The Last Show On Earth™! is an absurd, high-colour, funny yet compassionate story about the apocalypse told through a queer lens.

Writer Breton Lalama, who played Riff Raff in The Rocky Horror Show at Neptune, started writing the play as they were coming out as trans and “…that felt a death of sorts, which made me start thinking about all the millions of little deaths, or world endings, that we all experience all the time, which lead to me realizing this story was about the last night on Earth,” they say in a press release.

The 75-minute play, premiering at Neptune’s studio theatre through Feb. 18, is a celebratory trip into a surreal world – though real enough to be close to ours – that is dominated by the outrageous, social media star Ayo.

You can’t take your eyes off of this over-sexed narcissist even when – or maybe particularly when – they expose their bare butt cheeks via cut-outs in a bizarre, bold outfit. (The costumes by Oliver Dorais-Fleming are amazing in this piece.)

Ayo, fully realized in a ramped-up, vamped-up performance by Wayne Burns, has a social media channel greeting folks daily as the end approaches with the promise a great big stage show at the very end.

The emotional heart of the show is Eli, beautifully and poignantly portrayed by Elm Reyes. This serious, sorrowful, empathetic character is closest to what most of us would feel at the end. Eli desperately does not want to die but can’t afford a ticket to Mars.

Eli, who used to perform a dance routine with Ayo, takes a job at a fruit roll up factory – a wonderful, comic conceit by Lalama – to earn enough money for a ticket. And, there Eli connects with owner Lina , who feels she can’t abandon the generational family business. Anne-Marie Saheb is very good at both the Stepford Wife-like persona Lina adopts to shoot commercials for the business and at revealing her interior fears and desires.

Lina is obsessed with horoscopes as a form of escape in the way many of us are searching for escape from alarming news and our fears around impending environmental collapse, war, plague, etc., etc., etc..

An unspoken undercurrent in this play – as it gives wonderful voice and life to queer identity – is the threat of violence in Canada to the 2SLGBTQI+ community as debate rages provincially about gender-affirming surgeries and pronoun preferences.

Director Annie Valentina also makes the point in the press release. “This is a precarious time for queer and trans folks, who are facing increased violence worldwide, not to mention the constant threat of having legal rights stripped away. We’re scared, we’re angry, and we need you to pay attention.”

By their very existence, Ayo and Eli are under threat, though The Last Show On Earth™! is not didactic. These self-accepting, self-loving, entertaining characters don’t talk about their gender or sexuality; they talk about each other and the end of the world.

Visually The Last Show On Earth™! is a trip with Wes Babcock’s set of cat walks, screens and a conveyor belt/dance stage, a set that interests an audience before the play even starts. Valentina uses it very well with lots of motion as she keeps the pace fast and poppy but not without allowing emotional moments to settle.

The play features a very effective lighting design by Alison Crosby and sound and video by Jordan Palmer. Richie Wilcox appears on film in a cameo as a TV interviewer with Ayo.

It’s a little confusing as to whether Ayo is a ghost from Eli’s past or a character still in the present; however the play is a sci-fi mind-bender so that can float.

Tickets are at www.neptunetheatre.com

• Elsa is coming to Neptune for Christmas!
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a soldout hit; some tickets available Wednesday 2 p.m.

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: review