Fresh from playing the Emcee in Cabaret the actor, singer and icon of red-carpet fabulousness Billy Porter makes an assured UK directing debut with this two-hander. Harrison David Rivers’s play stars Omari ‘It’s a Sin’ Douglas and Alexander ‘Emmerdale’ Lincoln as an interracial American gay couple navigating the furious swell of the Black Lives Matter movement and the first hints of a Trumpian backlash.
It’s as much about the complicated ebb and flow of the relationship as it is about the couple’s differing attitudes to activism. The twist being that Douglas’s Jesse, who is black, doesn’t want to get involved, while Lincoln’s Neil, who is white, is forever leaping into the fray.
Jesse first spots Neil atop an equine statue of George Washington, “pressing against his bronze junk” and intoning black poet Essex Hemphill’s Take Care of Your Blessings through a bullhorn, at the Million Hoodie March in New York to protest the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012. A soused flirtation later on in Greenwich Village is shattered by the sound of breaking glass.
Other deaths follow: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, the slaughter of nine black church congregants in Charleston, South Carolina. The play was commissioned in 2015 and inhabits that otherworld where Trump’s first victory seemed absurd, and the killing of George Floyd and the pandemic had not yet happened.
The script has a slightly glib facility, the arguments about intersectionality, cultural appropriation and the issues of dating across ethnic and economic divides all neatly parcelled into polished nuggets of drama. As in so much American culture the characters occupy a rarefied stratum of society.
Neil’s family is tasteful, liberal, well-travelled and Brooklyn-brownstone rich. Jesse had a tougher upbringing with his strict Baptist folks but, whaddya know, he’s a brilliant writer. (Like Rivers, he grew up in Kansas, studied at Columbia and became an acclaimed playwright in Minnesota.)
Pleasingly, though, the play refuses to settle for being *just* about the politics or the love affair, or to follow predictable tramlines. There are nice digressions into the morals of Googling your partner’s parents, the legacy of the Cosby Show and why Barack Obama was a revelation for white people not black people. Each man learns how the other takes up space differently in society. That Jesse won’t dance is at least as galling for Neil as the fact he won’t march.
Infidelity rears its predictable head, but with unpredictable consequences, which gives Douglas a chance to tap into some powerfully raw emotion. Lincoln’s Neil is touchingly chagrined when he realises the difficulty of being an ally to those with entirely different life experiences: “I’ve never had to prove myself.” There is sweetness to their banter and pillow talk, an honesty to their fights.
Porter keeps things tight and lively as the play snaps back and forth along a three-year timeline. Scene changes are signalled by sound effects or the strobing of lights down Morgan Large’s set of screens. There’s artful use of projection and the title of Hemphill’s poem is spelled out in neon on top.
I could have done without the half-hearted attempts at audience involvement. And the repetition of the couple’s meet-cute and the sudden, splintering glass leads to an ending that seems incomprehensibly ambiguous. But maybe I missed something. Otherwise, this is a fresh and illuminating take on recent social and political history that’s already being rewritten elsewhere.
Soho Theatre, to July 26; sohotheatre.com
