There are certain anxieties you learn to live with as an avid follower of New York theater, and one of them is this: the most extraordinary artists making work for the stage might at any second be whisked off to the more lucrative world of TV and film, never to return.
I have had this simmering worry about Kara Young for a few years, and ever since she won a Tony Award in June for her impeccable comic performance in “Purlie Victorious,” the threat level has seemed high. As the fall season begins, though, we are still in luck.
Off Broadway, at MCC Theater, Young is channeling her extraordinary charm, and her silent-screen-star expressiveness, into a new romantic comedy, Douglas Lyons’s “Table 17.” An 85-minute romp, it wears its belief in true love — and in theater — rather fetchingly on its archly posed sleeve.
Young plays the restlessly single Jada, who tossed her therapist’s cautious advice about her former fiancé out the window the instant he called and invited her to dinner. It’s been seven years since they met at a nightclub and two years since their painful split. Of course she doesn’t want him back — unless he admits to wanting her back, in which case she would be willing to concede, eventually, that the longing is intensely mutual.
“From our first silly night on the dance floor, he had me,” she reminisces to the audience as she tries on one possible outfit for their reunion. “And I just knew I had found my person.”
Disclaimer to rom-com haters: “Table 17” is not for you. It is, however, for a lot of us — fans of the genre and anyone to whom theater of late has felt more arduous than entertaining. This is a play that wants you to have an amusing, untaxing evening out, and everything about Zhailon Levingston’s alluringly designed production, with its top-notch cast of three, is calibrated in service of that aim.
Bianca’s is the restaurant where Jada and her ex, Dallas (a smoothly appealing Biko Eisen-Martin), dine under an enormous disco ball at table 17, rehashing their coupledom and where it went wrong. Their server is the tart-tongued, queer and chronically unattached River (Michael Rishawn, impressively versatile in multiple roles). For all his exasperation at the messy relationship dramas of “the straights,” River is rooting for these two. They might actually possess the elusive thing that he yearns for: a soul-mate match.
Lyons, who made his Broadway playwriting debut with the comedy “Chicken & Biscuits,” directed by Levingston, is in neater form here, paying homage to Black romantic dramas of the 1990s and early 2000s. The three films he mentions in a note in the script are “Love & Basketball,” “Love Jones” and “Poetic Justice,” though the posters on the wall outside the theater are of rom-coms like “How Stella Got Her Groove Back.” The production unites both impulses.
With “Table 17,” though, Lyons and Levingston are not merely morphing a screen experience into three dimensions. What, truly, would be the point of getting off the couch for that?
They have instead created a piece of theater in which the presence of the audience overtly matters: in monologues and asides that are spoken directly to us and sometimes request a response, and in more than a dozen cabaret tables occupied by a portion of the audience and arrayed throughout Bianca’s. It is a surprisingly glamorous establishment, given that Dallas, who chose it, has a longstanding penchant for corduroy pants — a flaw that Jada is willing to overlook.
The costumes (by Devario D. Simmons) are often quick-change fun; the set (by Jason Sherwood) is pleasingly tricksy; and the lighting (by Ben Stanton) is lushly mood-making. Keep your eyes peeled for the moments when lines of colored light, bending on the surface of the disco ball, make the orb a giant heart.
“Table 17” does not have huge artistic ambitions, but what it offers is something we’ve been missing: a gentle, hopeful good time out in the world, in the company of other humans. This is theater as comfort food, and it satisfies a genuine craving.
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