Love bites

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This article was published 20/09/2023 (1120 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the darkest hours of the pandemic, Duncan Cox and Sharon Bajer snuck away from the stress of their day-to-day lives to meet at an otherwise empty church in Fort Rouge.

Not to worship any particular god, nor to consider the subtext of any particular passage of scripture, but to write a decidedly unholy book of their own, a musical about a 500-year-old vampire and an octogenarian widower who find company in misery during that precious sliver of time before sunrise when both happen to be awake.

Two lonesome creatures, pondering youth and seniority, morality and mortality, waiting patiently to find out what lies on the other side of a nocturnal, solitary abyss. That could very well be a description of the blood-thirsty Razvan and the love-starved Wanda, or of the actors who conceived of them in the dead of a COVID-19 lockdown.

Cox and Bajer began working on the musical now known as Afterlight in 2019. Following a wildly enjoyable run in the Rainbow Stage production of Danny Schur and Rick Chafe’s Strike!, Cox asked Bajer, his director, if she would like to hear a song he’d been working on about a vampire with a guilty conscience.

“When I heard it, I loved it,” says Bajer, an actor, playwright and Manitoba’s first certified intimacy co-ordinator. “And I had this vision of a love story between a woman at the end of her life and a 500-year-old vampire tired of living forever.”

“That cracked the lid off the thing for me,” says Cox, who starred as Roger in this summer’s Rainbow production of Rent and as the living embodiment of Depression in the JHG Creative pop-punk musical Breaking Up With Me in the spring.

“In most of the lore, the vampire falls in love with someone because they’re young and beautiful,” he adds. That felt boring and overdone.

“We thought it was more interesting to fall in love with someone with at least one lifetime’s experience to match (Razvan’s).”

Once that kernel popped, Cox, 27, and Bajer, 55, got to work developing their characters, writing and editing lyrics to nearly 20 songs composed by Cox with titles such as Moonlight’s Daughter, Warts and All and Drawn to Your Glow.

Mounting an independent, all-original musical was already a significant challenge both creatively and financially, with a cost estimated at about $200,000. But when the pandemic arrived in 2020, Afterlight became something akin to a lifeline for both Cox and Bajer, both of whom maintained a stubborn confidence that the show would see the light of day.

“I wasn’t prepared to let this thing die for Sharon’s sake, and she wasn’t prepared to let it die for my sake,” says Cox, a co-founder of the Walk & Talk Theatre Company.

“You might say that it was immortal,” Bajer adds.

(A major boon to the production was the support of Rainbow Stage, which for the first time is presenting a musical produced by an external company).

Cox and Bajer ensconced in the Crescent Fort Rouge United Church, a space Bajer had used to grow her company, the Keep Theatre, over the past decade. Cox would sit behind the piano, tinkering away at melodic motifs, while Bajer would badger him with questions about her character as she assembled the book.

In that state of extended, isolated collaboration, the duo focused on the spine of their gothic love story, shuffling the narrative vertebra before establishing a structurally sound alignment. The themes of the musical – namely, isolation, depression, the animalistic need for companionship and the universal truth of aging – were reinforced on a near-daily basis, lending a heavy dose of reality to the fantasy Cox and Bajer were constructing piece by bloody piece.

“I would say I’ve had more struggles with the idea of aging in this last year than ever before in my life,” says Bajer, who with Cox interviewed three members of the church about their experiences living in their 80s to better inform the character of Wanda.

“It’s been challenging to think about. I am going to get older, and look older, and feel older, and things will slowly be taken away, including maybe my own memory. Even learning this play, I couldn’t remember a few of the lines I wrote. Sometimes, I know that’s just me being a bit nutty, because I’ve done this to myself.

“When I’m deep into rehearsal or writing a play, you bring yourself into the character, but the character ends up seeping into your life as well. It just sneaks up on you.”

Producing the show hasn’t yet led Cox to become blood-thirsty; however, it has satisfied his desire to explore the contradictions of complex characters and focus on juxtaposition of tone. Much like the saddest ones, some of the most upbeat songs in the musical — available to stream and purchase on Bandcamp — are filled with gloomy lyrics, delivered with an equal dose of the silly and the morose.

That reflects Cox and Bajer’s collaborative dynamic. One minute, they’re talking about death and loss, and the next, they’re trying their best to make the other laugh. It’s a necessary balance, Cox says.

“Our process throughout the pandemic was that some days, we would just play,” says Bajer. “One day, we picked up foam swords and chased each other, and then, a sword fight ended up in the play. (The idea of play) shaped this show more so than any other project I’ve worked on.”

On Thursday, Cox and Bajer will finally get the chance to let an audience in on the fun.

They’re not alone anymore.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com