All the Rage

A Canadian playwright’s rise to fame amid the terrors of the AIDS era.

Brad Fraser suffered an impoverished and abusive childhood, living with his teenage parents in motel rooms and shacks on the side of the highway in Alberta and Northern British Columbia. He grew to be one of the most celebrated, and controversial, Canadian playwrights, his work produced to acclaim all over the world.

All the Rage chronicles Brad Fraser’s rise as he breaks with his past and enrolls as a performing arts student. He is pulled into the newly developing Canadian theatre scene, where he shows great promise. But his early career is one of challenge after challenge, some of which result from his upbringing and prejudice against his queerness. But just as many challenges arise from his combative personality and willingness to challenge the establishment. Few Canadian artists have been as abrasive, notorious and polarizing as Fraser was in his youth.

Woven through this tale of artistic development is his journey as a queer man coming into himself during the most exhilarating period in the Gay Liberation Movement, and the dawn of a global health crisis. What should have been a triumphant time in a young, successful playwright’s life was blighted with the terrifying emergence of AIDS, and the sickness and death of comrades and lovers.

This is both the story of an artist’s evolution and an important work of gay history that has rarely been recounted from a Canadian perspective. Written with Fraser’s trademark wit and candour, All the Rage is unsparing, sometimes shocking and always enthralling.