Spotlight Artist: Gordon Fraser, A Man of a Thousand Words, Finding Inspiration Everywhere

He writes. He directs. He acts. He reads. Is there anything Senior Gordon Fraser can’t do?Originally from Laconia, NH, this double major in Theater Arts and English is one of Plymouth State University’s most talented dramatic writers. The playwright of Love Song, which was performed at PSU, and the full-length Devil’s Waltz, which was performed by the Sandwich Players, Fraser has also been published in the Laconia Daily Citizen and The Clock.Giving credit to his more recent reads such as Tim O’Brien, Ernest Hemingway and Terrence McNally, Fraser finds inspiration for his plays and short stories from all sorts of places. With a self-proclaimed ‘warped’ sense of humor, Gordon’s storytelling borders the darkly comedic side of fiction. In a new short story, he tells the tale of a suicide contest between two childhood friends. “To me, that’s funny. To the rest of the world, I don’t know.”PSU’s own professors, like Paul Rogalus, Joe Monniger and Paul Mrozcka, have also inspired Fraser’s taste for the written word. He admits that turning in his work and receiving comments and suggestions in return has forced him to reevaluate his choices of plot, style, and structure with a stern eye. “I think I’m more likely to hack my work to pieces now,” says Fraser, adding, “It feels like you build this beautiful sculpture and than you hack it to death with a chainsaw. But I think that’s really how it has to work. That’s the most important thing I’ve learned here.”Those hacked up pieces of short fiction, plays, and poetry don’t stay hacked up for long. At present. he is rewriting his own play originally titled The Ordinary Madness of Lewis Rand. “Somewhere in my apartment there’s a drawer full of elegant monologues that don’t go with anything. But sometimes they find their way back into other pieces that I’m writing.” Fraser doesn’t fool himself into believing he has to be a chain-smoking, tortured soul to be a writer. All he needs is a pen, a piece of paper, and something to write on. And maybe a few good ideas from his predecessors. Although the phrase, ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ doesn’t apply to the academic honesty rules of college, Fraser believes that many art forms, including literature, are built upon the foundations of earlier work. “I think every important writer has had huge influences [on other writers]. If you read Tim O’Brien, you can see Hemingway in his work. If you read Hemingway, you can see authors who came before him. That’s just a fact of life.” Of course, each writer has his or her own style, and Fraser is no different. Able to switch from playwriting to journalism, short fiction to poetry, he is among the few writers on PSU’s campus that can master the art of each, as well as branch off into the theatrical art of acting and directing. Fraser has worked productions with the Sandwich Players in Sandwich, NH and at the Cumberland County Playhouse in Tennessee, which gave him a unique cultural experience and the surprise gift of a southern drawl. In addition to his theater work, he has directed ten to fifteen shows including Romeo and Juliet, Raised in Captivity, and You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, as well as acted in the productions of As You Like It and The Crucible at PSU.Although he has a flare for the dramatic, Fraser says he won’t be acting anytime soon. “I think people who really love acting have a passion for performing in front of audiences. For me, I always feel less genuine than everyone else on stage.” Behind the scenes is where Fraser feels most at home, citing that the objectivity of directing, like writing, allows him to view the production as a whole rather than through the one character he would act within a team of characters. “Ninety percent of the job of directing is done before the first rehearsal,” Fraser says, “It’s analyzing the script. It’s making sure that you know the little things.” Before directing Plymouth Players Spring production of Raised in Captivity, by Nicky Silver, Fraser read through the entirety of the script and looked up the definitions to each word he didn’t know so he wouldn’t be caught off guard by any question. The rest of the mathematics of directing happen in the audition process for Fraser, who remarked that casting good actors/actresses relieves a lot of the pressure for a show.”Some actors, when you work with them, make your life easier because they’re fantastic. They take it very seriously and you really don’t have to coach them very much. I [often] get the sense that no matter how much work I’ve done they know more about the character than I do,” says Fraser, adding that, “I would always rather cast an actor who is a hard worker than cast an actor who is brilliant. You can be brilliant, but if you don’t want to work with the rest of the team, you’ll be a brilliant actor standing alone on stage.”Fraser intends on applying to a Master of Fine Arts Program in Dramatic Writing or Creative Writing at Yale, Brown, UCSD, or University of Iowa, but wants to further his experiences outside of the higher education circuit to give him some experience worth writing about. But he does have some words of wisdom for the future writers of America or, at least, Plymouth State University: “Pick up a copy of Elements of Style and read it like its your job. It’s a book that tells you that whatever you’re saying isn’t important enough to say in so many words. Read what you want to read, read what you want to write, and write a lot. Eventually, what you write will be good.”