MARCIA BLUMBERG
This article examines Brad Fraser's Poor Super Man: A Play with Captions, "a sexually explicit exploration of diverse friendships and erotic relationships, that constitutes a powerful vehicle for the queer(y)ing of the Canadian stage. Set in an urban Canadian locale synonymous with fragmentation and situated in a liminal space between the worlds of the comics and the theatre, the play refuses the apparent dichotomy of the straight/gay binary and challenges the assumed fixity of heteronormative structures. At this time of the AIDS pandemic, complex interactions mitigate against the surety of superheroes and an ongoing denial of societal issues at the nexus of gender, sexual orientation, and cultural difference.
Cet article examine Poor Super Man: A Play with Captions de Brad Fraser, une exploration sexuelle de diverses relations amicales et érotiques qui constitue un véhicule puissant pour l'interrogation sexuelle (queer(y)ing) de la scène canadienne. Située dans un lieu urbain canadien, synonyme de la fragmentation, et placée dans un espace liminal qui sépare le monde de la bande dessinée et celui du théâtre, la pièce rejette la dichotomie apparente de la forme binaire hétérosexuel/gai et met en question la fixité supposée des structures hétéronormatives. En ce moment de pandémie du SIDA, de complexes interactions atténuent la certitude des super-héros ainsi qu'une dénégation continuelle des grandes questions de la société telles que genre, l'orientation sexuelle et les différences culturelles.
Brad Fraser's Poor Super Man, a sexually explicit investigation of diverse friendships and erotic relationships set in Calgary, is a powerful vehicle for queer(y)ing the Canadian stage. The world premiere, early in 1994 in Cincinnati,1 overcame obstacles threatening closure and then achieved a sold-out extended run at the Ensemble Theatre. Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre mounted an acclaimed production in 1994, which transferred to London after a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Brad Fraser directed the Canadian premiere in Edmonton (1994) and another staging in Vancouver (1996) while a joint production by the Manitoba Theatre Centre and Canadian Stage played to packed houses in Winnipeg and a twice-extended season in Toronto from February to June 1995. Pierre Bernard's Poor Super Man in Montreal in May 1995 was judged by Fraser as "the best production yet . . . even if [as Conlogue notes] he doesn't understand a word of French" (D2). At the same time successful productions were mounted by local directors and actors in Sydney, Australia and Wellington, New Zealand.
Fraser's acknowledgment of the global entrenchment of American pop culture highlights an inflammatory issue since Canadians often feel swamped by an influx of American television channels, fast food outlets, and Disney artifacts. Even though this list offers a limited view of the diversity of American culture, many Canadians argue for cultural autonomy yet are often themselves hard-pressed to define a diverse and changing Canadian culture.2 In addition, Time magazine's rating of Poor Super Man as one of 1994's ten best plays in America raises the question whether an American or international stamp of approval is required before Canadian audiences risk material that challenges the status quo and expressly aims to revitalize English Canadian theatre, which Fraser claims is boring and out of touch. For that matter, Fraser's assertion provokes the much debated theatres of Canadian identity, nationalism, and Quebec separatism on and off the theatrical stage,3 a significant and complex topic that I merely sign-post in this analysis as I traverse another route.
Instead, my exploration focuses on another aspect, the queer(y)ing of the Canadian stage, which Robert Wallace has insightfully analysed in other Canadian contexts. He quotes John Palmer's representative remarks of 1975: "Nobody minds that you are gay. . . . As long as it isn't mentioned" ("To Become" 5). Wallace's recent assessment indicates a transition over almost two decades that still leaves much to be desired:
The dominant sensibility of Canadian culture is as anti-sexual as it is homophobic . . . Because Canadian theatre also is reluctant to produce work that deals openly with gay interests and behaviour, texts by lesbians and gay men still enter Canadian culture through the back door. Canadian playwrights who openly declare a same-sex preference still are subject to enormous prejudice--systemic homophobia that works to silence voices that offer alternatives to the heterosexual norm. ("Making" 16, 28)
Whilst gay playwrights in Canada occupy differing subject positions and situate themselves in complex relations with the staging of their theatrical work and their gayness, Brad Fraser is, in his words, a gay playwright who deliberately engages with the diversity of gay communities and their positioning in an avowedly heterosexist society. He also strongly resists the relegation of himself, his work, and those classed as outsiders (notably those identified as members of the gay community), to the margins:
There is a dignity and a power and an importance to all human experience. . . . [T]he marginalized segments of our society. . . that's where history is changed, it's never done by the complacent middle-class, it's done by the people who have to struggle and have to fight to be heard. . . . [M]y message is about those people and those things. (Bailey np)
No doubt the constructions of male and female characters in Poor Super Man will disturb and challenge audience members in different ways depending on their positionings, their politics, and the particular production they are viewing, yet the play presents complex interactions that mitigate against blanket denunciations, the surety of heroes, and an ongoing denial of societal issues at the nexus of gender, sexual orientation, cultural difference and the AIDS pandemic; the play, moreover, interrogates the fixity of categories in discursive, performative, and societal domains. Fraser writes out of an awareness that theatre is hardly a popular form of entertainment for many spectators who prefer viewing movies, rock videos and television. Consequently, in keeping with the rhythm of the sixty-second sound-bite and the fast pace and clashing concerns that typify urban living, he structures the play as a myriad of short scenes that pile one upon the other at break-neck speed. Comics and cartoons are another generational source that inspires this dramatic structure; the playwright not only "keeps a collection of 10,000 comic books" (Johnson 60) but asserts their importance during his miserable childhood: "Television and comic books were my touchstones . . . . Pop culture became our physical landscape" (61). Poor Super Man utilizes the Superman intertext to remind spectators of the more than five-decades-old Action Comics hero but concomitantly enacts Adrienne Rich's notion of "re-vision: the act of looking back, seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction" (35). While Rich considers that this process "is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival," I extend her rubric to argue that Poor Super Man provokes women and men to explore the emergence of new possibilities that not only interrogate the conventional reception of the popular intertext but also undermine traditional viewings of seemingly entrenched societal norms.
The title's rupture of the conventional designation of the comic hero renders problematic the glorification of a masculine stereotype representing brute strength, corporeal superiority, and the invincibility implied in Superman's epithet, "Man of Steel." This appellation resonates on many levels with Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, an extensive study of the dynamics of the fascist unconscious. Theweleit juxtaposes a photograph of a painting of a discus thrower by a German artist with a drawing of a superhero from the comics--in this instance, Spiderman--and links these two images with the notion of the new man as a perfectly functioning machine:
The most urgent task of the man of steel is to pursue, to dam in, and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horribly disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines, and feelings that calls itself human. . . . The new man is a man whose physique has been machinized, his psyche eliminated. (160, 62)
Poor Super Man acknowledges the wretchedness and deficiency of a society where the operative dynamics have valorized those attributes of masculinity. Fraser argues that the title signifies the "unrealistic role models" for boys as well as girls and their effects:
so many men have trouble being vulnerable or dealing with their feelings . . . they are so afraid of failure. . . . [There is] a real potential in our society for self-hatred because "men never live up to the expectations of the society." (Stein 1B)
The titular format also questions the necessity for the construction of heroes in a manner reminiscent of Brecht's Galileo, who counters his assistant's indictment of betrayal, "Unhappy the land that has no heroes" with an apposite rejoinder, "Unhappy the land where heroes are needed" (98); the title, consequently, foregrounds the impoverishment of a society that relies on the viability of superheroes, whether they emanate from the comics or are constructed as such in a present lived reality or in history.
Umberto Eco's analysis of Superman's performance of heroic powers and his defence of "Truth, Justice and the American Way" interrogates aspects of the comic hero which are implied in Fraser's play:
Superman could exercise good on a cosmic level, or a galactic level, and furnish us in the mean time with a definition that through fantastic amplification could clarify precise ethical lines everywhere. . . . In Superman we have a perfect example of civic consciousness, completely split from political consciousness. . . The paradoxical waste of means . . . astound[s] the reader who sees Superman forever employed in parochial performances. (22, my emphasis)
Written over two decades ago, Eco's ideological critique of limited individual good deeds versus a lacunae of group action, and by implication a preservation of the status quo, forms an important caveat for Fraser's Poor Super Man. Is Superman so ethically impoverished and collectively ineffectual that his death should be welcomed rather than mourned?
Querying the Poor Super Man stage picture demands engagement with an unstable urban Canadian 1990s locale synonymous with fragmentation. Over two-hundred shifts in spotlighting evoke the frenetic pace, instability, and bombardment of urban living. In addition, these multiple sites foreground a short-lived present and signify past and future scenarios to stage both ruptures and connection. The title and sub-title, "A Play with Captions," generically mark a liminal space between the worlds of theatre and the comics. Spectators require a simultaneous engagement with the stage--a raked wooden floor signifying a tenuous grounding for five characters--and the backdrop--panels intermittently overlaid with lettering. These captions represent thought bubbles in counterpoint to staged action or speech. Flashing by like frames of a cartoon, they situate scenes, emphasize issues, and highlight the continuum of negotiation between reality and wish-fulfilment, truth and lies, or euphemisms and personal desires; mostly, however, they stress impermanence and an intellectual and/or emotional contestation of expectations, all of which demonstrate one mode of queering the stage.
Stage locales (an artist's studio and a bedroom) serve as spaces for straight and gay coupling as well as a place for dying. The Edinburgh production partitioned the bedroom space into three adjacent floor areas covered with similar duvets and pillows, where repeated sexual acts and a suicide occurred in designated sections; this composition invites us to compare the complex juxtaposed actions. In Vancouver, the three areas worked differently: straight coupling and death occurred in beds on each side of the stage, while gay coupling took place in the centre of the stage on a geometric-shaped area that served multiple purposes, such as the table in the cafe. Perhaps this production points in its very staging to the fact that gay sex refuses the putative convention of the bedroom setting in the same way that gay relationships resist the fixity and conformity of heteronormative structures. In Toronto, however, the single bed used for straight and gay coupling as well as suiciding makes visible in a more obvious but perhaps simplistic manner these complicated dynamics. The apparently minor variation, however, lays itself open to a reactionary reading that unproblematically equates sex with death for gay men at a time when AIDS in North America has undoubtedly wreaked enormous loss in the gay community; this aspect of the Toronto staging, therefore, risks perpetuating the homophobic stereotype that not only suggests the possible hearkening back to moralistic judgments of perversity and punishment in an act of scape-goating but also offers a potential interpretation of the containment of AIDS within specific risk groups such as the gay community, which is both patently false and counterproductive to the provocative reassessment of societal mores that the drama text stimulates.
Poor Super Man also refuses the apparent dichotomy of the straight/gay binary with its assumed privileged and devalued terms. Neither does the play invert the hierarchy even though a gay artist is the central character. Instead it enacts Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's broadening of the term to explore the plethora of possibilities that comprise gender, sexuality, and other "identity-constituting and identity-fracturing discourses" (9). The unfixity of relationships in ever-changing scenarios relentlessly challenges perceived norms and inspires re-visionings. Speech acts mediated by the captions as well as the coupling of bodies express a desire to relate meaningfully across regulated norms and keep loneliness as well as alienation at bay. Poignant and witty evocations of loss, pain, intimacy, and renewal articulate the dynamics of a pre-operative transsexual, who is living with AIDS and re-casts the entire scenario in a new time-space that defies the mythic invincibility of Superman and, more importantly, foregrounds the limitations of "superheroes" of science and medicine. Despite the violent juxtaposition between the comic book world and issues of life and death on the stage and in society, the curtain-line caption, "beginning" invests the stage picture with transformative potential and suggests affirmation over despair.
In moving across various formulations, whether these be national boundaries, genres, media, genders, or sexualities, the play celebrates what Sedgwick terms
the moment of Queer. . . . [S]omething about queer is inextinguishable. Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive. . . . The word "queer" itself means across . . . multiply transitive. . . . It is relational, and strange. (xii)
A continuing movement of queerness inflects Poor Super Man. Some characters perform difference to resist the reification of sexual identities and demonstrate and expose, by way of contrasting perspectives and behaviour, the effects of homophobia and a potential for change. The play, moreover, disturbs what Jauss terms "the horizon of expectations" of the spectators since it continually crosses boundaries and relates strange and even antithetical generic modes and assumptions. David Halperin's definition of queer also informs the play:
whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. "Queer," then, demarcates not a positivity, but a positionality vis-a-vis the normative. . . . [I]t describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance . . . a variety of possibilities for reordering the relations among sexual behaviours, erotic identities, constructions of gender, forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, logics of representation, modes of self-constitution, and practices of community--for restructuring, that is, the relations among power, truth, and desire. (62)
Although some constructions and characters in the play re-iterate what Michel Warner terms "a heteronormative understanding of society" (xi), these are problematized by the spectator especially when they are contrasted with the queer dynamic as explicated by Halperin that fuels the play.
The age-old trope of the quest for self-knowledge which motivates the narrative structure contrasts with the fragmented postmodern dramatic structure. These occupy a generic configuration of comedy that employs the mechanisms of triangular relationships with a blocking figure, typically associated with Classical New Comedy, as well as the convention of the happy ending, which in the play translates for this spectator into a powerfully affective and complex but ultimately affirmative finale that refuses closure. Another crossing juxtaposes the descriptor urban comedy with many serious issues: fragmentation, loss, broken relationships, mourning, and the immense challenges for people living with AIDS. While witty repartee, the lingo of a hip generation, and the sexual explicitness and forthright dialogue usually induce the laughter of recognition in Fraser's audience, the play also utilizes, but at same time significantly re-visions, conventional generic markers of comedy.
Poor Super Man comprises two sets of triangular relationships: one constituted by sexual desire, another performing the love of friendship. Both triangles stage the traversal of apparently rigid categories using characters that effect this crossing with varying degrees of success. In both sets of relationships the pivotal character is a gay artist, who performs the pursuit of self-knowledge and a meaningful relationship to rekindle his creativity and well-being. David is also the main reference point for the intertext, naming himself Superman (88) and Clark Kent (98), and confessing his outsidership: "I don't know anyone who's like me. I'm a fucking alien" (153). In contrast with Superman's unrequited love triangle constituted by an inept Clark Kent, who loves his colleague, Lois Lane, who in turn desires the hero who will never form an attachment, David's sexual relationships refuse the societally constructed boundaries of normative heterosexuality. This context of difference, nevertheless, also offers similar structural mechanisms. Countering the accepted Superman lore, David Mamet calls "the man of steel"
the most vulnerable of beings. . . . His power is obtained at the expense of any possibility of personal pleasure. . . . He cannot tell [Lois] his secret, for to do so would imperil his life. . . . He can have adulation without intimacy, or he may long for intimacy with no hope of reciprocation. Superman comics are a fable, not of strength, but of disintegration. . . . Superman's personalities can be integrated . . . only in death. Kryptonite is all that remains of his childhood home. . . . It is . . . fear of those remnants, which rule Superman's life. (177, 78)
David, an out gay man, wrestles with secret alienation or what the play depicts as a lack of knowledge that propels him towards relationships with straight men. Whether an abusive relationship with his cousin who re-appears in his paintings or the urgency of desire in his relationship with Matt, the young restauranteur who is his temporary employer, David structurally occupies a position similar to that of straight men with whom he becomes involved, and this involves a possible misogyny.
Unlike the conventional love triangle, which stereotypically posits two men in pursuit of a woman, Fraser's revisioning offers two men in a relationship of mutual desire and Matt's wife, Violet, as the betrayed victim still firmly entrenched in heterosexist assumptions. David and Matt's burgeoning relationship initiates the artist's creativity and Matt's awareness of a new path of desire, different sexual practices and a depth of intimacy. Yet while Matt succumbs to a fear of societal castigation, "You think I want people saying I'm a fucking queer. . . . I don't want to be a famous fag" (147, 158), Violet discovers in David's paintings a different Matt. Although her own sense of failure as a woman and a wife remain intact, her admission, "he loved you as much as I did" (174) acknowledges difference and validates David's conviction: "I don't believe all relationships are the same. . . . I don't think we have to love only one person. . . . I think love needs to be redefined" (132, 33). Matt's attraction to David is, however, soon overshadowed by an inability to situate himself outside rigid traditional structures. On the strength of another broken relationship, David resolves "to find someone like me--instead of trying to create him" (176). This confrontation with his secret vulnerability acknowledges the difference between the limitless creative potential he stages as an artist and the boundaries of the roles he performs in a lived reality; it also forms one of his rationales for cutting ties with Superman, taking control, and making his life anew.
The friendship triangle occupies more stage time and significance than the love triangle. David's feisty friend, Kryla, regrets her single status and obsessively and unsuccessfully searches for a male partner. Work provides no compensation for the lack of significant relationships, which leaves her bitter and jealous of David's absorption with Matt. Fraser's construction of Violet and Kryla problematically exposes the always already oppressive positioning of women in patriarchal culture and reinforces the pervasive entrapment of gender stereotyping. Kryla's recognition of her role model, "Lois Lane is the reason I entered journalism"(28), emphasizes the intertextual caveat.4 The play confines both women's potential for transformation, which forms a central attribute of feminist theatre5 (Keyssar xiii), to the final moments and their break with past dynamics. Yet the play does invest transformative potential and a model of compassion in the relationship between David and his roommate, Shannon, a pre-operative transsexual denied the fulfilment of her dream of becoming a woman because of AIDS. Shannon's distress at the impossibility for a crossing of this sex/gender border evokes David's unconditional affirmation: "I love you no matter who you are" (79).
Their witty and forthright banter signifies the closeness of an abiding friendship and forms a central structuring of the play. It also reminds us of Michel Foucault's concept of friendship:
A way of life can be shared among individuals of different age, status and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be "gay," I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try to define and develop a way of life. (207)
The dynamic of their intense friendship performs an ethics that is revealed in Shannon's confrontation with AIDS, which engages David in her philosophy of living and dying and inspires greater self-awareness and courage. Shannon's answer to the first caption of Act Two, "Why People Cheat On Their Lovers," significantly follows the other characters' one-liners:
Cheating's a relative concept. Tom [Shannon's lover] fucked other people all the time. But he was completely up-front about it and--once I got over those suck ass morals our lying, cheating parents foisted on us--I realized his other sexual partners had nothing to do with his love for me. It was okay. It was great. Christians are liars. (104)
Whilst some spectators may regard this speech as shocking or even blasphemous, Shannon's mourning for her dead lover and the performative actions of a loving friendship with David make visible her convictions. In challenging the pervasive rectitude of societal norms Shannon also questions institutional structures, belief systems, and, by association, the veneration of superheroes. Their final exchange before Shannon's suicide tellingly reinvokes the intertext. David's desperate attempt at dissuasion, "I'll use forgotten Kryptonian technology to suck the virus out of your body," is met with Shannon's sobering reminder, "You're not Superman, David" (166). Her determination to make the final decision about the diminished quality of her life signifies her choice of suicide as an act of empowerment that transgresses juridical prohibitions. Moreover, throughout the play Shannon enunciates her sense of death as a process of renewal (43, 85) which she appears to perform in her final utterance, "Wow" (171). This exclamation marks the inextinguishability of queer life and celebrates Shannon's agency rather than victim-hood in the face of the pandemic; at the same time, its juxtaposition with David's elegy for the many friends who have died of AIDS refuses a romanticization of her death.
In this time-space of AIDS, the problematic role of a diminished eponymous hero is evoked in references and marked by physical absence except in the Montreal production where the director "theatricalizes the metaphor by projecting panels from Superman comics on the backdrop at crucial moments" (Conlogue). In the concluding dialogue, Kryla presents David with Action Comic no. 500 celebrating Superman's rebirth. David's refusal of this peace offering, which he drops on the ground, visually reinforces his final word, "Goodbye" (179), a reiteration of all the characters' farewells to a child-like innocence and an allusion to their collective relinquishing of their superhero. The ending foregrounds the gap between the myth and the present moment, a time when even Superman cannot prevail.
Despite the violent juxtaposition between the comic book world and issues of life and death on stage and in society, the final caption, "Beginning" (179), invests Poor Super Man with a measure of affirmation in a generically typical comic ending of renewal. This final tableau vigorously counters reliance by children or adults on a powerful superhero to fix the world, and the play in its entirety simultaneously demythologizes Superman and emphasizes the imperatives of self-knowledge and empowerment. Moreover, in performing and negotiating various queerings Poor Super Man refuses the fixity of socially constructed norms and offers in its place a critique of regulative divisions and a challenge to instigate change.6
Notes>
1. Cincinnati is the city notorious for the debacle with the Robert Mapplethorpe photographic exhibition. Chris Jones contextualizes the play within this political climate:
The people of Cincinnati passed a resolution in early November [1993] denying civil rights protection to gays and lesbians. In the unfriendly environment the theatre's 28-member board initially voted to cancel the production. (32)
Fraser reacted perversely to the notion of opening the play there: "It's important to invade enemy
territory" (Jones 33).
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2. See Reid Gilbert's article, "Mounties, Muggings and Moose: Canadian Icons in a Landscape
of American Violence," and others in a collection that explores aspects of Canadian culture: The
Beaver Bites Back. Eds. David H. Flaherty and Frank E. Manning. Montreal: McGill/Queens
UP, 1993.
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3. In Producing Marginality Robert Wallace asks "Why is theatre in English Canada suffering a
debilitating crisis at exactly the time that Quebecois theatre companies are travelling the world to
rave reviews, and packing houses at home?" (15)
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4. The objectification and diminution of women in comic books has continued unabated. William Savage reminds us that
Lois Lane demonstrated that it was perfectly all right for a professional woman to behave like a moron while mooning over the man of her dreams. . . . [While] women were out to marry . . . marriage was out of the question for heroic males because it cramped their styles. (78)
5. Fraser's play has provoked strong reactions from some feminist critics who are justifiably
disturbed at the constructions of women in the play: a witty but cynical and complaining almost
middle-aged woman whose life is characterised by emptiness, absence, and missed opportunities
and a naive, young wife who is a victim of betrayal. Other feminist academics, who actively
participate in turf wars, decry the growing interest in gay and lesbian issues and the burgeoning
field of queer theory, which they feel "steals the limelight" and deflects attention from the
multiple feminist fields of inquiry. Engagement with these theories and practices is more helpful
and is the subject of the Summer-Fall 1994 issue of Differences, entitled "More Gender Trouble:
Feminism Meets Queer Theory," with an introduction by Judith Butler. As a feminist spectator
and academic whose work is primarily directed at feminist approaches to theatre and texts by
women playwrights, I am also committed to the nexus of theatre, AIDS, and activism. Whilst I
problematize the constructions of women and other aspects of Poor Super Man I pay attention to
a play which has achieved sold-out runs internationally and locally and raises multiple issues;
most particularly it has proved an affirmative experience for many people who are HIV+ or are
living with AIDS and has brought new insights to many people who have had no exposure to the
issue other than in newspaper headlines or TV programmes.
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6. I acknowledge with much appreciation a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada. Sincere thanks to Reid Gilbert for insightful comments
about this work and a warm debt of gratitude to Stephen Oldenburg-Barber for ongoing dialogue.
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