“‘Gay’ is so over,” says 22-year-old Madison to her father’s ex-boyfriend. “It doesn’t mean anything anymore. It is like ‘Negro’ or ‘Jewess.’ It’s all just sex.” But even though some of his characters offer simple (or simplistic) truths about sexuality, playwright and director Brad Fraser definitely doesn’t. His latest work, True Love Lies, which opens Factory Theatre’s 40th season this Friday, tells the story of two kids, their mom, dad, and the first love he never told them about.
“I think it’s a very healthy play, in fact,” says Factory artistic director, Ken Gass. The theatre, which Gass describes as a “cultural oasis” amid the ever-proliferating condos of Toronto’s west side, has a reputation not unlike Fraser’s for contesting artistic boundaries.
“It’s interesting for me,” says Gass, “the way the play somehow encapsulates both generations.” When Madison tries to get a job from local restaurateur David, he refuses her for a reason she would never expect. “Just a few minutes in, suddenly the two children in the family become aware that their father [Kane] had a gay lover 23 years ago,” explains Gass. But this uncovered secret makes way for more complicated half-truths. “There’s just one lie from the past that becomes accidentally revealed, and things unravel, and unravel, and unravel,” Gass grins. “When you read the play, it’s a real page-turner.”
But although he’s something of an intruder in True Love Lies, the witty, cynical David McMillan is intimately familiar to fans of Fraser’s work. The changing situations of his life, like the changing role of the gay community, have been charted through three of Fraser’s other plays. David’s relationship with Kane had its beginning almost 20 years ago in the darkly comic critical smash Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. But Gass says he wouldn’t describe this as a sequel. “The play is of a world and of a piece—that is, Fraser’s universe—but it is ‘unified’ and relevant on its own.”
Because its back story spans generations, sharp differences in generational attitudes about sex, like Madison’s assertion that “gay is over,” colour many of the play’s conflicts. “I think that it’s something to do with the way in which we’ve made a certain degree of progress in our society. That sense of the ‘gay world’ in a city like Toronto—it’s simply integrated into the fabric, and a sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’—‘Oh, you’re gay, you’re straight’—these definitions have broken down. We’re in that wonderful, rich ambiguity of sexuality,” says Gass.
However, there is an inevitable tension between the sexual freedom the younger characters take for granted and the struggles the older ones have had to carry with them. “The older generation of characters, when they refer to their past, when they refer to 20 years ago […] clearly they were segmented from the mainstream,” Gass explains. As David’s parents disowned him when they discovered he was gay, he’s painfully aware of the risks Kane faces when he comes out to his children.
To match the shifting perspectives of Fraser’s storytelling, Bretta Gerecke’s set is designed for rapid and smooth transformation. “There’s something cinematic about the way in which [Fraser] moves from scene to scene. Theatre has that fluidity if you choose to exercise it, if you don’t get stuck with a realistic set. They’ve gotten to something that’s fairly simple, but textured. I think it’s just getting over naturalistic sets and naturalistic expectations.”
Then again, those curious about what to expect from this play could always look to assistant director Briana Brown’s blog, which shares rehearsal trivia (like some surprising ingredients in the actors’ herbal cigarettes) and directorial techniques (like “theme of the day: risk failure”). Gass is pleased with this non-traditional publicity technique. “She takes you right into the pulse of the rehearsal. I think it’s a very interesting journey.” However, this being True Love Lies’ Canadian premiere—it opened in Manchester only eight months ago—the story of its production might take on a special significance. “Rehearsals are a process of discovery, particularly when a play is new. The wonderful thing about doing new work generally is that there isn’t a blueprint. And so the choices that you make are fresh, and sometimes difficult.”
Another obvious benefit of the blog is its appeal to younger audiences. Gass hopes teenagers and twenty-somethings will come to see this play with their parents. The young people in Fraser’s play “have to realize that their parents have, or had, as equally complex emotional and sexual lives as they may currently be having.” Although that may not be a thought many find appetizing, if anyone can make it work, it’s the playwright who found the true nature of love in unidentified human remains.
True Love Lies runs at the Factory Theatre (125 Bathurst St.) from October 1 through November 1.
$10-35, Sunday matinees PWYC.
