Our culture has a name for this kind of panicked, late-stage blooming: we call it a midlife crisis. It is fertile ground for both laughter and lament. Man of the Year, Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland’s latest production (and their first musical), offers up a brilliant twist on the genre: what if the dark night of the downtownie soul was soundtracked by Sean Panting?

If 40 is the noon of life, as Carl Jung once remarked, then one metaphor for a midlife crisis is the abrupt discovery that you’ve slept in well past brunch. Fittingly, the lights come up on Dom (Brandon McGibbon in St. John’s; Andrew O’Brien in Corner Brook), passed out on the futon in his living room, on the rare day that he wakes to catch the morning. Dom is the last man standing in his Gen X cohort, the only one who has avoided selling out to the demands of economic necessity, family obligations, or doctor’s orders; he coasts through life in a slacker’s paradise funded by the royalties from a ketchup jingle he dashed off thirty years ago.

We meet Dom as he is struck by a flash of inspiration delivered through four hallucinatory groupies — the muses (Sam Chaulk, Kelly-Ann Evans, Vicki Harnett, Robyn Noftall) — who swirl around him through every musical number in the show. He’s finally nailed the guitar riff that will land his band The Super Spies their big break and retroactively justify his life. There’s just one problem: his best friend and erstwhile bass player Barry (Phil Churchill) has stopped by on his way to an actual job to tell Dom he’s quitting the band. It takes Dom a long time to register this intrusion on his fantasy — this is a running theme — and he blames Barry’s domineering wife Nancy (Alison Woolridge) for breaking his band apart. As Barry is leaving (and cagey about the details of his Friday night plans), Dom’s upstairs neighbour Mackenzie (Amelia Manuel) barges in to berate them for all the noise — only for this dignified doctor of veterinary science to throw herself at Dom the minute they’re alone.

Photo by Ritche Perez

Mackenzie’s also got some big news for Dom: she’s pregnant, and he’s the father. But Dom is so absorbed in his easily-bruised ego that he isn’t able to hear her for the rest of the first act. Instead he brings her to a show on Friday, which she thinks is a date but is really a reconnaissance mission to find out if Barry has betrayed him by playing with another band. Things are worse than he thought: the ex-Super Spy is a double agent. Barry is playing bass for an act fronted by Dom’s estranged daughter Tasha (Julia Pulo), who comes roaring out of the gate with a reggae-inflected roast of her useless deadbeat dad. Dom didn’t know Tasha was in town because, it turns out, he abandoned his family years ago when his partner Caitlyn (Geraldine Hollett) was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

As the past he has tried to escape erupts into his present, Dom retreats into a drinking binge and encourages Barry to get so wasted he winds up in the hospital with broken bones. Tasha drags her dad back to his apartment and ends up mothering him — just in time for Mackenzie to come by and have Dom finally hear that he will yet again become a father. The second act is where Dom decides whether he will atone for his past by accepting his future or whether he will withdraw, once and for all, into his lonely alcoholic fantasy.

This is where Man of the Year shines as a compelling character study. We all know a guy like Dom; some of us have been, or could be, or are currently a guy (or girl) like Dom. He is totally self-absorbed without any self-awareness; his brittle delusions of grandeur are papered over a bottomless well of self-loathing, a vortex of shame and fear. Dom projects an image of power and freedom that masks a deeper, but no less imaginary, conviction that he is absolutely powerless to do anything but stay fixed in place forever — with only endless empty apologies to offer for the emotional wreckage he leaves in his wake. We learn that it was Caitlyn who told Dom to leave her and Tasha to face the cancer alone, because his total absence seemed less painful than the chronic anxiety of never knowing whether they can rely on him to show up. The defining moment of Dom’s life is that he could have stepped up to contest her damning indictment of his character; instead he stepped out, and confirmed it.

“All you needed to be was there,” Tasha tearfully tells her father as the show comes to its emotional crescendo. This is the grim irony of refusing responsibility: Dom declares “I chose Hell for the company” and finds himself watching his life fall apart from the sidelines, absolutely and utterly alone.

In the end there is no dramatic moment of redemption, no grand romantic gesture. No grace is dispensed and no forgiveness is forthcoming because “sorry is not enough and it never was.” It is only when Mackenzie — the one woman in Dom’s life with boundaries and self-respect — denies his desperate declaration of love and tells him “nothing I say or do can save you from your past” that Dom finally grasps that the only person who will rescue him is himself. Nobody gets even one second of time back to undo what was done or do what was left undone. Dom cannot go back and become the father Tasha needed when she was a child, but he can become the father that his new son needs today. When you recognize that all you have is now, you will also find the power to show up and be present for yourself and the people around you. A single minute in the sunshine as ‘man of the year’ is worth more than half a century spent living in the shadow of your shame.

This is the mercifully mundane secret of salvation: that no matter who we are, or what we’ve done, there is still time to taste the sun. The hour is later than you think — but there is still time. I promise you Man of the Year is worth every precious minute.

Drew Brown is a writer from Grand Falls-Windsor. He was a PhD candidate in political science before dropping out to write for VICE and serve as Editor-in-Chief of The Independent. He is currently a Counselling Intern at the Jacob Puddister Memorial Foundation in St. John’s while finishing his MA in Counselling Psychology.