The Journey of Brother Rat

Erik Richards: Growing up as a theatre person in Edmonton, I began my Fringe journey with an obsession. Every summer, trying to see as many shows as my friend Jeong Ung and I could squeeze into the few days we both had free together. Improv, musicals, comedy, drag, clown, street performers, everything. Let’s just say that we were WELL acquainted with the grounds by the end of every Fest.

This led us to eventually produce our own work at Festival when we were 17 and 18 coming out of high school. I have one million people to thank for helping us get this first show together: Fringe Vets, friends, family, everyone scrapping it together in the living rooms and garages until opening our first Fringe show in 2017. Since then, we have continued creating shows through ReadyGo Theatre each summer. We have worked on new works and established plays and have had an amazing time doing it.

In the fall of 2022, after graduating theatre school, I met with Fringe’s Artistic Director Murray to talk about transitioning from student and Festival Artist life into a career in theatre. We met in the Arts Barns and talked about design and directing and producing. And about Brother Rat. I had written the show a year earlier and was looking for ways to get in on its feet. We talked about where it came from, about No Means No, about my Dad, and about music. This meeting coincided with when Fringe was looking to get a season back together after Covid, and from there we talked about putting Brother Rat together. And now here we are! Two years and a full punk band on stage later.

Erik: I think Brother Rat is a sloppy joe? For some reason this feels right to me. It’s messy, and you kind of want to eat it with your hands but you know that’s going to end badly but you want to anyway. And even when you do decide to eat it with utensils it gets everywhere and you’re not confident in exactly every ingredient that’s there, but at the end you know you’re full. Am I making sense? Sloppy joe. Brother Rat is absolutely a sloppy joe.

Erik: I created Brother Rat in 2021 as an experiment in adaptation. Originally, the play had four Actors and no music. It used text from the songs in the dialogue and took much more direct narrative influence from the source material. Something always felt wrong to me about writing a play adapted from punk music without including any actual music though. From there I added one song. Then two songs. Then three, until eventually I had a whole other beast and needed to write the version we’ll see in November. This version of the show is absolutely still an adaptation of the two songs, but this time was created as a love letter generally to punk and hardcore from the 80’s and 90’s. By setting the show at a punk concert, we are able to create a more honest representation of what the music and people are like in many ways, and create music onstage that is rooted in the world of the play.

Erik: I hope that Brother Rat will find success as a bridge between the punk and live music world and theatre community. The play is designed to replicate the experience of seeing a punk show, from the design, to the text, to the volume. It is a massive goal of mine with the direction of the piece to investigate the intersection between these two spaces and to challenge communities from both sides to come together for Brother Rat.

Brother Rat is also an extremely personal piece for me dealing with mental illness, substance abuse, houselessness, and family dynamics. I hope that people who have had similar experiences to myself will find some comfort in the way that the people in this play are portrayed.

Brother Rat is not a pretty show. It is a play which embraces the ugly, it displays the gross, and it portrays every excruciating second of the pain and anger felt by each one of the band members. In our climate today, we are in constant dialogue with and about mental illness and our relationships with the systems and how they treat the growing numbers of people requiring care. These systems are subdued in many ways by the funding and resources afforded to them and can inevitably struggle to provide treatment to everyone in need. In no way is Brother Rat an affront to the mental health sector. It is not a critique of the treatment pathways available to individuals who are struggling. What it is, is a representation of people who are angry. People who have been left behind in many aspects of their lives and who in this case, take it out on systems which they don’t fully understand, or at least haven’t been supported by. Brother Rat is important because the feelings, the hatred of the wellness sector, that the band members have are real. I’ve seen them with friends and family, I’ve fought with them myself. At the end of the day though, Brother Rat communicates something very simple. No matter where you’re at you can always care for yourself. Always.