Phoenix Festival Playbill 2025 (1) - Flipbook - Page 47
AFTERPLAY
Adapted by Brian Friel
Directed by Karen Case Cook*
Cast
ELISE STONE*............................................................................Sonya Serebriakova
CRAIG SMITH*................................................................................Andrey Prozorov
Production Team
Buffy Cardoza — Production Manager/Props Designer
Craig Smith* — Lighting Design
Place: Nighttime, in The Cosmos, a small run-down café
Run time: 70 minutes without intermission
*Member, Actors’ Equity Association
Playwright’s Note
I called this piece Afterplay because it revisits the lives of two people, Andrey Prozorov
and Sonya Serebriakova, who had a previous existence in two separate plays. Both
plays were written by the same author one hundred years ago. These two people
came from very different 昀椀ctional backgrounds and we meet them again now approximately twenty years after their previous 昀椀ctional lives ended. Now re-animated and
re-imagined they are middle-aged. They cannot escape their origins, of course; those
experiences that their creator furnished them with are still determining experiences.
Part of Andrey is still an only boy, confused, motherless, reared in a remote provincial
town by a domineering father and three restless sisters. Sonya is still wrestling with
a dif昀椀cult estate and is still as deeply and as hopelessly in love with the local doctor
as she was all those years ago. But they have had new experiences in the twenty-year
interval. And what interested me was what those experiences might be and how they
might blend into and adjust those earlier lives. Had I created these two characters in
the 昀椀rst place I would feel free now to reshape them as I wished. But they are not mine
alone. I am something less than a parent but I know I am something more than a foster
parent. Maybe closer to a godparent who takes his responsibilities scrupulously. So
when I consider the complex life Anton Chekhov breathed into Sonya and Andrey one
hundred years ago, I believe that that life can be carried forward into this extended
existence provided the two stay true to where and what they came from. That means
that the godfather has to stay alert at all times to the intention of their 昀椀rst begetter.
