Afterglow (Eternity Playhouse) ★★★

Written by S Asher Gelman. Midnight Theatricals. Eternity Playhouse. Feb 26 – Mar 22, 2026.

Much like its characters, Afterglow — S. Asher Gelman’s Off-Broadway and Off-West End gratuitously sexy threesome play — doesn’t know what it really wants. Does it want to be sexy escapism, or an exploration of complex relationships? In trying to do both, it manages to do one of those very well.

This is, at heart, a silly melodrama, with the most gratuitous use of full-frontal nudity I’ve seen in a long while (completely different in execution to Griffin’s Naturism, if you were wondering). But just because something has the subtlety of a pornographic telenovela doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it.

Theatre director Josh (Matthew Mitcham) and scientist Alex (Julian Curtis) are a thirty-something married couple in an open relationship, who invite the twenty-something massage therapist Darius (Matthew Predny) round for a night of complication-free sex. They hit it off, and pretty soon Josh and Darius are hooking up during the day with Alex’s approval — Josh is high-maintenance with a strong sex drive, and Alex is quietly relieved to have someone keeping him occupied. But what starts as adventurous fun grows more complicated as the emotional connection deepens, and things they thought were rock solid begin to seem simply rocky.

As far as plot complications go, anyone who has even walked past the Romance section of a bookshop can guess the twists and turns from the off. Writer/director/choreographer Gelman isn’t trying to add anything new to the conversation around modern love and its many arrangements. Fair enough — let’s not overcomplicate things.

This show is obsessed with surfaces, especially when they’re buffed and shiny. It trades in projections of perfection — physical, sexual, financial — that reveal a hollowness underneath. The messy white gays who fill the stage are the stereotypical characters of slightly outdated queer fiction: rich, entitled, gym-hardened, and hollow.

Ann Beyersdorfer’s sharp-edged, neon-drenched set design blends nightclub and sex-club aesthetics, putting performative sensuality centre stage (and under a shower). This isn’t real sex — it’s the choreography of porn, all lighting and angles, six-packs and sweat. Someone clearly spent too many nights at New York’s Splash Bar in the 00s.

Afterglow asks us to treat its characters as sexual objects before layering in personality and detail. This is less HBO-style “sexposition” — using sex to make dull exposition palatable — and more straightforward sexploitation: using sex to put bums on seats. Once you move past the nudity and the long, over-choreographed scene transitions, you’re left with around 75 minutes of actual theatre: a thirty-something couple buckling under pressure, and a twenty-something man who struggles to make genuine connections in the big city.

Gelman’s script nods in the direction of their woes, but neither it nor the performances quite manage to navigate the shift from skin-fest frivolity to heartfelt drama. The carefully staged sex sometimes feels inorganic, and the set ill-suited to domestic moments — unless your home is decorated in pleather, plastic, and steel (no judgement here). The emotional plot beats feel equally awkward. A subplot about Josh and Alex pursuing surrogacy does a lot of heavy lifting, but you can hear the gears grinding beneath the dialogue. Much like its characters, Afterglow doesn’t quite know how to handle its own emotions.

But this is a melodrama — so we’re not here to get under the skin of anything. It’s much easier, as singer Peaches once put it, to simply “fuck the pain away.” It feels churlish to harp on about a lack of nuance in a play whose tagline is “The climax is just the beginning.”

Afterglow is exactly what it says on the tin — there’s something almost admirable about that commitment and there’s definitely much to enjoy here. If you’re after serious gay theatre, The Normal Heart and The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin are playing nearby, and Qtopia has a strong range of indie queer alternatives. But if you want ridiculous, slutty fun with a generous side of overwrought schmaltz, this one’s for you.