THE FIRES Brings A Breathtaking Inferno Downtown — Review

I sat in the wrong seat for The Fires, Raja Feather Kelly’s tenderhearted, richly poetic new play which opened last night at Soho Rep. It proved a fateful accident.

Hustling into the invaluable downtown company’s 73-seat space, here reconfigured by Kelly (also directing) into long rows of seating running alongside Raphael Mishler’s gorgeous railroad apartment set, I blew obliviously past a seat marked “J.S.” and found a central spot. About two-thirds of the way into The Fires, the horribly frightened Maurice (a soulful Jon-Michael Reese) sat down next to me. 

An enigmatic presence, Maurice had hovered around Kelly’s staging, hiding in the theater’s far corners. On stage, he was a constant topic of conversation. Eli (Beau Badu) was having a party, and he wanted Maurice there. Even as Maurice sat next to me, the two remained on the phone, with Eli entreating him to come over. 

Maurice insisted he wanted to. He was trying to get there. But he just kept getting lost. Lost in time. In a history – specifically a Black, American history – of love, and loneliness, and tragedy, weighing him down.  

It would be overly neat, perhaps, to designate Maurice as the author’s stand-in. Nothing in Kelly’s surreal text is so straightforward. But he is grappling with a question that sits at the heart of this moving, occasionally verbose work: Why do we keep running away from each other? What keeps us hiding in the darkness – even as we are entreated, lovingly, to step into the light? 

The answers, Kelly suggests, lie in the past. The Fires collides three queer narratives from three different time periods, all of them taking place in the same cramped apartment. In 1974, Jay (Philip James Brannon) is desperately finishing a manifesto, filling endless journals with philosophical musings while cared for by his doting lover George (Ronald Peet). In 1998, George’s 20-somethings son Sam struggles to decipher those journals following his father’s suicide, unaware of their true author. And in 2021, Eli floats hazily through hook-ups while quarantined in the same apartment, now rented from Sam’s sister Rowan (Janelle McDermoth).

The distinct worlds of Jay, Sam and Eli exist on stage together, the performers gliding around each other in an elegant, carefully choreographed dance. The fluid movement work is no surprise, since Kelly is chiefly known as an accomplished choreographer (A Strange Loop, Lempicka and Teeth are among his credits). Under Kelly’s careful hand, a device that could so easily grow awkward instead feels smooth, unforced. Each story exists clearly in its own world – yet observe the bodies on stage closely, and you might spot a flinch, or a shudder, as wounds from one time travel imperceptibly into the next. 

As a writer, Kelly can fall into repetition. Some of that is deliberate – we are witnessing cycles of fear, pain and loneliness, repeat, as three gay Black men struggle to protect, and to share, their soul, or essence – their fire. Still, Jay’s arguments with George feel circular, though the ‘74 scenes are briefly enlivened by a visit from Jay’s brother Reggie (a tremendous Jason Veasey). In ‘98, Sam presses his mother Leslie (a powerful Michelle Wilson), over and over, on his father’s sexuality, and is met with a brick wall of denial. And in ‘21, Eli and Maurice’s phone calls are repeating riddles, as Maurice continually struggles to articulate what is keeping him from Eli’s embrace. However conscious of a choice, these repetitions sap the play’s momentum and ultimately hold it back from greatness. 

Yet there is a cumulative effect to all this frustrating disconnection, this doomed fumbling for love. For a time, I turned and watched Maurice watch the play. As Jay, Sam and Eli struggled to find connection, Reese shook his head, muttering in frustration. As they failed to find a home for their love, tears rolled down his cheeks. Time after time, in story after story, the same cycles keep repeating – and poor Maurice could see it all. It broke his heart. And as I watched him, it broke mine.

The Fires is now in performance at Soho Rep through June 16, 2024 in New York City.