In Douglas Lyons' Table 17, Dallas (Biko Eisen-Martin) and Jada (Kara Young) get together for the first time since they broke up.
Why should one have to go to the movies to see uncommonly attractive people flirt, fall in love, botch their relationship, have their heart broken but maybe live happily ever after anyway? Playwright Douglas Lyons has brought that beloved cinematic staple, the romantic comedy, to the stage with Table 17.
Lyons freely acknowledges his inspiration: “the luscious portrayals of Black love that permeated my childhood,” he says in a quote posted outside the entrance to the theater, on a wall lined with posters for films like The Best Man, Brown Sugar and Love & Basketball—examples from this “thrilling movement” of the 1990s and early 2000s, as Lyons calls it.
Among other roles, Michael Rishawn plays a cocky bartender in Table 17.
For his 90-minute rom-com, the playwright has reunited with director Zhailon Levingston, who helmed Lyons’s short-lived Broadway comedy Chicken & Biscuits, and enlisted 2024 Tony recipient Kara Young as his leading lady.
To play Table 17’s Jada, Young calls on the comic chops she showed off in Purlie Victorious (her Tony-winning performance), her romantic yearning from Cost of Living (which earned her an earlier Tony nomination) and the sensitivity and spunkiness of her Clyde’s role (also Tony-nominated)—and throws in a little Beyoncé homage and a lot of costume changes. She masters it all, and is perfect in the part.
Young’s two castmates, Biko Eisen-Martin and Michael Rishawn, boast their own charisma and comedic skill. Eisen-Martin portrays Dallas, the love of Jada’s life, whom she dated for four years, lived with for three of them, and was engaged to for two. Rishawn plays all the other characters—and audience members may be surprised to realize that the fast-talking macho bartender in the scene where Jada and Dallas meet and the swishy, snarky waiter at the restaurant where they’re having a post-breakup reunion are played by the same actor. (Rishawn’s range extends to perhaps his biggest role in the play: Eric, Jada’s fellow flight attendant who takes a romantic interest in her.)
“The cast’s charm and the overall warm fuzzies help elide possible faults in the plotting.”
An appealing cast with good chemistry, a few plot contrivances on the journey to true love, and a catchy soundtrack—that’s all it takes for a winning rom-com, per Hollywood’s model, and Table 17 has followed suit. But Lyons and Levingston made sure to include some things that could never occur in a screen rom-com. Theatergoers can choose seating at one of the café tables, just like the titular one occupied by Jada and Dallas, that surround the stage thrust. Jada asks the audience for an opinion of her outfit, and may point to one person for a reply. Dallas, Jada, Eric and the waiter directly address the audience (which when done on film is often labeled “stagy”). Plus, observing a love story within live theater’s proximity adds an intimacy, like you’re the BFF somebody turns to with their relationship issues.
Table 17 doesn’t tell its tale in boy-meets-girl fashion; the play opens two years after Jada and Dallas’s breakup, and they haven’t seen or communicated with each other since then. They get together at a bistro named Bianca’s—the playbill contains a menu—and once they’ve been seated and served, their relationship is recounted in flashbacks, which are intercut with scenes back at Bianca’s, as Dallas and Jade reminisce, reflect and occasionally regret.
As with the movie rom-coms that inspired Table 17, the cast’s charm and the overall warm fuzzies help elide possible faults in the plotting. Like, whether people so deeply in love would give up on their relationship. Or how much it would help if they just told their partner how they feel at the time, not months or years later when damage has been done.
Rishawn also portrays Eric, coworker of Young's Jada. Photographs by Daniel J Vasquez.
And maybe Dallas’ drinking should figure a bit more into the story—it never comes up again after he mentions early on that he “woke up one too many mornings next to an empty bottle, not knowing how the previous night ended. It wasn’t a good look. Kinda scary, actually.” Also, both Dallas and Jada do something—she in their relationship, he with another girlfriend—that isn’t exactly behavior you’d like in a partner.
But why, rom-com fans would protest, be a killjoy? As Lyons requests in his program note: “Laugh openly with us. Love with us. … let yourself be.” That’s the spirit governing this polished production, where everything from the actors’ faces (and abs) to the purple wine bottles lined up as a backdrop looks pretty. And as if to guarantee audiences get swept up in the feeling, the show concludes at a key moment in Jada and Dallas’s story, with a needle drop that perfectly captures its romance and poignancy.
Table 17 runs through Sept. 29 at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space (511 W. 52nd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, at 8 p.m. Friday, and at 8:30 p.m. Saturday, with matinees at 3 or 4:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday; for tickets and more information, visit mcctheater.org.
Playwright: Douglas Lyons
Director: Zhailon Levingston
Sets: Jason Sherwood
Costumes: Devario D. Simmmons
Lighting: Ben Stanton
Sound: Christopher Darbassie
