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    Kill Me Now
    Kill Me Now
    Kill Me Now
    Ebook211 pages1 hour

    Kill Me Now

    By Brad Fraser

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    About this ebook

    When Joey enters puberty, his father Jake finds himself in a morally ambiguous position. Joey is severely disabled, but he still has the same sexual desires as any seventeen-year-old boy, only he can’t do anything to relieve the tension. Jake is a widower whose life is devoted to his son, but when he suddenly develops a serious medical condition, he becomes the one to rely on the people around him, including his sister Twyla, his friend Robyn, and Joey’s best friend Rowdy. As Jake’s condition worsens, an ethical dilemma troubles the household as everyone is forced to consider the possibility of saying goodbye.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPlaywrights Canada Press
    Release dateOct 6, 2015
    ISBN9781770914407
    Kill Me Now
    Author

    Brad Fraser

    Brad Fraser won his first playwriting competition at the age of seventeen and has since written numerous plays, including Cold Meat Party, Love and Human Remains, True Love Lies, and Poor Super Man, among others. Brad is a five-time winner of the Alberta Culture Playwriting Competition, the London Evening Standard Award for Promising Playwright, London's Time Out Award for Best New Play, and the L.A. Critics Award. In addition to his work as a playwright and director, Brad writes for print media, radio, film, and television.

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      Book preview

      Kill Me Now - Brad Fraser

      Cover: Kill Me Now by Brad Fraser.

      Kill Me Now

      Brad Fraser

      Playwrights Canada Press

      Toronto

      Contents

      On Characters and Casting

      Production History

      Characters

      The Setting

      Kill Me Now

      Thanks

      About the Author

      Copyright Page

      For Alex. For Rudy and John.

      On Characters and Casting

      By Brad Fraser

      I am a queer mixed-race person from a rough background. I grew up in roadside motels in northern BC and attended a dizzying array of schools in my early years. The people I encountered during that time, and throughout my life, were young and old, good and bad, short and tall. They were able-bodied and disabled. They were male and female and trans, straight, gay, and queer, bi and asexual. Some were even straight, middle-class, and white, the group I least related to. They were my family, my friends, and the citizens of the many towns we passed through. And, like me, many of them were outsiders in some way.

      I am a writer. I tell the stories of these people. Outsider stories. Our stories. Not once did it occur to me to ask if I had a right to portray these people. Portraying people is what writers do. I chose to write for the theatre not only because of my love of the form but because it has always been the place where those who live on the margins of society are first able to share and find their voice.

      In the context of my background and experience, I’m baffled by the judgmental tenor of the current controversy over physically abled actors playing physically challenged characters. Not that we shouldn’t be having this discussion—of course we should—but let’s do it in a nuanced and pragmatic way.

      Physical disability is a very broad spectrum. Each individual manifestation of disability has its own attributes. Theatre also has almost infinite variety. Each production has its own requirements. Each character has its own demands.

      In the theatre, unlike the electronic media, an actor’s job is not just to act, but also to control the flow and pace of the play. What is seen on stage is only the tip of a much larger backstage iceberg of fast-paced manoeuvring that involves racing around in the dark, lightning-quick changes, and often a great deal of physical and mental dexterity. Actors, whether able-bodied or challenged, have to rise to these challenges, or the production will fail.

      This is not to suggest that disabled actors can’t do theatre, but that the way in which it is done will vary greatly by individual and role, and, in the commercial theatre at least, this will always come down to a question of time and money.

      Acting is one of the hardest professions in the world. Most of those in the business will know far more rejection than success. It doesn’t matter if you look the part, you’ve lived the part, or you are the part—the director and producers will go with whoever they think will lead to highest ticket sales, and ninety-nine percent of the time the actor hired will not be you, regardless of race, gender, sex, or physical capability. Rejection, for actors, is an equal opportunity experience.

      Equating able-bodied actors playing physically challenged characters with historic blackface is a false equivalence. Disability, like queerness, is potentially found in everyone regardless of race or gender. Further complicating the issue, disability, like race and gender, is a mutable and evolving thing. Advanced prosthetics let people who were once considered disabled outperform the average able-bodied person. Intermarriage and the mixing of the races increasingly makes race and skin colour a more complicated issue. Gender is also fluid. Men can become women, women can become men, and those who choose not to identify as either are fighting for their own recognition.

      Can Othello only be played by someone who had two black parents? What if one parent was of another background? Just how black does Othello have to be? Conversely, it is equally valid to ask if Willy Loman has to have both of his hands, or if he has to be able to walk without an aid, if he has to be able to see, or even if he has to be white. Can the lead dancer in the chorus of the latest mega-musical lead the troupe on advanced prosthetics rather than legs? How does a director communicate ideas to a deaf and mute actress who is playing Helen Keller? How versatile does the actor need to be in a single show; will they be playing multiple characters and how will that work? What if the character is only differently abled for part of the narrative? Can a disabled actor play the able-bodied part as convincingly as an able-bodied actor can portray the disability? If Joey in Kill Me Now should only be played by an actor with a true physical challenge, then must the actor playing Jake also suffer from spinal stenosis?

      The answers to these questions can only be found in the context of each individual production, process, and performer, not in endless reductive comments in the corporate press and social media. They’ll only be found when the theatre truly opens itself up to the possibility of actors with physical disabilities playing parts where their physical ability is irrelevant or interpretational. Casting is all about context.

      As for those who complain that plays like Kill Me Now don’t reflect the specific truth of their own experience with life or disability, and who denigrate the authenticity of challenging dramatic narratives that don’t tell the stories of their own less tragic lives, I would remind them that theatre is drama, drama

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