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Snake in Fridge by Brad Fraser By
Inspired by Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Snake in Fridge examines the everyday lives of not so everyday characters. A group of eight misfits living in a misfit house go about their daily business in true Fraser Corbett works in porno and owns a pet snake; Caddie is a stripper; Travis is a busboy who aspires to be a waiter; and someone who lives in the house is a murderer. As bizarre things begin to happen, the house members wonder if it's the snake they hear at night - or is the house making them do bad deeds? As Violet says, "Nothing good ever happened in this house."
Mass Market Paperback
First published April 16, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 14, 2022
Donna is a childlike and possibly brain-damaged woman who is one of the residents of a spooky, broken-down Victorian house in Toronto. Her sister, Caddie, also lives here; she's a stripper at a club owned by high-powered sex-exec Violet, who owns the house and whose cousin, Corbett, is the main tenant there. The other inhabitants are Corbett's longtime pal Travis, a black man who works as a busboy but dreams of opening his own restaurant, and Randy, Violet's "personal assistant" and occasional boy toy; as the play begins, Randy announces that his girlfriend Stacey, a third-generation Chinese-Canadian with no job, is going to move into his room too.
The spine of Snake in Fridge is derived from Shirley Jackson's classic story "The Haunting of Hill House" and has to do with the idea that this old house is somehow evil (it's never clear why or, precisely, how). After Corbett stashes a dead boa constrictor (which he received in payment for a debt in lieu of what he really needs, i.e., cash) in the broken refrigerator, the house's tendencies somehow awaken, and it starts to demand sacrifices. Eventually there's a murder and, in an exciting climax, a good deal more violence. But I never really felt the supernatural pull of the house, nor was I really convinced that Fraser totally believed in it. Corbett and Donna are the only characters who "hear" the house's call--and they are linked as adult survivors/victims of horrific child abuse--but again, the significance of what they hear or why only they hear it is never satisfactorily explored, let alone explained.
Instead, Fraser piles on shock after shock: scenes in the bathroom, depicting characters defecating on the toilet; scenes at the strip club where Caddie works; scenes about and around Violet's new Internet porn business, which she wants Caddie, Stacey, Randy, and/or Travis to work in; scenes about Corbett's dependence on all manner of recreational drugs (which he buys from a worshipful kid named Gabriel) and on a sugar daddy who he detests named Norm, plus others in which he bemoans the small size of his penis. There's also a moment where Travis recounts a mini-race riot that broke out in a bank after a white customer used an ugly epithet against a Black manager. And there's a menacing older character named Charles, hovering around the edges and then right in the center of the story, who, it is suggested, could be the long-absent brother who repeatedly raped and then assaulted Donna sixteen years ago, leaving her in the very damaged condition that we now find her.
Snake in Fridge is, in short, crowded with incident--far too much for it's own good, I think, given that the characters I was really interested in--Donna and Caddie--wind up with very little of the plot. Their story, of two sisters running from a dangerous past and toward a possibly redemptive future away from one another, is the one that feels most original and heartfelt. The rest of the stuff crammed into this play feels either like baggage or a red herring, and almost always more than a little derivative (of Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking and Fraser's own Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, to name two obvious reference points).
The spine of Snake in Fridge is derived from Shirley Jackson's classic story "The Haunting of Hill House" and has to do with the idea that this old house is somehow evil (it's never clear why or, precisely, how). After Corbett stashes a dead boa constrictor (which he received in payment for a debt in lieu of what he really needs, i.e., cash) in the broken refrigerator, the house's tendencies somehow awaken, and it starts to demand sacrifices. Eventually there's a murder and, in an exciting climax, a good deal more violence. But I never really felt the supernatural pull of the house, nor was I really convinced that Fraser totally believed in it. Corbett and Donna are the only characters who "hear" the house's call--and they are linked as adult survivors/victims of horrific child abuse--but again, the significance of what they hear or why only they hear it is never satisfactorily explored, let alone explained.
Instead, Fraser piles on shock after shock: scenes in the bathroom, depicting characters defecating on the toilet; scenes at the strip club where Caddie works; scenes about and around Violet's new Internet porn business, which she wants Caddie, Stacey, Randy, and/or Travis to work in; scenes about Corbett's dependence on all manner of recreational drugs (which he buys from a worshipful kid named Gabriel) and on a sugar daddy who he detests named Norm, plus others in which he bemoans the small size of his penis. There's also a moment where Travis recounts a mini-race riot that broke out in a bank after a white customer used an ugly epithet against a Black manager. And there's a menacing older character named Charles, hovering around the edges and then right in the center of the story, who, it is suggested, could be the long-absent brother who repeatedly raped and then assaulted Donna sixteen years ago, leaving her in the very damaged condition that we now find her.
Snake in Fridge is, in short, crowded with incident--far too much for it's own good, I think, given that the characters I was really interested in--Donna and Caddie--wind up with very little of the plot. Their story, of two sisters running from a dangerous past and toward a possibly redemptive future away from one another, is the one that feels most original and heartfelt. The rest of the stuff crammed into this play feels either like baggage or a red herring, and almost always more than a little derivative (of Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking and Fraser's own Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, to name two obvious reference points).
July 21, 2015
This is pretty much definitive Brad Fraser, with its portrait of disenfranchised young people living in an evil house, haunted by their past traumas, which drive at least one of them to horrendous acts. And it has the coolest first act curtain I've ever read.
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May 1, 2008not a fan.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews