The Birth of Casper G. Schmidt (review)

The Birth of Casper G. Schmidt. By Sky Gilbert. Toronto Fringe Festival, Tarragon Theatre, Toronto. 13 July 1999.

The 1999 Toronto Fringe Festival production of Sky Gilbert's The Birth of Casper G. Schmidt bore all the trademarks of the controversial playwright's twenty-year history of writing and directing within Toronto's queer arts community. Fast-paced physical comedy combined with a radically politicized narrative rendered Gilbert's most recent play an intriguing and timely polemic on the nature of living and loving in an AIDS environment at the end of the twentieth century.

As an earlier artistic director of Buddies In Bad Times (Canada's largest gay/lesbian theatre) Gilbert directed a number of his own plays, including Drag Queens on Trial, Drag Queens in Outer Space, Suzie Goo; and Private Secretary. Gilbert's characters often find themselves straddling a world of gender ambiguity over which they have little to no control. The Birth of Casper G. Schmidt is no exception as it places the very familiar body of the "raging queen" between the even more familiar bodies of a heterosexual couple. As seemingly stable bookends to the "insane" and acerbic Howard (Clinton Walker), Mandy (Moynan King) and John (Brendan Wall) represented a measured heterosexual serenity that cracked open, faltered, and was recuperated by the end of the hour-long "comedy." In a sense, the "het" couple became "raging queens" themselves as they responded to the inherent neurosis of a community overwhelmed by two decades of illness, death, celebration, and survival.

One of the production's most moving scenes occurred when the couple faced the possibility that their unborn child had been exposed to AIDS through a one-time encounter between Howard and John. Although infection seemed slight from the details of the encounter, anyone immersed in an AIDS environment could identify with the complex fear that bodies incorporate as they attempt to gain control over their physical safety. By placing the heterosexual couple within this environment, Gilbert furthers a significant point made time and again by AIDS scripts. This has never been a gay disease. Even the notion of AIDS as a "disease" is called into question by the title character's theoretical work, presented through the voice of Howard near the play's end.

The late Casper G. Schmidt, a gay psychoanalyst who left his native South Africa in 1975 to train in New York, wrote an article entitled, "The Group Fantasy Origins of AIDS" (The Journal of Psychohistory, 1984). Schmidt argued that AIDS results from an elaborate cultural mechanism shaming marginalized groups into a pathologically depressed state profoundly affecting their physical well-being. Gilbert takes up this claim in a complex arrangement of comic scenes establishing the shamed character (Howard) as a prime candidate for this kind of psychologically induced illness. Howard represents the mythic, self-debasing, neurotic gay male character suffering from OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder).

By giving his central character the opportunity to create a kind of comic soapbox upon which to "perform" his social and sexual identity, Gilbert creates a sophisticated brand of didactic political comedy. The inclusion of excerpts from Casper G. Schmidt's theories in Howard's final monologue adds an elegiac quality to the play. Howard prophesies that John and Mandy's child will be born with AIDS but will live and love happily and "disease free" to a ripe old age without endangering the lives of others. By sharing his dream for Mandy and John's unborn baby, Howard asks the audience to consider a revisionist version of an all too familiar tragic scenario. He names the baby Casper as homage to Schmidt's plea to reevaluate the cause of AIDS.

Clinton Walker's impeccable timing and his highly physical performance transformed demanding shifts in tone to smooth and engaging transitions. As the sex-crazed neurotic homosexual who undermines every scrap of social and sexual security among his friends, Walker turned a politically overexposed character into a hapless, lovable, and sympathetic protagonist. The...