SLOWDANCE IN ROOM 8-C
Both plays are written and directed by Runako Jahi (best known as the author of the TV special Martin Luther King Suite), and both focus on male-female tensions–a theme also expressed in the show’s set (designed by Jahi), which is hot pink and royal blue. Again, Sometime Soon, the evening’s opener, has a barbed comic style that recalls the bitcheries of The Boys in the Band, but the gay, mostly white milieu has become black and mostly heterosexual here.
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But the evening strikes plenty of sparks, in the sharp dialogue and intensity of feeling Jahi has given his characters and in the performances of Ellis Foster and Adekola Adedapo, two actors with offbeat but powerful presences. Foster, a tall, gaunt man with a richly expressive voice, is haunting as the tortured Albert in Slowdance and quite funny, in a Vincent Price sort of way, as the campy and cynical Gerald in Sometime Soon. And Adedapo, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Agnes Moorehead, is electric as the vindictive Vera in Sometime Soon, and a winsome, girlish Georgia in Slowdance; she’s also a superb jazz singer, as she demonstrates in a brief turn as a Rush Street chanteuse in the latter play. Fine work also comes from Jijinota Oyayemi and Lenora Brown, as the falling and rising beauties respectively in Sometime Soon, and from Darryl Reed in Slowdance as a man reliving his boyhood shyness.
