Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Raja Feather Kelly’s THE FIRES pungently, poetically excavates the burden Black queerness and the devastation of love

• By drediman
• June 15, 2024
• No Comments

This past week, I had the opportunity to catch up with Raja Feather Kelly’s The Fires by Raja Feather Kelly, courtesy of Off-Broadway’s small but mighty Soho Rep, which over the years has had the uncanny knack for spotting and programming important new playwrights on the rise (I first encountered the works of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and Shayok Misha Chowdhury at its intimate Walker Street venue). Although Kelly is best known as an avant-garde choreographer — he created the distinctive movement for the Tony-winning A Strange Loop — here he takes the official plunge as a playwright, telling the tough stories of three generations of Black gay men who occupy the same apartment over nearly half a century.

Taking place in 1974, 1998, and 2021, the play’s three narrative threads unfold simultaneously during its nearly two intermission-less hours. As the play reveals more about the three tenants, you increasingly come to understand how their stories and circumstances interlock. Thankfully, the playwright’s writing keeps the confusion at bay, instead creating a symphony rich with poetry and feeling. Most impressively, Kelly brings the same kind of humanistic intuition inherent in his choreographic works to his new play. The Fires is filled to the brim with confusion and melancholy as it excavates the burden of Black queerness — which rears its head in different manifestations over the decades — and the universal devastation wreaked by love.

Kelly also brings a dance-maker’s sensibility to his pungent production. Staged in the mode of a fever dream and a ghost story of sorts, there’s a graceful physicality and spacial awareness as the characters navigate sharing the same living space within a collapsed timeframe (the cramped apartment seems to be a character unto itself). The Fires also strikes me as a deeply personal play. It’s clear that Kelly has put a lot of himself into the work, which is evident in the set of raw, honest performances he elicits from his talented cast (Phillip James Brannon’s haunted performance is particularly harrowing). Indeed, there were times when the forcefulness and intensity of their acting — animating some rather candid scenes depicting unadulterated sexuality and fractured/bruised mental health — shook me to the bone.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

THE FIRES
Off-Broadway, Play
Soho Rep
1 hour, 50 minutes (without an intermission)
Through June 30