LIFEafterLIFE is a two-act musical/opera/drama hybrid, exploring the lives of two individual, but tragically connected, characters, one in each act, backed by a four-piece band. The two solo musical-dramas examine the heartbreak of loss, the obsessive burden of guilt, the anger of grief, and the essential hope that enables us to rise up from the depths of unbearable tragedy. While drenched in death and loss, with occasional, unquenchable pools of humor, LIFEafterLIFE ultimately celebrates life, and the human capacity to change.

Act One, Virtuality Sal, looks at the broken life of a former bus driver recovering from the trauma of accidently running down and killing a pedestrian, funneled through the musical lens of electronic/punk pop (accompanied by an all female (at least in appearance) trio of musicians.) His mindless, work-at-home job keeps him focused in the computer, as do the online games he plays during the slow periods; yet each moment is filled with the blood-soaked memories of the bus accident. Eaten away by the guilt he cannot bear, Sal chooses a life that is virtual, rather than literal, finding his solace in the avatar that allows him to function via a second life within the computer. By the end of the act, Sal is a shell of himself, locked behind his door, bathed in the glow of his computer as he finds a virtual happiness in a different world.

Act Two, Whida Peru, explores the plight of Whida Peru, a Puerto Rican transsexual shut-in agoraphobic psychic, as she is forced to break up with the ghost of her dead boyfriend and rejoin the world on the other side of the door. Juannie, the dead boyfriend, was accidentally run over by a city bus, driven by Sal, on the morning of Whida’s reassignment surgery; Whida has been shut in the apartment ever since, supporting herself as the most powerful psychic on the Eastern seaboard. Whida manifests all the invisible ghosts that fill her tiny life, but is not ready for the big change that greets her this night: Juannie wants to break up. Whida rages through the five stages of accepting death, and with the help of the ethereal spirit of her dead lover, and the physically omnipresent Pianist (apparently male, providing both the musical accompaniment and soundscape vocalizations of the score), along with a trio of paranormal, poltergeistic sisters (the musicians from Virtuality Sal, who now migrate over to manipulate Whida's environment as if from the beyond), she finally unlocks the front door, ready to step back out into the land of the living.

Together, Virtuality Sal and Whida Peru take us on a journey that retreats from the pain and brutal realities of the real world, yet allows us to find a way out at the end of the long, sheltering tunnel. Ultimately, LIFEafterLIFE celebrates the journeys of two people connected by the same tragedy: one shutting the door on the world, the other, finally opening it to start her life again.