Poor Super Man: A Play with Captions

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

Like all Brad Fraser’s plays, Poor Super Man has had a rocky
theatrical history. Its premier production, by the Ensemble Theatre of
Cincinnati, narrowly escaped cancellation over fears that the
controversial content would alienate mainstream subscribers, and it was
only after the play had achieved international success that cosmopolitan
Toronto mustered the courage to stage its own production. In his
outspoken introduction to the playscript, Fraser attributes the
nervousness that invariably greets his work to a combination of
homophobia and obeisance to a tired theatrical model that sacrifices
action and narrative to “character, metaphor, and debate.”

There is nothing remotely tired about Poor Super Man. The protagonist
is David, a gay artist who falls in love (and lust) with an ostensibly
straight restaurateur named Matt. Serving as an acid-tongued Greek
chorus are David’s longtime friends Shannon, an HIV-positive
transvestite, and Kryla, a journalist who is as hapless as David when it
comes to relationships with men. The least effective character, Violet,
serves as little more than a foil to her husband Matt’s sexual angst.

Rapid-fire dialogue, deftly paced scenes, and a steady flow of
projected captions all contribute to the play’s relentless forward
momentum. Its depressing themes—loneliness, death, alienation—are
lightened by deliciously camp humor (Shannon: “I have seen the face of
horror and it is Betty Rubble”) and mordant wit (David: “Sometimes I
feel like the only men who stayed with their families in the seventies
were the ones fucking their kids”). Controversial or not, Poor Super
Man does more than keep theatregoers wide awake and entertained;
ultimately, it moves them.