16-04-2025
'Life After' musical: Canada's 'outrageous' theatre talent wooed New Yorkers for Toronto production
Grief is a complex experience for everyone, but it's especially complicated when you're a teenager, trying to manage all the growing pains of transitioning from child to adult. But brilliantly, composer, lyricist and playwright Britta Johnson, from Stratford, Ont., channeled that into her play Life After.
Life After follows Alice, played by Isabella Esler in this Toronto production, after the death of her father Frank (Degrassi: The Next Generation alum Jake Epstein). Frank's death comes after he found success and fame as a self-help author.
"I'm a new dad, so it's funny, we were talking about playing parents for the first time and all of a sudden relating to the parents now, it's a whole new world," Jake Epstein told Yahoo Canada in Toronto. "Frank's story, he's this sort of newly famous self-help author ... who's really busy, and we've been talking a lot about balancing your career with your kid, and I think it's a really relatable struggle and really relatable conflict that my character gets into with his daughter."
Johnson has a pattern of doing the seemingly impossible, with Life After making its debut at the 2016 Toronto Fringe Festival, and now returning to the city (April 16 - May 10 at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre) after bring produced in both San Diego and Chicago. That's basically unheard of, especially because original Canadian plays largely appear for a period of time, and then disappear into history.
"It's been the biggest gift in my life, truly, to get to work on this project on so many different scales, to grow up with it," Johnson said. "To grow up as an artist with it has been really transformative."
"I get to keep returning to this and fleshing it out, and finding more connections through it and finding more honest conversations about grief through it. It's a pretty remarkable thing, but I don't take it for granted, because most writers, especially in this country, ... it's really hard to put up a new work. It's risky. So the fact that I have this blessing to keep returning to it is one I don't take for granted."
But that's not all. Life After also fills a significant gap in stories we see on stage, with a 16-year-old character, Alice, leading us through the piece. While we see works with young girls and older women, shows led by teen girls are few and far between.
"Being a teenager is one of the most crazy times ever," Esler said.
"When I was 16 I felt like I had so many thoughts in my brain, like all at once. There's just so much going on. And I think that's why I felt so attached to her, because I don't see a lot of teenage centred stories."
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What's so special about Life After is that no matter who is in the audience, everyone can connect with a particular character in the story, like Alice or Frank, or even Alice's mother Beth (Mariand Torres). Johnson tackles the experience of grief with a play that's still fun and joyful to watch.
"It happens to deal with the universal themes of grief and loss, but it's also about a family and what happens over time as you grow up, and through Alice's eyes, what a 16-year-old sees growing up," producer Natalie Bartello said.
"So when I think about the show, I think about Alice's coming-of-age and realizing that not everything will have an answer in life. ... Because Britta's so creative and she's very funny and very witty, you see her personality in this show, and that's what makes it a very appealing, enjoyable night at the theatre."
Bartello's fellow producer, Linda Barnett, also shared that she had a particularly personal connection to first seeing Johnson's piece.
"It's 2016 and I was supposed to go with Natalie to see the show. I couldn't go. My husband was effectively dying," Barnett said. "Natalie went and, of course, came to the hospital after and said, 'You've got to see this show, ... but I don't know how you're going to do it.'"
"[I've always been very] hardcore and I said, 'Yeah, I'm going to go.' And I went with my eldest daughter. For her, it was even more difficult, but she's also hardcore and she wanted to go and see it. We were already grieving and so it really helped. It helped in a way a healing process that hadn't even begun yet. I was able to laugh, I was able to cry, and to be able to laugh the time like that was a very good thing. And to be able to cry, it was also a really good things."
For Mariand Torres, playing Alice's mother really spoke to how she saw her own mother after her father's death.
"I lost my father when I was young and I saw a lot of my mom in this character. I just feel like it's a cathartic thing and a way to honour my mom," Torres said.
Pulling from her personal experience of grieving her father, Johnson's core goal with Life After has been to make everyone in the audience feel "safe" in their experience with grief.
"When I was grieving my dad when I was 13, I went to see Into The Woods like 14 times," Johnson said. "I grew up in Stratford, ... my mom and dad were pit musicians, [and that was the] first show my mom played without my dad."
"I hadn't ever been much of a music theatre kid, I was a piano kid, and then I saw this show that didn't try to talk down to me about this difficult thing. It made me feel safe in the complexity of it. And if I can provide an experience that feels like that to someone in the audience, we will have done our work."
But among the different iterations of Life After, this Toronto production is a particularly special homecoming, which also showcases the greatness of Canadian talent.
"We feel that the talent in Canada is outrageous. People don't understand," Bartello said. "And we brought our New York team here and we were like, you can cast a lot of these roles locally, please come and meet these actors. And they were just blown away."
"As a Canadian, I'm really proud," Epstein added in a separate interview. "It's a really complicated time right now and I feel really proud to be part of Canadian pieces, Canadian stories, Canadian characters. And so I just want to represent it well."
The continued success development of Life After can also be seen as a guiding light for playwrights in Canada.
"It's really great for Canadian audiences to see what's possible with new work," Johnson said. "I think there's just more of a template for that in the States, ... and the fact that now we're discovering that language in Canada, and that investment from audiences, I think it's really exciting."
"And hopefully it will feel very rewarding to audiences that like this, that have been with us since the fringe, to see like, hey this show is still very much this show. The heart of it is the same. But here's what can happen when this level of investment is given to a new project."
