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The Fire This Time Festival, the annual showcase for short one-act plays by emerging Black playwrights, has come up in the world, literally, since I last attended in 2022. From the little Kraine Theater in the East Village the festival has moved uptown, to the new Apollo Stages at the Victoria Theater on 125th Street in Harlem, right by the historic Apollo Theater itself.
In these larger, modern digs the festival’s 17th season features six short plays. Artistically speaking it remains, like almost any event of this nature, a mixed bag. Some playlets hit the mark; a few wander from the target.
Saving the Day
An enthusiastic opening-day audience helped make Saturday afternoon’s show memorable. It didn’t hurt that this year’s lineup opens with the splashiest and funniest of the plays. “Black to Save the Day” by Preston Crowder takes a satirical look at serious matters: race, class, solidarity, heroism. There’s a Black Superheroes’ League, see, personified here by Sista Steele, played to the hilt by Nikiya Mathis, this year’s number one Fire This Time powerhouse. Defending the home front, her gaudily costumed superhero faces off against (not-so)-supervillain the Gentrifier (a hilarious Malik Childs).
Offstage, her heroic teammates are comically struggling to get to the scene. But it turns out manpower backup isn’t what Sista needs. It’s willpower, when an old flame (Kareem Lucas) shows up and tempts her to abandon her community and join him in a larger-scale, presumably multiracial League where she can live a life of luxury and galactic adventure.
Pop culture references (Wakanda, anyone?) further brighten the palette as the zaniness sharpens into something resembling a difficult reality. As she fills out every inch of Crowder’s broadly funny script, Mathis performs the superheroic feat of infusing both outsized swagger and human-scale interior conflict into a comic-book character – while generating laugh after knowing laugh.
Life After Death
Donathan Walters’ “White Diamond” sustains the focus but switches gears to the realism of family dynamics. This, the most incisive and expertly crafted of the sextet of plays, combines two dramatic tropes: a death in the family, and a struggle over acceptance of a family member’s identity. In two sharply drawn performances, Naomi Lorrain and Victor Musoni play a loving but conflicted mother and son searching for a treasured brooch needed at an imminent funeral. Walters needs just this one intense scene to vividly portray a family dynamic that includes multiple absent characters along with the mother and son.
“Everything But” by Teniia Micazia Brown is another intense two-hander, a funny one about fraught lovers. What makes this one shine is a deadpan-droll performance by Naomi Lorrain contrasted with an emotionally pained turn by Childs, now not Gentrifying, but gently trying to smooth his way out of relationship trouble. Subtly elevated language brings the conversation into meta-territory in an artistically and emotionally satisfying way despite inconsistent momentum.
The next two plays, “Clumsy” and “DNR,” aren’t as good. In the first, I just didn’t get what was happening. The second was too unfocused for its slowly revealed family situation to be compelling.
The last playlet, the semi-absurdist “Goose” by Delane McDuffie, is a compressed reflection on the civil rights movement via a well-played clash of personalities. Musoni as a militant and Lucas as a hyper-enthusiastic newcomer to the movement are especially good in the ensemble cast. A twist ends the play, and with it the festival lineup, on a comical note, circling back in a way to the superhero parody with which the show begins.
The 17th Fire This Time Festival is at Apollo Stages through January 31. Tickets are available online.
