The theater season is off to a queasy start with “Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love,” at the Orpheum—a new play by the Canadian Brad Fraser that would have been passé in 1975, when the world was young. Now that the world is old, it’s hard to see how the play made it to New York, let alone how it got put on in Chicago, where it had its American première. In it a number of sexually frustrated and/or confused young people—played by Michael Connor, Clark Gregg, Michelle Kronin, Scott Renderer, Sam Rockwell, and Lenore Zann—meet, chat, come on to one another, work out, make dates, play video games, do drugs, have sex, abuse one another, leave messages on one another’s answering machines, and, needless to say, cry out in anguish. Sometimes they stand in Melvin Van Peebles–type pools of light (designed by Kevin Rigdon) and make stream-of-collective-consciousness utterances: “Alone!” “Dark!” “Wet!” “Dying!” “Why?” Meanwhile, a girl in lace scanties with a Louise Brooks haircut (Kimberley Pistone) tells ghost stories.
You don’t give a play a title like “Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love” unless you have some pretty big fish to fry. Unfortunately, Mr. Fraser’s play doesn’t tell you anything about the characters beyond their needs and proclivities. David, who lives with Candy, is gay; Candy is straight. David used to be straight, too—back when he and Candy were an item. He also used to be a television star, but now he’s a waiter in a restaurant where he has the hots for Kane, his extremely young busboy. Candy, who makes a living writing book reviews, has the hots for Robert, the bartender in what is either the restaurant where David works or another one, but she encourages the attentions of Jerri, a lesbian she meets at her health club. We don’t know what Jerri does for a living. We don’t know what David’s best friend, Bernie, does either, but he keeps showing up bloodied, with unconvincing tales of barroom brawls. Bernie used to hang around a lot with David and Candy—when he was going out with Candy’s best friend, Dana. But Candy doesn’t like Bernie anymore—not since Dana’s suicide.
It’s because of Dana’s suicide that Candy is so troubled by the psycho killer who’s on the loose. She thinks that Bernie is weird, and says this often, so that it’s hardly surprising when Bernie, whose wife hasn’t been heard from for several days, turns out to be the killer. Neither is it particularly surprising when Candy’s bartender boyfriend turns out to have a wife and daughter. What is surprising is that Mr. Fraser seems to place these two revelations on the same order of cosmic importance. But then “Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love” is a play that never really gets its priorities straight. It wants to illustrate something about real-life desperation among the young people of Edmonton, Alberta, where the action is set, but Mr. Fraser can’t resist pepping things up with shock-horror twists and devices—any more than he can resist always giving David, the putative autobiographical character, the snappy last word.
That the play is autobiographical is implied by a sententious program note which includes such information about Edmonton as that it has “a chain of overpriced 24-hour stores” that “are erroneously referred to as convenient” as well as a plethora of youths who get drunk and stoned and fight in parking lots. If Mr. Fraser’s revelations about his feelings and his sexuality were made in the service of something else—a good story or some small, unlooked-for truth—they might be brave rather than self-indulgent. Similarly, if the ghost stories were allowed to remain unconnected to the action of the play, we might be forced to think about the corollary between sex and horror in the stories children tell. But, as my great-grandmother used to say, if the mouth grew string beans, it wouldn’t be a mouth, it would be a garden. Not content to leave the ghost stories hanging in the air, Mr. Fraser turns the macabre girl who tells them into a character—a sort of junkie-hooker-psychic friend of David’s, who snorts heroin, gives blow jobs, and makes prophecies.
The mention of blow jobs brings me, willy-nilly, to the subject of nudity and simulated sex. “Unidentified Human Remains” probably contains more sexual stage business than the New York theater has seen in a decade. Besides the blow jobs (courtesy of Ms. Pistone), we get simulated heterosexual intercourse (Mr. Rockwell and Ms. Zann), simulated lesbian lovemaking (Ms. Zann and Ms. Kronin), homosexual humiliation (Mr. Renderer’s, of Mr. Connor), homosexual foreplay (Mr. Renderer’s, with Mr. Gregg), and sadomasochistic violence (visited upon Ms. Pistone by Mr. Gregg). Whether all this is actually required by Mr. Fraser’s script or was a bright idea of the director, Derek Goldby, who also staged the Chicago production, I can’t say, but it makes questions of acting entirely beside the point, since nothing in the actors’ performances is an impressive as the sang-froid with which they take off their clothes and touch each other. That they are essentially being upstaged by their own nudity and willingness to oblige is a point that either will or will not be of interest to Ms. Zann, Mr. Rockwell, Mr. Connor, Ms. Pistone, and Ms. Kronin. As for Mr. Renderer and Mr. Gregg, they are to be commended for not getting caught with their pants down.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, September 30, 1991