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Drag race

Theater

After the fall

Gibbons doesn’t stack the deck, with Salif Camara, an aging Afro-centric activist who did time on the front lines of civil rights, and conservative black intellectual Cadence Lane giving as good as they get. Camara has roped off the tiny parameters of the quarters where nine enslaved Africans once lived, and he stands inside it with a bullhorn, demanding that the house be rebuilt as a monument to the grievous wrong in which African-American history is rooted. Lane, a star professor hot on the talk-show circuit, has written a bestseller called The Race Circus that argues that racism has been legally done away with and that African-Americans should eschew victimhood and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Although both characters have passion and a point, each is also to some degree an opportunist out to make personal hay of his position. That Johnny Lee Davenport plays Camara with an uncanny mix of eloquent fervor and hustle makes him the more compelling character. It doesn’t help that Lane, her starchy surety somewhat leavened by Riddick Marie, is in the midst of being seduced by the Republican Party, as unctuously represented by Stephen Russell.

The political courtship is more convincing than the temporary rekindling of an old romance between Lane and namby-pamby white liberal academic Allen Rosen (Michael Kaye), who’s aiding the Camara campaign. And the scenes set in the 18th century, in which abolitionists attempt to seduce Washington-owned slave Ona Judge — the subject of a book by Lane — into what would be a high-profile escape, lack the complexity of the present-day argument. Ona is sweetly played by Kortney Adams, but she and her brother seem more like symbols than people. Of course, history is ultimately unknowable — a subsidiary point of the play. But this House feels less than lived in.

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