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    Afterimage
    Afterimage
    Afterimage
    Ebook108 pages48 minutes

    Afterimage

    By Robert Chafe and Michael Crummey

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Seeing beyond Winston’s disfiguring scars and foreseeing a future with him, Lise falls in love and the couple soon marry. Years later, having inherited Lise’s gift, two of their children, Theresa and Jerome, must struggle to find their place within the community. But for Leo, their middle child, that is just the start of his worries. As he grows older and the chasm between himself and his family grows, Leo realizes that he doesn’t belong to his family. While familial tensions mount and secrets are revealed, the Evans family come to see the monumental effect even the smallest spark can create. Based on the short story by Michael Crummey, Afterimage explores the connections built within both family and community, of finding a place to belong.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPlaywrights Canada Press
    Release dateApr 27, 2010
    ISBN9780887549489
    Afterimage
    Author

    Robert Chafe

    Robert Chafe is a writer, educator, actor, and arts administrator based in St. John’s, Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). He has worked in theatre, dance, opera, radio, fiction, and film. His stage plays have been seen in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and in the United States, and include Oil and Water, Tempting Providence, Afterimage, Under Wraps, Between Breaths, Everybody Just C@lm the F#ck Down, and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (adapted from the novel by Wayne Johnston). He has been shortlisted three times for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama and he won the award for Afterimage in 2010. He has been a guest instructor at Memorial University, Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, and the National Theatre School of Canada. In 2018 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Memorial University. He is the playwright and artistic director of Artistic Fraud.

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      Book preview

      Afterimage - Robert Chafe

      Cover: Afterimage, by Robert Chafe. Adapted from the short story by Michael Crummey. Canada Council for the Arts, Governor General’s Literary Awards Winner The GGs

      Afterimage

      Robert Chafe

      Playwrights Canada Press

      Toronto

      Also by Robert Chafe

      Robert Chafe: Two Plays

      Butler’s Marsh and Tempting Providence

      Afterimage © Copyright 2009 Robert Chafe

      Introduction © Copyright 2010 Michael Crummey

      Playwrights Canada Press

      The Canadian Drama Publisher

      202-269 Richmond Street West, Toronto, ON M5V 1X1

      416.703.0013

      info@playwrightscanada.com • www.playwrightscanada.com

      No part of this book, covered by the copyright herein, may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for excerpts in a review or by a licence from:

      Access Copyright

      1 Yonge St., Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5

      phone 416.868.1620

      For professional or amateur production rights, please contact:

      Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland

      PO Box 23193, Churchill Square

      St. John’s, NL A1B 4J9

      artisticfraud@nf.sympatico.ca

      Cover image of Melanie Caines by Justin Hall, courtesy of Artistic Fraud.

      Cover design by Blake Sproule.

      Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada.

      ISBN: 978-0-88754-948-9

      Also available in print and PDF formats.

      Logo: Government of CanadaLogo: Canada Council for the Arts. Logo du Conseil des Arts du Canada.Logo: Ontario Arts Council, an Ontario government agency. Logo: Conseil des Arts de L’Ontario, un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario.Logo: Ontario Media Development Corporation

      Playwrights Canada Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and of the Province of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council and the Ontario Media Development Corporation for our publishing activities.

      For Michelle

      I expect that Afterimage would never have come into being if not for the fact that Jillian Keiley (founder of one of the country’s most innovative and fearless theatre companies, Artistic Fraud) is terrified of flying.

      Jill and I first met at the Labrador Creative Arts Festival in Happy Valley-Goose Bay in 1998. The week-long event invites professional artists in all disciplines to run workshops with school kids from across Labrador. The night before she flew back to St. John’s, Jill was already stressed about the thought of getting on the plane. I gave her a copy of my second book, Hard Light, a collection of stories and poems about outport Newfoundland. This will keep your mind off it, I told her. I meant it as a joke, but Jill claims she read the whole way home and never gave a thought to the imminent crash that usually occupies her time during a flight.

      A few months later she contacted me to suggest adapting parts of the book for the stage. Eventually Salvage: The Story of a House went up in an old merchant residence in St. John’s, the audience moving from room to room in groups of eight to hear a series of three-minute monologues. Each small group carried a map that told them which room to move to next, a hundred people jigsawing through the narrow hallways, the actors on the move between pieces as well. Everyone saw the same show, but each in a different order.

      I remember thinking, when Jill first described this Rubik’s Cube of an idea to me, that there was no way to make the logistical nightmare work. I was wrong, of course. And as I’ve learned from that experience and my subsequent run-ins with Artistic Fraud, Jill’s mind operates in a realm completely different than my own.

      * * *

      When Jill and Robert Chafe invited me out to lunch three or four years ago, I was expecting the unexpected. Several times after the Salvage show Jill had mentioned that she might be interested in adapting Afterimage for the stage. Fill your boots, I told her, though privately I thought it was a ridiculous notion and would never happen.

      The story is part of Flesh and Blood, a collection set in a fictional mining town that is remarkably similar to the place where I was born and raised in central Newfoundland. I have only the vaguest recollection of how the story came to me and how it took shape, but there were a number of real-life anecdotes at the root of it: a French woman who worked at the hospital in

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