Leduc: "Mark Leduc's journey from ex-con to gay icon and the death of Canada's silver-medal sweetheart"

27 Aug 2019.
by Drew Rowsome -

Many years ago, I managed to get my hands on the script for Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes which was about to make its explosive debut in New York. It was an enthralling read, Kushner's words flow in a cascade of ideas and themes, but the visuals and vocal nuances, so integral to a theatrical production, remained elusive. A play on the printed page requires even more imagination and interpretation from this reader than a novel or piece of journalism.

Having seen several theatrical and filmed productions since, each one is extraordinary and each teased from the basic framework visuals and thematic ideas that I hadn't considered but definitely welcomed. And re-reading Angels in America, I later purchased the officially published script, was, and is, an entirely different experience. Which is a round about way of trying to explain that I personally find reading a play as a text a task quite different from mining a text for creation.

Raymond Helkio (disclaimer, Helko is a colleague and a friend so I have a vested interest in his success, but also in being honest about his work) had just published his play Leduc. And, knowing how ambitious Helkio is, he plans for it to grow into a full production. Inviting me to read it is an honour, requesting constructive criticism is a bit nerve-wracking. Fortunately Leduc is an intriguing read and is a solid foundation for a team of creatives to transform into a theatrical entity.

Leduc is a one-person show narrated by the central character, Mark Leduc. I am not a sports fan - believing in my fairy godmother's advice that "sports are like porn, more fun to participate in than watch" - but every time a sports figure comes out, I pay attention. We still, in the woke year of 2019, place a premium on the masculization of homosexuality. On being masc. When Leduc, a hard scrabble and handsome ex-con who won a silver medal for boxing in the '92 Barcelona Olympics, came out, it was a sensation. He became an icon. Which made his classic show business/sports rise and fall trajectory a particularly tragic one.

Helkio was Leduc's partner for just short of a decade, so has a vested interest in telling the story empathetically. And to put the audience, in this case the reader, inside Leduc's experience. To make an individual and unique story, a universal one. On the page Leduc succeeds, with the assistance of a dramaturge, director and powerhouse actor, Leduc the play should soar.

Confining the action to a claustrophobic space that becomes a prison cell, a boxing ring and a bathhouse room, is an instant metaphor that is flexible and that resonates with the collective gay experience. The addition of a central metaphor of time - specifically three minutes, the length of an official boxing round and some other important things, as Leduc tells us, "a lot can happen in three minutes" - adds a momentum that propels the play forward, always teasing that time to be up. And when the time is up, paired with another three minutes as metaphor reveal that is devastating, we are confronted with just how short and fragile our time is.

The central problem of a one-person show, particularly one that is in a celebrity biographical format, is exposition. Much of an audience will not be familiar with Leduc's complete story and the monologues that reveal Leduc's motivations and emotions are dependent on some background material. Leduc is heavily laced with "Audio" segments that consist of newscasts, information dumps, and newspaper articles. On the page it works, on the stage it will be a problem for the creative team to sort out. Far more effective is a moment when the Leduc character reads of himself in a newspaper article and the exposition becomes a layer instead of a lecture.

There has always been a homoerotic component to boxing and it was part of Leduc's downfall that he acknowledged it, even if after the fact. Leduc is at its best when it shows and exposes rather than explains. Helkio handles the delicate passages where he himself is included well, almost clinically, which makes them heartbreaking. And a scene where Leduc recounts taking the drag queen Jackae Baker to an official Olympic event, throbs with excitement and fuck you attitude. When that adventure directly leads to, and then parallels, Leduc's downfall, it is shattering and powerful.

Crucially Leduc gives the reader a portrait of a character who lives and breathes. At times he is poetic, always self-aware in that way that only gay men can be, and the few times that he treads into inarticulation that is not alcohol related (there are some jarring extraneous "ain't"s in one passage), it becomes a facet instead of a flaw, a voice the actor will have to find. Leduc's upbringing and prison time helped shape who he became but his years, perhaps because Helkio is being uncharacteristically coy, of gay life must also have been influential and deserve a little more weight.

As well as being a biographical portrait of a man and gay culture filtered through boxing, Leduc is commentary of celebrity culture, with Amy Winehouse and Elvis Presley being metaphors. Specifically on how we delight in rehabilitating and then elevating idols only to revel when they come crashing down to cement their place in the firmament. Helkio has done his part to secure Leduc that immortality. Now we can just eagerly anticipate the theatrical interpretation.