The Wolf Plays

R. Kerry White is the director of theatre arts at Laurentian University.

Brad Fraser wrote Wolfboy in 1981, when he was 22 years old; he wrote
Prom Night of the Living Dead in 1991. Both have been thoroughly revised
for publication. Neither can be counted among Fraser’s more
significant works, although both share Fraser’s preoccupation with
issues of sexual orientation, power, and marginal existence.

Aside from the merits of the plays themselves, there are two reasons
for this book. The first is the presence of a “Wolfboy” character in
both plays. In the earlier play, the character ostensibly suffers from
lycanthropy (werewolf syndrome), and is a patient in a mental hospital.
In the later play, the character is a teenager who changes into a
werewolf at night. In both instances the character is a metaphor for
difference and power; the character either is, or imagines himself to
be, an outsider, and more or less helpless in the adolescent struggle
for sexual and social identity. The persona proclaims this feeling of
difference and bestows power on the character, but this only creates
further problems. The second reason is that the reader can assess the
playwright’s development over 10 years in terms of the quite different
treatments of these issues.

In dramaturgy and dialogue, however, both plays are rather sophomoric.
Wolfboy, for example, uses the awkward and overworked invention of
offstage characters who appear in spotlights, representing the
problematic relationships of the two patients. The dialogue is
self-consciously clever and derivative. Characters speak in phrases and
single words with no organic reason for doing so. The result is that we
become conscious of the playwright’s “artiness.” Prom Night has
individuals and groups popping up all over the stage, appearing and
disappearing for no better reason than to move the overly obvious
machinery of the play’s structure along another notch. The lyrics to
the “songs” count for so much of the play’s length that serious
examinations of issues and character relationships are impossible.