Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love

Cecily M. Barrie is a senior drama student at Mount St. Vincent
University in Halifax.

This play is a surrealistic, naturalistic exposé of the various ways
people search for “love”. Set in Edmonton, it demonstrates
remarkable technical finesse and honesty in creating a painful modern
world of sexuality and love. The primary focus is on how David and Candy
and five other characters experience the “many forms” of love:
heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, monogamous, adulterous, promiscuous,
spiritual, and fraternal. The narrative theme is the unfolding identity
of a serial killer who sees love as a hunger that must be fed.

Fraser piques his audience’s curiosity about the world where gays and
nongays actively seek “love” (which may or may not be the same as
lust), the same way he uses four urban myths to pique other, darker
interests in titillating violence. He concludes that, for those
involved, violence and pain are real and not at all titillating. The
play is guaranteed to evoke powerful emotional responses. But its
general appeal would be limited by the language, which is filled with
shocking images of violence and death, and by on-stage enactments of
various forms of homosexual and heterosexual intercourse.

But Fraser has gone beyond merely piquing curiosity with sex and
violence; he has also included a profusion of other current social
problems: drugs; child abuse; aids, sadomasochism, mutilation,
voyeurism, sexual manipulation, and betrayal of friendship. In a chaos
of dark, shadowy images and emotions, David and Candy seek “the true
nature of love,” which each seems to define as tenderness.

Unfortunately, this overloaded plot is exacerbated by two production
techniques that should be effective but that only serve to tip the style
from expressionism into surrealism. Fraser parallels conscious dialogue
with subconscious cue words, and he also requires that all characters be
on stage throughout the play, despite minimal explicit interaction.
Therefore, the plot movement is poorly focused and uneven, and the
dramatic tension leads to abrupt dénouement.

Fraser has successfully created a nightmare society in modern Edmonton,
but the play’s subtext belies its positive ending, instead agreeing
with David’s early statement that “there is no such thing” as
love.