Des and Dre travel through time and space as they explore the past, present, and future of their relationship (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
SHIFTERS
Cherry Lane Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 20, $69-$149
www.cherrylanetheatre.org
Ah, what might have been — or still could be?
Charity Bedu-Addo and Daniel Ezra are electrifying in British Congolese playwright Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, a sizzling two-character drama at the Cherry Lane that posits that destiny is a choice. It begins when Des (Bedu-Addo), short for Destiny, and Dre (Ezra), both thirty-two, meet up at the wake for Dre’s beloved Nana. They’ve known each other since high school, when they were sixteen, but haven’t been in touch for eight years, a period during which their lives changed significantly.
Over the next 105 minutes (with intermission), Lombe and director Lynette Linton take the audience back and forth from the past to the present as Des and Dre go from sixteen and seventeen to twenty-four and twenty-seven, their relationship shifting from classmates and friends to possible lovers; in the script, scenes are identified by such titles as “Allies,” “Fractures,” and “Fugitives.” Through the play, they each break out of the narrative to recite monologues and make brief points to the audience.
“This is the moment when I finally [see] that time is an illusion,” Dre explains to us after greeting Des. “Because the walls of the world we built, the walls where time is linear and finite — start to crumble. And in this moment, I — you — are both here and there and time is moving and standing still as memory is made skin — yesterday, today, tomorrow — all real, all happening, all at the same time. And suddenly — ”
Des is the new girl in school, and she is in philosophy class with Dre when they get into an argument about the decisions people constantly face as he tries to get her to join the debate club. “There are more than two sides and more than two choices,” Des says. Dre responds, “Still gotta be for something to know what you’re against though, innit?” When Des offers that decisions should not be the most important thing, Dre replies by asking how anything would get done if there were no decisions. “You’re asking the wrong question,” Des says.
The story shifts from the wake to key moments in their life together, when decisions had consequences that brought them together and tore them apart, including some choices that are still haunting them. While Dre sees him and Des as “two little Black kids destined to oppose each other push each other shift each other until they could be formed again,” Des doesn’t believe in destiny, telling us, “If destiny is the path laid out for you — you still have to walk it. Choose it.”
It’s the choices they made when they were younger that brought them to this moment, at the wake, where they continue to dance around asking, and answering, the right questions.
Benedict Lombe’s Shifters has been extended through September 20 at the Cherry Lane (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
Most of the choices made by the cast and crew work extremely well. Alex Berry’s compelling set is a dark, open rectangle with two added rows of seating on the far side of the stage, which is draped with narrow LED tubes of varying lengths and at different angles that change colors based on mood. (The lighting is by Neil Austin.) The characters, in Berry’s contemporary costumes, occasionally move around black storage boxes that they sit on and open to find pieces from their past, as if reaching into their memories and psyche. Tony Gayle’s sharp sound incorporates Xana’s entrancing, award-winning score and John Hiatt’s 1987 track “Have a Little Faith in Me,” heard on an old turntable. “When the road gets dark / And you can no longer see / Just let my love throw a spark / And have a little faith in me,” Hiatt sings.
Shifters evokes Nick Payne’s Constellations and Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries, two other outstanding plays in which a man and a woman revisit the past as they explore their relationship. Ezra (Twelfth Night) and Bedu-Addo (The Bolds, Stocking Fillers), replacing Heather Agyepong when the show was extended, as she did in the original London run, have an instant chemistry. Both of the characters are complex and unpredictable, and the two actors imbue them with a fresh, beguiling honesty that keeps the audience’s emotions swirling as Dre and Des seek out their crisscrossing paths.
The play is about ten or fifteen minutes too long, as it gets bogged down with a bevy of revelations of tragedy and trauma in the final scenes; Lombe (Lava, for which she won the 2022 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize) and Lynton (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Not Your Superwoman) already have us invested in Dre and Des, so this added information is unnecessary and detracts from the proceedings. Otherwise, Shifters is a triumph.
In a program note, Lombe writes, “Shifters was born from this intentionality and specificity — a universal love story between a British Congolese woman and a British Nigerian man — that shifts in and out of time and space and feeling, demanding nothing less than to shift the theatrical canon itself.” Lombe is clearly on the right path.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]