. I mean, I’ve been working in the theatre for over 40 years now. I mean, there was a time when theatres really worked for community outreach and to get out there and to meet the people and to find out what they want and to get that audience.

But that’s all kind of gone out the window. And it’s come to a point where really, we’re just performing theatre for other theatre people most of the time, except in the most commercial houses. But generally speaking, in our Canadian theatres and our smaller theatres, the audience that is coming is the same audience that has always come, or it’s young people who want to be in the theatre.

But we don’t see a lot of the average person going to plays. And I think that’s really unfortunate. I think that’s really unfortunate too.

And I think you’re right. It does have to do… If we’re not bothering to find out what people want to see, if we spend all of our time disparaging the kinds of movies that Hollywood puts out, which still bring in audiences and things like that, if we’re totally ignoring the rest of the world, and we’re still doing our essentially our living room dramas or our kitchen dramas, then we’re really missing the entire audience that’s not our friends and family. Yeah.

And basically, yes, exactly. And it’s a place where academics feel comfortable. And I hate that about the theatre, because it shouldn’t be a place where academics feel comfortable.

It should be a place where a great many people feel uncomfortable and also thrilled at the same time. And yet when you talk to artistic directors, and this is as true now as it was when I was starting out, predominantly, they work on a level of fear. They work on a level of non-confrontation.

They’re terrified that someone’s going to write a letter of complaint. They’re terrified. They’re not terrified that no one will show up because they’re going to get the grant money to keep the theatre going no matter what.

They’re actually terrified someone might show up and respond to what they’re actually doing. And I think that’s why our theatres have become really not very valid places for the average person to go anymore. No, because to me, one of the things that I always hate to hear, but I’ve heard it so many times, is mentioning a play to somebody.

And I saw a play once and I didn’t like it, so I don’t like the theatre. It just means that we are not engaging with people. I would love to get a letter.

If you’ve pissed somebody off and they the time to write the letter, you’re doing something exciting. I think it’s really too bad that theatres are afraid to take the chance of thrilling people. Yeah, well, there’s a lot of that that goes on.

And I remember at one point that there was a small theatre, I won’t mention where it was, not in this country, that opened remains and got these polarizing reviews about how horrible and how brilliant it was at the same time. And sales went through the roof and I phoned to congratulate them. And they actually were angry because they didn’t know how to keep up with the demand.

So they were mad that my play was selling so many tickets that they couldn’t keep up with the demand because they’d never had anything that people wanted to see that much before. And they didn’t want to rise to the occasion. They just wanted to be angry about it.

That’s so tragic. That’s so tragic. It’s so true.

I mean, it’s very sad. Now, does the success of a play like Unidentified Human Remains, does that make it easier for you to approach a theatre with a new play or more difficult? Well, it actually does both, you know, because people are very interested. And, you know, I was lucky, and I mean that quite non-ironically, that a lot of producers saw money signs when I walked into the room.

You could see the dollar signs light up in their eyes, whatever I was doing. And therefore, there was a period where I could go into a number of different theatres, and most of them tended to be more commercial rather than the other kind of theatres, and say, you know, this is what I’m working on. And they would say, yeah, we’re very interested in that.

But the problem is, people come in with an expectation that your next project is going to be like your last one. My whole thing has always been throughout my career not to repeat myself, to try to explore different forms and different concerns and different worlds and different kinds of characters. So people can come in expecting Remains, and then they get something like The Ugly Man, which was my follow-up to Remains, which is an adaptation of the Revengers tragedy, which is a classic Jacobian revenge tragedy, full of blood and gore, but not in the same way that Remains was.

And they all kind of went, what the hell is this? This isn’t what we were expecting. And even Poor Superman, which was the next play, had some of the same concerns in terms of sexuality and in terms of gender, but none of the violence, none of the melodrama of Remains. It was a much smaller, more domestic play.

But again, then people responded better to that one because it was more like what they expected. I don’t even know if this is a question that can be answered, but is having that successful play so near the beginning of your career that people are looking to and keep thinking that’s what you’re going to be giving them, is that a bit of a burden to carry, or do you just not care? One learns not to care. And it wasn’t that early on in my career.

I had won my first playwriting competition when I was 18. I had my first production of Mutants when I was 21, and I’d had three or four other productions by then. I’d just turned 30 when Remains happened.

So it wasn’t like I suddenly had written one play and it was a huge hit and what I’m going to do. I had plenty of experience with failure prior to that, thankfully, because that’s mostly what you’re going to get in the theatre. But there was a period in the late 90s, early 2000s where I did feel a bit like one of those singers who has a hit song and none of their other songs ever quite make it, so they’re always going around and trotting out that one song that they’re known for.

And I was getting quite resentful about it, and I even left the theatre for a while. But after that, and after I had done a movie and we did Queer as Folk and things like that, I’d stayed away for a while. When I came back to the theatre, I really didn’t care.

When I write a play, I write a play because I want to explore something theatrical that appeals to me that I think might appeal to other people, and I’ll do my best and see how it goes. And I was lucky enough to have a 20-year relationship with the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, England, where they litreally did every play that I wrote, and where I am the only playwright there who’s been produced more than me is Shakespeare. So I had an artistic home for two decades with an artistic director who believed in me and would put what I was doing up, even if it wouldn’t succeed in the same way Remains or poor Superman had, because he understood it was important to my development to get me to the next thing we would be working on.

I mean, to have that is really quite a gift for any playwright. It is, and I always wanted that in Canada, and I never got it. It’s so ironic and yet maybe typical that someone from Manchester had to do it because I couldn’t get it in my own country.

And in fact, after the year 2000, the productions in Canada went way down, but the productions in England and other parts of the world went way up. Any idea why that is? Or has Canada just continued to get more conservative in its theatrical productions? I think Canada felt like, oh, we’ve had enough Brad Fraser. We want other people now.

It had nothing to do with the audience. It has to do with the people who program, and the people who perceive me as being a particular type, and people who perceive me as being hostile to the theatre, which I am, in the same way that I’m hostile to mediocrity in any situation. And I know I haven’t made myself a lot of friends in certain theatres around Canada, but at the same time, there also weren’t like a ton of people I wanted to work with here that I felt would understand what I was doing and be able to enhance it.

And I felt like I had to go a little farther afield to do that. Not that there aren’t actors and directors and people that I love here in Canada, but I just felt like I had done as much as I could do here, and if I wanted to learn more, I had to go beyond what I was seeing here. And I have to say, working with directors in Italy, or working with directors in Brazil, or working with directors in other countries with other languages where they have other ideas of how theatre can be produced or presented, has been really important to me, and a really great bonus to my writing, because it really has exposed me to a lot of different ways of working.

Now, you mentioned being hostile to the theatre. When you say that, are you hostile to the theatre, or are you hostile to Canadian theatre? Is that the issue? Bad theatre isn’t confined to Canada. Gutless theatre is not confined to Canada.

In fact, you can go to New York and you can see tons of theatre that has no spine at all, and London, and is all being done for presentation and show. So I don’t want to make it seem like I’m bashing the Canadian theatre, because it does happen everywhere, but there is a kind of homogenousness to Canadian theatre, I find, and it comes from, they tend to hire artistic directors who have the same education, often from the same people, and so they’re not often open to other ways of working or other ideas of what theatre could be, or even being challenged, which I think is quite unfortunate. Definitely about the idea of being challenged, I think that there is an attitude, and I’ve seen it all over the place, people are afraid to criticize.

People are afraid to, people who are not theatre critics, or maybe some of them as well, people are afraid to be critical of the theatres and the plays that they do, and things like that. Almost as if challenging the upper creative class can be death to your career, and who knows, maybe it would be if you’re not, if you don’t, I don’t know, if you’re not of that class, but I think that the idea that we cannot criticize the organizations and the productions that they do, that we cannot ask them to challenge us more, is really sort of a, keeps the mediocrity pumping out. Yeah, well, and I’ve always said that, and I’ve had no problem challenging anyone on something that I think isn’t up to par, or is mediocre, or they’re backing away from because it’s too difficult, and they want to try something harder.

And again, you don’t make yourself any friends by doing that kind of thing, and if you’re a gay man, or if you’re a woman of colour or something, you get known as being difficult for doing that, whereas white women when they do that, or straight white guys when they do it, are known as being uncompromising. Not that they do it as much, but it is a double-edged sword, and often the people at the top are the people who are the actual problem. Well, I mean, the people at the top are the ones that sort of like, they’re the ones who say, our audience won’t like that.

They’re the ones who program. They’re the ones who, yet again, another season of play is set in either a kitchen or a living room. Yeah, although the kitchen and living room plays, I’m kind of pining for them, because what we get much more now are someone’s kind of identity confession and claiming of their minoritarian victim status, and then dragging us through their process as if that somehow excuses how amateur it can be sometimes, seems to be much more what’s going on than those kind of plays.

What I’ve seen in the Canadian theatre in particular are directors who don’t actually know how to direct plays anymore, so they’re much more comfortable doing a collective, well, they don’t call them collective creations anymore, they call them verbatim theatre or cooperative theatre, or something where we’re not actually going to learn any lines, we’re not actually going to do any blocking, and we’re not actually even going to really tell a story, but we’re going to share something with you that our teacher would have liked in university. And those ones make me scream for the days when we had bad kitchen plays and that kind of thing, because at least there was an attempt at narrative, and at least there was an attempt at some kind of craft in presenting the play, and that seems to have fallen completely by the wayside. I mean, there is something to be, I mean, there is, you have to present something, there has to be a, I don’t know, back when I was, back when I was growing up, I was reading all books about theatre, they would talk about the tableau, and I didn’t really understand what that meant, but there needs to be, you know, there needs to be, it needs to be drama, it needs to look good, there needs to be a, there needs to be movement, there’s so many things that there should be, and a bunch of people standing still, sharing their verbatim whatever, is not, there’s a lack of drama in there.

Yes, and that’s because we have developed a theatre that is actually afraid of conflict, just like we’ve developed a world that’s afraid of conflict, when in fact, conflict is the only thing that promotes any meaningful or constructive change a lot of the time, and we’ve taught young people to be afraid of it, and, you know, one thing I talk about in the memoir is that I come from a background of conflict, and I had to fight for everything I got in my life, and I’ve never been afraid to do it, and I’ve never been afraid to walk into a theatre and get in conflict with somebody because things aren’t going the way they are, but that doesn’t, again, make you a lot of friends in the theatre, people are very frightened by that, even if it’s non-confrontational, and not all conflict has to be angry or confrontational, it can take a lot of different forms, but, you know, the theatre is based on conflict, people, you can’t be afraid of it on any level. No, that’s true. I’m just sort of switching gears just a little bit, I’m curious about how you have been dealing during the last year and a bit, the pandemic, were you working on something at the start of this, or how have you been handling it? Well, I was actually pretty lucky, because after a number of years with very little going on, I got a movie production of my latest play, Kill Me Now, in South Korea was made, and so that was going on, and at the same time, excuse me, I signed a deal with a production company here to do the Canadian version film of the same play, and I was writing this memoir.

I had to put the final touches, which took a year, on the book, so I had a lot to keep me busy, and honestly, you know, I’ve been self-employed for 40 years now, I haven’t had another job, I work out of home, I do a lot of stuff out of my home, so the only really big change in my life is I’m not seeing as many of my friends as I used to, and I’m becoming very aware of how important that was to the kind of lifestyle I lead, that those times of getting out to see people and having people over and things like that are really important, and I miss them, I miss them very much, but I also, I care for an 85-year-old neighbour of mine who has dementia, who was an only child and has no family and has no one, so my relationship with her has become much stronger, and much more, our lives have been much more entwined over this last 14 months because I litreally have to do everything for her. I mean, I have to buy her food, I have to get her drugs, I have to set up her appointments, you know, I have to check in and make sure she’s eating and all of that, so being responsible for somebody else in a period like this is actually a gift, because it stops you from getting wanky and feeling sorry for yourself, right? Because you have to function, you have to be there for them. Yeah, definitely that would be, I think, sometimes I wonder if that’s why so many people have gotten dogs over the last little while.

I’ve seen an explosion of people getting dogs, and I think a lot of that has to do with the need to have something to be responsible for, another living thing to have to be responsible for. Yeah, and hopefully they’ll be responsible for those dogs even when this is over and we won’t see a huge dump of rehomed dogs going to shelters, because people now realize that when you leave your house for eight hours a day, your dog is a very different creature than it is when you’re around all the time, and has other requirements. So I’m hoping that people keep the responsibility with that.

I mean, I have a cat, I’ve had cats my whole life, and she’s been great to have during this pandemic because she makes me laugh every day. Yeah, that whole dog thing is, you know, I think, you know, I had a dog for many, many years, and I think, you know, your life revolves around the animal, you know, and these dogs that are new, they’re growing up in their world where their people are always there. And I think there could be a boom industry of dog trainers who help to prepare dogs for when their people go back to work.

Yeah, absolutely. And it is going to be a big change. I have to say, even my cat has been so thrilled that I’m home all the time.

She’s just delighted to have me here at her beck and call constantly, you know. So when things go back to normal, and I’m away for six, 10 hours, 12 hours a day when I’m rehearsing or something, it’ll be a big change for her as well. Yeah, she’ll probably find some way to punish you.

Oh yeah, she totally will. One of the questions that I’ve been asking everybody who’s come on in the last 14 months is about joy. We all need some joy in our lives, and I think it’s good to remind each other of the joys in our own lives.

So aside from your cat, what’s one of the joys that you’ve been experiencing over the last 14 months? Well, seeing Shirley, my friend, is always a joy. She’s, you know, generally chipper. She’s generally glad to see me.

Doing something good for someone else makes me feel very good and brings me great joy. You know, my friend Spencer and I, who’s the only other person in my bubble, we put together a new season of our web series, Old Movies for Young People, that’s on YouTube, and we’ve been editing that and doing all the work on it. And being with him and working with him brings me great joy.

And you just have to find it where you can get it, because it’s not in the usual places these days. Yeah, no, absolutely. We’re all trying to figure out how to navigate, you know, and we’re still trying to figure out what does not seeing my friends for a year mean? Except on a screen.

Yes, exactly. And seeing them on a screen or talking to them on the phone is not the same thing at all, you know. No, no.

And it also puts a tremendous pressure on those people in our lives that we do see, because they are it. They are the only people that we see. So they are looked at to supply a great many things that in my case, anyway, are usually distributed among a larger number of people.

You know, so there can be a lot of expectation there as well. Yeah. Now, you mentioned Old Movies for Young People.

Can you tell me, what is that? I mean, the title seems to explain it all, but I’m curious about what inspired that and what kind of movies can young people see? Well, eight years ago, maybe nine, just about nine years ago, I did my master’s at the University of Toronto, and I was the oldest fellow in the class and the gayest. And there was a young guy who was 22 years old, who was straight, who was my exact opposite in the class, and we hit it off really well. We got along great.

We became very good friends. He’s a young writer. I’ve mentored him.

He’s assistant-directed for me. He’s stage-managed for me. And part of our relationship from the very beginning is once a week, I would show him a movie from the 20th century, and we would talk about it, and I would just try to show him something.

Often, they’re queer-themed, but not entirely, not exclusively. But there are movies that I personally like that I think other people would like, and he usually likes them, although not always. And so eventually, we had watched so many movies.

We had talked about them. We went, you know, we should do this and let other people in on it, let them in on the discussion, because we enjoyed doing it so much. So we did our first season, which was a technical nightmare.

We screwed everything up, but we were committed, and we got our 10 episodes out. We looked at 10 different movies, and we talk about whether or not they will play for a 21st century audience, for his peer group and people that are younger, and that often leads to very spirited conversations. But recently, we did the second season, and we acquitted ourselves much better technically, and we do double features, where we pit one movie against another.

The opening one this season was Tommy versus Jesus Christ Superstar, which one is better, and we argue about which one is better. And we just have a good time doing it, and hopefully bring another audience in to watch these great films that, you know, it would be a shame to see them lost, because they were part of the zeitgeist of the 20th century. And they often bring up really interesting discussions today about misogyny, about homophobia, about racism, about how different the world was not that long ago.

You know, these movies being lost is one of the reasons why I think I’ve been thinking about video stores, video rental stores, and all of the movies that you could get at those, that, you know, unless you are fortunate enough to have a video store in your town, you’re stuck with just whatever is available on whatever streaming services you have, or what you can buy from iTunes. And there’s a lot of movies that you can’t get that way. Yeah, no, they’re very hard to find, and some of them you have no choice but to turn to torrents and that kind of thing to get them.

But they’re out there, and we do try to include where you can find them legally with everything that we show. But you’re right, it’s with, you know, even discs and Blu-rays and things, at least you had an artifact that you could go back to. With all that stuff disappearing, it just becomes this ethereal, ephemeral thing in the air that only a corporation owns, and that you can never have in your hands, if you know what I mean.

In that sense, it’s a bit like the early days of television, or even pre-television, where a movie came, and you saw it, and then it basically disappeared. You never saw it again, unless it was shown on TV or something. But there were very few re-releases, so it was much harder.

It wasn’t until the 80s when they started releasing videocassettes of classic movies and that kind of thing, and even more obscure stuff, that for 20 or 30 years, we had this wonderful resource of films that weren’t lost because you had them in your hand. And again, now we’re standing on that precipice of what happened with so many silent films, when they fell out of favor, that they were just destroyed, disbanded, thrown away. Nobody cared about them anymore, and consequently, we’ve lost more silent films than we actually have now.

Yeah, I was actually thinking about that as you were talking about that, and thinking about, if you can actually look at the list of films that say a Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford or Buster Keaton, and there are films that just don’t exist, and even more of people that we don’t know so well. And I think that you’re right, there is a danger of losing access to all of these great movies from the past. So I think it’s great that you’re sharing those.

You know, movies are like plays in that way, though. I mean, they are a product of the moment. They are meant to be sold at the time.

They aren’t meant necessarily to be watched 10, 15, 20 years from now. And if you look at all of the movies or all of the plays that have been produced, very few of them are worth re-watching, no matter how popular they were at the time. I mean, if you watch, you know, the 70s disaster movies, for example, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, they don’t speak in our language anymore.

They’re too slow. They’re too drawn out. The camera work is too static.

And we have the same issue with silent movies. We do, you know, a silent movie every season, because I love showing Spencer silent movies, and it’s taken time for him to get on board, because you’re learning a new vocabulary. You really are.

You’re learning a visual vocabulary and a style of acting that we don’t see anymore. And that’s also true of 1940s movies. That’s true of 1960s movies, even 1990s movies, compared to today, that every contemporary audience has a way of looking at films that’s really valid at the time, but often doesn’t last longer than a decade.

No, that’s certainly true. I remember recently trying to, I decided I was gonna, like, I don’t know why, re-watch some of the Terminator movies, because why not? And I think I got, I wasn’t quite able to make that adjustment, because the movies move, like you say, at a different pace. And I was like, how did I like this? Why is this so boring? And it’s like, no, that’s the pace that movies moved at at that time.

Now we move a lot faster. Now, although I will say Terminator 2 is still one of the best movies I think I’ve ever seen. Terminator, Aliens, and The Bride of Frankenstein are the three best sequels that have ever been made.

And I can go back and watch them anytime. And part of watching it with Spencer is explaining to him why the pacing is different, why we’re doing it differently at that time. Because, of course, film has been around for over 100 years now, and we have become very sophisticated in the way we consume it and what we expect from it.

And it isn’t at all what it was at the very beginning. But if you watch the very beginning, all of the techniques, all of the camera work, all of the innovations were made in the first 20 years of filmmaking, and very little has changed since then. It’s interesting, because those movies were basically meant to be seen once at the theatre.

Maybe you might go back and see it again, but see it and forget it. They had to lay it out, they had to lay everything out in a more meticulous manner. There were no Easter eggs, no things in the background that you were going to discover later because you watched it 100 times on VHS.

So that means that you can’t make a movie in the same way then as you do now, because you just assumed nobody was ever going to see it after that first time. Yeah. Well, if you look at the original King Kong, it’s under 90 minutes or just around 90 minutes long.

We’re in New York, and we’ve got the ocean voyage, and we’ve got the islanders, and we’ve got the dinosaurs, and we’ve got the kidnapping of the girl, we got the trip back to New York, and we got the escape in New York. And that all happens in an hour and a half. Whereas Peter Jackson’s version of King Kong is over two hours long, and it’s full of all those same things.

But the thing is, it was made for a DVD market. It wasn’t so much made for the theatre. I mean, yes, it was made for the theatre.

But the reason it’s so long and episodic is because we’re used to people picking and choosing the best parts of the film to show someone. I know I do that quite often, that there’ll be a sequence or something. We don’t need to watch the whole film.

Just watch the sequence. It’s really good. And I think that’s the main difference of why the later King Kong is so bloated and so overdone is because it’s going to be watched again and again.

It’s going to be watched in parts, it’s going to be watched at home. So it doesn’t have the same kind of objective as going to a movie theatre to see a movie, and then a couple cartoons and a newsreel, and let’s get on to the next showing so we can make some more money. Well, Brad, thank you.

Thank you so much for having this conversation with me today. I really appreciate it. No problem.

I hope it was helpful.