Stratford Festival mounts 1st work by gay playwright Brad Fraser 40 years into his career

Playwright Brad Fraser said that queer content wasn't really a thing in mainstream theatre when he started his career decades ago, but a lot has changed. 

The Stratford Festival has a whole line up of queer programming for Pride month this year that includes Fraser's adaptation of William Shakespeare's Richard II, which opens Saturday.

A Pride line-up at Stratford is something Fraser never thought he'd see when he began his career. 

"I've been trying to get a play done in Stratford for at least 40 years, and finally it happened," Fraser told CBC Radio's The Morning Edition with Craig Norris. 

Despite the progress, Fraser's adaptation — which is far from your usual Shakespeare production — has upset some audience members.

"I think people walk out in every preview," he said. "Not a lot of them but yes, there's a scene where two men kiss in a hot tub, and it seems to offend a number of people and they walk out."

"In 1989 when we opened Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love at [Alberta Theatre Projects] in Calgary, two women kiss in the middle of the second act and people walked out then, and here we are … 34 years later and people are still walking out because two people of the same sex kiss."  

He said that he'd developed a following in Manchester, England where a number of his plays have been mounted, unlike what he's found in Canada due to the provocative nature of his work. He attributes this to "the lack of courage among our artistic directors and their unwillingness to take a chance."

'How difficult the life in the arts is' 

The artistic director of the Stratford Festival, Antoni Cimolino, has high praise for Fraser's work.

"You have to understand how difficult the life in the arts is for all of us," Cimolino told CBC News. "And every single artist you speak to will feel that they were not as accepted as they should've been."

"This is a very common experience and it's not an inappropriate one. Life in the arts is hard and so someone as successful as Brad both here in Canada and abroad, I think that, his success, over those years speaks for itself as to the acceptance."     

Pivotal moments for queer theatre

Fraser describes some pivotal moments where queer content slowly became more accepted in mainstream theatre.

He points to plays like Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley in the late '60s — which he said was "groundbreaking" — and Bent by Martin Sherman in the '70s.

He said that in the '80s, there was content around the HIV/AIDS epidemic with plays like Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart — which was adapted into a film by HBO in 2014 — but things changed significantly with the airing of the British and American versions of Russell T. Davis' Queer as Folk in the '90s and 2000s.   

"And suddenly those stories that we could only see off-Broadway at small theatres and those sexual situations were all on television and we didn't have to go to the theatre to see them anymore and that made a big difference as well," said Fraser who was a writer and producer for the American series.

He said that the play, Angels in America by Tony Kushner, which was also about the HIV/AIDS epidemic, had an impact as well. It too was adapted into an HBO special.