to dismiss the lunatic notion outright.
Robert, likewise, took it all in without batting an eye. He and Jill have been collaborating for years, and nothing she suggested seemed to give him the slightest pause. I’ve been following Robert’s work since moving home to St. John’s a decade ago, from his one-man show, Charismatic Death Scenes , to the brilliant bare-bones period piece, Tempting Providence , to what was his most recent work with Jill at the time, Belly Up , a risky meta-narrative about a blind man trapped in an apartment with a wall mirror that alternately reflects the room’s interior and the blind man’s thoughts. He was being charged with writing a script based on my story that incorporated an electrified stage and an as-yet-unwritten original score setting some of the show to music. He seemed perfectly calm about it all.
The central conflict in “Afterimage” revolves around an orphan trying to figure his place in a peculiar family, a child who feels excluded by his normalcy and takes extraordinary measures to fit in. Robert’s plays, it seems to me, are always about people trying to make connections, about an individual’s struggle to find their place in a world that on the surface might suggest they don’t belong. And for all the choreography and stage wizardry Jill employs, story is central to her shows. The pyrotechnics are always meant to illuminate or act as a metaphor for the human drama at the heart of the piece. If there was a pair to make something of “Afterimage” on stage, I was sitting with them.
They spent a long time that afternoon talking about staying true to the spirit of the story and how they planned to translate that to the theatre, but they needn’t have bothered. They had me at hello.
* * *
I was in Toronto for the premiere of Afterimage at the Harbourfront Centre in April of 2009. It was a surreal experience to watch the play unfold, to have a vague sense of connection to characters and lines and images in the play and at the same time to recognize that the story as it was presented belonged wholly to someone other than myself.
Robert invited my input and involvement at all stages of the adaptation, but with the exception of some general conversations I left it to him. The little story I’d published was already more than a decade old and I’ve long since forgotten what interested me enough to write it. Robert and Jill had found something of their own in it and the best I could do for them, and the play, was to get the hell out of the way. And though there’s an undeniable family resemblance between the short story and the theatrical incarnation, they are completely different creatures, with their own personalities and idiosyncrasies. This current version of Afterimage has been workshopped and rewritten since its debut and in some ways has moved even further afield of what the original story was. Which makes it more true to itself.
At the Harbourfront after-party, I was offered congratulations by a steady stream of well-wishers. I felt like a father handing out cigars in the waiting room while the mother recovers from the shock and awe of labour somewhere in the bowels of the hospital. I may have unknowingly planted the seed, but everything that followed in the gestation and birth of the play—everything that really matters—is the work and heart and vision of Artistic Fraud, and of Robert and Jill in particular.
—Michael Crummey
Characters
Lise: the mother of the Evans clan
Winston: the father
Theresa: the oldest
Jerome: the youngest
Leo: the middle child
Maggie: a nurse
Connie: a young woman
Leonard: a photographer
A Note on the Chorus
The chorus in this play is built from the eight characters listed above. While they seem to have moments of omnipotence, chorus lines dedicated to a particular character are unique to their perspective and emotional arc and should be approached as such. The goal is to create the sense of communal storytelling, both
Robert, likewise, took it all in without batting an eye. He and Jill have been collaborating for years, and nothing she suggested seemed to give him the slightest pause. I’ve been following Robert’s work since moving home to St. John’s a decade ago, from his one-man show, Charismatic Death Scenes , to the brilliant bare-bones period piece, Tempting Providence , to what was his most recent work with Jill at the time, Belly Up , a risky meta-narrative about a blind man trapped in an apartment with a wall mirror that alternately reflects the room’s interior and the blind man’s thoughts. He was being charged with writing a script based on my story that incorporated an electrified stage and an as-yet-unwritten original score setting some of the show to music. He seemed perfectly calm about it all.
The central conflict in “Afterimage” revolves around an orphan trying to figure his place in a peculiar family, a child who feels excluded by his normalcy and takes extraordinary measures to fit in. Robert’s plays, it seems to me, are always about people trying to make connections, about an individual’s struggle to find their place in a world that on the surface might suggest they don’t belong. And for all the choreography and stage wizardry Jill employs, story is central to her shows. The pyrotechnics are always meant to illuminate or act as a metaphor for the human drama at the heart of the piece. If there was a pair to make something of “Afterimage” on stage, I was sitting with them.
They spent a long time that afternoon talking about staying true to the spirit of the story and how they planned to translate that to the theatre, but they needn’t have bothered. They had me at hello.
* * *
I was in Toronto for the premiere of Afterimage at the Harbourfront Centre in April of 2009. It was a surreal experience to watch the play unfold, to have a vague sense of connection to characters and lines and images in the play and at the same time to recognize that the story as it was presented belonged wholly to someone other than myself.
Robert invited my input and involvement at all stages of the adaptation, but with the exception of some general conversations I left it to him. The little story I’d published was already more than a decade old and I’ve long since forgotten what interested me enough to write it. Robert and Jill had found something of their own in it and the best I could do for them, and the play, was to get the hell out of the way. And though there’s an undeniable family resemblance between the short story and the theatrical incarnation, they are completely different creatures, with their own personalities and idiosyncrasies. This current version of Afterimage has been workshopped and rewritten since its debut and in some ways has moved even further afield of what the original story was. Which makes it more true to itself.
At the Harbourfront after-party, I was offered congratulations by a steady stream of well-wishers. I felt like a father handing out cigars in the waiting room while the mother recovers from the shock and awe of labour somewhere in the bowels of the hospital. I may have unknowingly planted the seed, but everything that followed in the gestation and birth of the play—everything that really matters—is the work and heart and vision of Artistic Fraud, and of Robert and Jill in particular.
—Michael Crummey
Characters
Lise: the mother of the Evans clan
Winston: the father
Theresa: the oldest
Jerome: the youngest
Leo: the middle child
Maggie: a nurse
Connie: a young woman
Leonard: a photographer
A Note on the Chorus
The chorus in this play is built from the eight characters listed above. While they seem to have moments of omnipotence, chorus lines dedicated to a particular character are unique to their perspective and emotional arc and should be approached as such. The goal is to create the sense of communal storytelling, both
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