Raja Feather Kelly is an artist on the rise who knows his way around a theater.
Kelly is the award-winning choreographer of the recent Broadway musicals A Strange Loop and Lempicka and the incoming Off Broadway musical Teeth, as well as for the dancing and movement seen within several notable dramas such as Fairview. Kelly further happens to be the artistic director of feath3r theory (TF3T), a dance-theater-media company he established in 2009 and for which he has created 18 new works.
Kelly now makes his debut as a playwright with The Fires, an ambitious new play that opened Tuesday at Soho Rep.
Directing his own work, Kelly’s theatrical smarts are evident. His artful production reinforces the drama, a mildly surreal one-act which tends to be tricky and underwritten.
A work deeply steeped in sorrow, The Fires considers three troubled Black men who inhabit the same modest Brooklyn apartment in different years: 1974, 1998 and 2021. Although these men (and several other characters) are melancholy in varying ways, they all are writers and their anxieties stem from being homosexuals in love.
Or not in love. Or not sure they are truly in love. Or maybe they’re only in love with love. Anyway, they’re variously sad about it.
Apparently being Black somehow makes the men feel even sadder about their situations, but such mournful subtleties are intimated rather than articulated by the characters, who in spite of their fires burning within prove to be not so hot at expressing their feelings. The realization that these three never leave the apartment perhaps symbolizes how they are confined by the circumstances of their existence as homosexual Black men of different eras.
The challenging dramatic aspect of The Fires is that these somewhat separate narratives unfold simultaneously, more or less, within a railroad-style flat of a bedroom, kitchen, and living room.
To summarize the stories: The 1974 portions present a clandestine romance between middle-aged Jay (Phillip James Brannon) and George (Ronald Peet). The 1998 sequences view Sam (Sheldon Best), the depressed, agoraphobic son of one of those lovers, who is reading the journals penned by his dad, a recent suicide, and trying to puzzle out their enigmatic contents. “I think Dad was gay,” he ventures to his teen sister Rowan (Janelle McDermoth) and worried mother Leslie (Michelle Wilson), who doesn’t think so.
By 2021, an adult Rowan has lent the now-deceased Sam’s apartment to Eli (Beau Badu), a lonely Gen Y guy stuck in a Grindr rut of casual sex who dithers over pursuing a potentially significant relationship with a skittish yet dreamy rent-boy (Jon-Michael Reese).
Connected mostly by a shared location and a batch of red-covered notebooks, how these storylines are able to develop concurrently without causing too much viewer confusion as its characters intermingle is a tribute to Kelly’s staging skills. His nearly two-hour play, however, aside from a few rhapsodic moments – Aphrodite, the goddess of love, is invoked more than once – is oddly flat in conversation and does not gather steam dramatically.
Hinting at a happier future, the style and humorous edge of the 2021 sequences are dissimilar to the rest of The Fires, suggesting that Kelly may have tried to combine two separate plays.
Kelly’s confident production is more admirable than his patchy drama. Soho Rep’s narrow 70-seat space has been reconfigured sideways to provide a wide, shallow stage. Designed and furnished by Raphael Mishler with quasi-realistic detail, the expansive apartment setting is mostly tinted in a passionate red that shades into deep purples and magentas under Bryan Ealey’s moody lighting.
Thanks to such striking visuals and the shimmering charm of otherworldly music composed by Emily Wells, the play’s lugubrious nature is persuasively translated into sweet sorrow. The everyday clothes co-designed by Naoko Nagata and Enver Chakartash look appropriate for the characters, other than anachronistic underwear sported during the 1974 affair.
A company of capable actors, which includes Jason Veasey in contrasting roles, gives the spark of life to the individuals they portray, although the performances appear a tad overemphatic for their intimate proximity to the audience.
The Fires opened May 21, 2024, at Soho Rep and runs through June 30. Tickets and information: sohorep.org
