Guest Blog: Brad Fraser returns to Calgary!

Today’s Guest Blogger: Brad Fraser, playwright, True Love Lies

I first moved to Calgary in 1987. It was a much different city then. Still Alberta’s most metropolitan but it was the years after the first big oil bust and unfinished buildings stood around the empty downtown area like ruins. The cost of real estate was jaw-droppingly low.

I rented a cheap house with a couple of friends and got a waitering job at Chianti on 17th Ave, then one of the busiest restaurants in the city.

We ate at places like Fourth Street Rose, Divino and A Touch of Ginger, drank at bars and clubs like The Bank, Dicks and Propaganda, watching skeptically as the city hummed and bustled preparing for the 1988 winter Olympics. The Centre for the Performing Arts was a new building then. ATP and Theatre Calgary were adjusting to their new digs and the One Yellow Rabbit Group offered brilliance in the secret theatre.

There was a special vitality about Calgary at this time. A sense that some very dark years were coming to a close and that the city was on the precipice of some sort of momentous change. There was a hunger, a need to be acknowledged as a viable, successful city that still had a golden future ahead. The arts scene which for many years had seemed moribund was starting to come to life. There was a hum under the streets and sidewalks, a non-stop buzz that was the sound of an entire city prepping itself for a momentous event.

The next year, when those much anticipated Olympics finally happened, the world arrived and was impressed. Thanks to ATP’s playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays, which was one of the countries most exciting theatre events at the time, the influx into the city wasn’t just sports minded folks but also many of the country’s most well-known entertainers and artists. Calgarians and their guests partied for 24 hours a day for 10 days. Mornings were filled with reports of the previous days sporting events, afternoons were spent negotiating the throngs of tourists mobbing Stephen Avenue and the city centre and the nights were filled with parties, dancing, music and fireworks. As almost anyone who was here at the time will attest, it was magical.



Afterwards it was like most hideous, three month hangover the city had ever endured.

All that preparation and anticipation, the amazing success and the accolades heard around the world dried up completely. It was almost as if a sad, torpor had fallen over each of us. The light seemed dimmer. The streets felt quieter.

But gradually things returned to normal. The growth the city had seen for the Olympics continued and within a few years Calgary was once again the gleaming, modern jewel of the prairies.



Photo: Trudie Lee

The next year, as part of the playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays, I opened a show called Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. Just like Calgary the year before, the play was an amazing success and launched me into a much larger world. A year later I left Calgary and continued my lifelong establishing of homes in other cities and sometimes other countries. They have each been unique and amazing in their own way but few of them have been as memorable and exciting as the three short years I spent in Calgary.

I’m really looking forward to coming back again.

-Brad Fraser

Visit Brad's website at http://www.bradfraser.net/
True Love Lies runs at Alberta Theatre Projects from September 20 - October 8, 2011
Visit our website for more info.