A dead lover returns decades later. In new play, the impossible might just be possible

Think about someone you’ve loved and lost – a parent, a lover, a friend. Years go by, maybe decades. Death happens, but life goes on.

Then, one day, there’s a knock on your door.

And there stands someone claiming to be your loved one. Only that person looks nothing like the person you’ve lost. And by the way, you’ve aged, but the person hasn’t.

Hmmm. How likely is it? “You might as well tell me you can grow flowers on the moon,” says the actor playing Helen MacMillan when a stranger makes the same claim in TheatreXP’s production of “Growing Flowers On The Moon,” a world premiere by Philly playwright R.T. Bowersox.

“It’s a moving story about love and its power to cross time and impossibility to heal even the deepest wounds,” Bowersox said. “There is a twist ending that you will never see coming.”

“Growing Flowers” opens Thursday, Nov. 6, and runs through Nov. 15, at the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion in Germantown.

The full cast of “Growing Flowers on the Moon” (from top left): Susan Giddings, Cathy Simpson, Travoye Joyner, Kathryn Wylde, Brian Scott Campbell. (TheatreXP)

Bowersox said “Growing Flowers,” his seventh world premiere, has been in the making for 30 years, inspired by his Aunt Helen, whose husband Robert died when they were both young. Devastated, she never remarried. Wealthy and elegant, she lived in a lovely building in an apartment decorated with the finest Asian antiques.

“Her apartment was like walking back in time,” Bowersox said.

During one visit, as she sat in her chair, a cigarette in her fingers and a glass of sherry nearby, she mused, “I wonder what I would do if Robert walked through that door right now,” Bowersox recalled her saying.

And just like that, Bowersox began thinking about her question, letting it noodle around in his head until about seven years ago, when he began to write and workshop the play.

A fantastical premise

In “Growing Flowers,” Helen is a white woman in her 70s when the stranger appears. He’s in his mid-20s and Black and insists that he is her long-lost fiancé, David Cargill, a white man in his 20s when he died.

So, what does the stranger really want?

“He’s looking around like he’s casing the joint,” Bowersox said. Yet, “he knows all kinds of things that only the real David Cargill would know. There’s a little paranormal flavor coming in. I’m throwing a lot of red herrings out to distract the audience.”

Bowersox, founder and artistic director of TheatreXP, often stages shows at the Plays & Players Theatre near Rittenhouse Square. But a friend who had read “Growing Flowers” urged him to look at the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion, built in 1859 by Maxwell, a wealthy cloth merchant.

The Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion in Germantown. (Maxwell Mansion)

Although “Growing Flowers” is set in a southern mansion, the Germantown mansion’s “parlor room looked exactly like the room I wrote the play in my imagination,” Bowersox said. “It was amazing. I walked into the place and I said, `Jeez, it looks like someone walked into my head and reproduced it.’”

Bowersox has had a long and varied career, including 23 years hosting a cooking show on QVC, the West Chester-based home-shopping television network. For years, his show, “In the Kitchen With Bob” was the network’s most-viewed show.