Like many plays, it starts out with a rather handsome young man. He’s interrupted by someone he finds intriguing – a woman he somehow feels inexplicably drawn to. Unlike most plays, however, Afterlight, an original work created by local theatre veterans Sharon Bajer and Duncan Cox has thrown in an unlikely twist: the young man’s love interest is 85, and has dementia – and she may have met a good match. The young-looking man isn’t really in his 20s. He just looks that way because he’s a vampire stuck in time.
The comic potential of the idea struck Bajer and Cox during the pandemic, and they set to create a piece around a song for a depressed vampire Cox had written. But the location of their company, Keep Theatre, at the Crescent Fort Rouge Arts Centre also offered another opportunity.
Bajer sent a notice to the congregation at the Crescent Fort Rouge United Church looking for older women who would be interested in chatting about their love lives. “We put it in the church newsletter,” said Bajer.
The result of the interviews helped to create a main character with a great sense of humour, and an outlook on life from a vantage point not often explored in theatre. “It was very illuminating,” recalls Cox. A compilation of their interview subjects formed one of the two main characters – and the curious paradox of what real humans might feel if they couldn’t change – as in the case of Afterlight’s character Rasvan, a 500 year-old in a handsome young man’s body, was set.
He’s five times older than her, but “probably would still get ID’d at the liquor mart, imagine how annoying that would be…and never had the chance to, I’d say, to grow up,” says Cox.
Octegenarian Wanda “appears to be getting attention from quite a younger man,” says Bajer, with the accompanying “invigorating” feelings that engenders at almost any age. “But for Rasvan,” says Cox, “Wanda has something that he will never be able to do.”
The two characters are historians in their own way, and have plenty on their mind to figure out. Wanda can’t remember what happened to her husband, and Rasvan has numerous gory memories that seem like they will forever be the bane of his existence.
But even though the characters in Afterlight are on the “fringes” of society, their humanity is maybe even more relateable.
“In a certain sense, they’re invisible,” explains Cox, but still need to be seen in a deeply universal way.
500 years couldn’t keep them apart.
The concepts in the play also couldn’t keep Cox from singing out loud, who added 17 more songs to his original composition, with Bajer’s help, for the play. The talents of Paul DeGurse as music director, supervisor and arranger are very much on display for the production that is directed by Jillian Willems.
Keep Theatre put on their first production of the play at the Franco Manitoba Cultural Centre to great reviews in 2023, and since then has had many requests to bring the play back.
Afterlight runs in the Pauline Boutal Theatre at the Franco Manitoba Cultural Centre from October 24 – Nov 2. Tickets can be purchased online at RainbowStage.ca and may be available at the door.
