TDF Stages

Playwright Douglas Lyons and director Zhailon Levingston discuss their new romantic comedy at MCC Theater

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Romantic comedies are known for their meet-cutes, the just-by-chance way that two people first connect. So it's completely on theme that a serendipitous meeting between playwright Douglas Lyons and director Zhailon Levingston has now led to Table 17, the new romantic comedy at MCC Theater starring recent Tony winner Kara Young at the center of a love triangle.

The collaboration between Lyons, 37, and Levingston, 30, dates back to 2018 when they happened to sit next to one another at a Britton & The Sting concert. They struck up a conversation and bonded over their shared interest in creating plays about Black people that aren't rooted in oppression.

A few days later, Lyons emailed Levingston the first 30 pages of a script he had recently begun, inspired by some of the perversely amusing incidents he'd witnessed at a family funeral. Three years and many workshops later, that comedy, Chicken & Biscuits, opened on Broadway. It lasted less than two months, but the next season Chicken & Biscuits became the second most produced play in the country.

That was a triumph for its creators, both of whom started out as actors. Lyons, who grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, has a BFA in musical theatre performance from The Hartt School at the University of Hartford. Levingston, a native of Shreveport, Louisiana, earned his BFA from the AMDA College of the Performing Arts in Los Angeles. But they've both found that writing and directing, respectively, allows them to tell the kinds of stories they want to tell in the way they want to tell them.

"Auditioning, not getting the job can be heartbreaking," says Lyons, who has performed on Broadway in The Book of Mormon, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and Parade. "Writing gave me something that the industry couldn't take away from me. There's always a blank page and no one can stop me from doing that." Levingston shares a similar perspective. "I just feel that me as a communicator comes out more effectively as a director, and what I'm trying to do has more impact in the world."

Since the American theatre too frequently centers Black trauma, Lyons and Levingston counter that by leaning in to Black joy. Earlier this summer, Lyons debuted a comedy at the Diversionary Theatre in San Diego called Pure Glitter: A new play for the Gays that celebrates chosen family, and Levingston co-directed the Perelman Performing Arts Center's acclaimed reimagining of Cats: "The Jellicle Ball", which resets Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical on NYC's queer Ballroom scene.

Their new collaboration is in keeping with their brand. The ingredients for Table 17 started to come together when Lyons couldn't figure out how to move forward with his new play, which was inspired by a series of Instagram videos about exes discussing their failed relationships. He called Levingston to pick his brain. As they talked, Levingston shared a story about a past romance in which he ended up as the odd man out in a love triangle. And that, Lyons says, "gave me a road map."

Table 17 opens with former lovers Jada (Young) and Dallas (played by Young's real-life partner, Biko Eisen-Martin) preparing to meet for drinks two years after their bad breakup. The rest of the play toggles between their testy but very funny reunion and the trying events that led to their split. Michael Rishawn portrays a haughty maître d' in the present as well as the man who came between them in the past.

Young joined the project shortly after its initial reading at New Works Provincetown last summer, and Lyons and Levingston are delighted to be working with her on a play that shows off her considerable comedic chops.

"Like everyone else in the city, I loved what she did in Purlie Victorious," says Levingston about Young's hilarious Tony-winning performance in last season's revival of Ossie Davis' satire about racism set in the pre-Civil Rights-era South. "I was curious about giving her the opportunity to flex those muscles in a way that is much closer to someone you might be in line with at Target right now."

At first glance, Table 17 may appear to be a conventional rom-com with characters that could be played by actors of any background. But Lyons and Levingston have embedded cultural signifiers throughout that identify them as a Black couple, from the hair bonnet Jada wears in one scene to the playful use of the N-word. "It is a universal love story," says Lyons. "But I do want to honor the fact that Black folks have a very specific vernacular in the way that we relate."

Yet Table 17 sidesteps the tropes that are so often required of Black plays, and that's by design. "There's an inherent racism in the expectation of what Black bodies are supposed to do on stage," says Levingston. "They're either there to fix something about the world or to teach audiences that aren't Black something. But these characters are just trying to fix themselves."

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