The Ugly Man

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan and director of La Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

After a long apprenticeship in the theatre and a life of considerable
knocks, Edmonton playwright Brad Fraser is experiencing meteoric success
internationally. Canadians who are not theatregoers may well have
encountered his work Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of
Love in the film version directed by Denys Arcand.

The world of The Ugly Man is similarly bleak, exploitative, and
sexually violent. As Beckett distilled his text to its philosophical
existentials, leaving only a basic or highly symbolic physical world on
the stage, so Fraser reduces the plot and social context of this play to
skeletal form in order to give full play to the hormones and sexual
politics of his characters. (“We could be friends only as long as you
want something from me.”) Or, as Paula Simons would have it in the
excellent introduction to the text, Fraser assumes an array of “pop
cult references [to] allow him to sketch his characters quickly [...]
crafting a work that moves as fast as any rock video, with enough jolts
to serve the adrenaline needs of the most frenetic channel surfer.”
Exactly. It is crafted for a young, modern audience of short attention
span.

At the same time, the symbolic shorthand (e.g., Archie’s Veronica and
the Barbara Stanwyck character from The Big Valley) is fed by the
television, comics, and movies of a generation past (the fare of the
author himself), and all of this has been fitted to a framework based on
the revenge tragedy The Changeling. In savage detail (not a little
informed by the author’s own childhood of physical and sexual abuse)
Fraser poses the question, “Do all children pay for the crimes of
their parents?”

Gerry Potter, Artistic Director of Workshop West in Edmonton, describes
a production of The Ugly Man in a felicitous afterword in which he
identifies “the power of the piece to keep audiences riveted to their
seats and gasping for breath.” One suspects that an audience member
would find ample reason to conclude with one of the characters,
“It’s been a radical day”!