Review: Azuka Theatre's 'Lights Rise on Grace'

'Lights Rise on Grace" begins with a meet-cute: Grace (Bi Jean Ngo), a 16-year-old high school girl who is shy and socially inept - apparently, from what we're told, because she is Chinese - meets Large ( Ashton Carter), an African American boy, also in her high school. Their sweet meeting turns into many, which turn into a love affair, violently disapproved of by both the black and the Chinese communities. Romeo and Juliet are invoked.

One day, Large fails to meet Grace; she feels abandoned and betrayed, and it will turn out he's in prison, apparently for beating his brother into a wheelchair. All these apparentlys indicate just how much we're to take on faith in this implausible, illogical drama presented by the Azuka Theatre.

In jail, Large meets Riece (Keith J. Conallen) and they meet cute, repeating the same words, with Large now the inept, fearful one. All the predictable prison events occur: Large is beaten up, Riece protects him, and a friendship develops that becomes a love affair. It will turn out that years later, Large will blame Riece for having "converted" him to homosexuality. Later, the play will trot out every cliché about the transformative power of babies, reaching the thundering conclusion that "you need to be a man to raise a man," as an explanation for Large's abandoning Grace once again, after expressing his wish for his son: "I hope you don't end up like me." This is apparently a comment on his sexual inclinations rather than on his murderous violence.

The play is full of misleading repetitions and character contradictions that confuse. The self-consciously theatrical devices - of characters directly narrating to the audience, of standing silently by while other characters speak, of shifting between past and present - become tedious and pointless: This is a play that might be better served by straightforward realistic staging. The actors, especially the always impressive Conallen, do what they can with the material, although both Ngo's and Carter's fake accents - each actor plays multiple characters - are hard to understand.

If one didn't know that Azuka "loves outsiders" as Kevin Glaccum's director's note says, Chad Beckim's play would seem to be both homophobic and racist. Also, classist, as everybody's poor, which apparently (yet again) means all families are cruel and abusive to their children. This judgmental play seems to endorse the prison mantra both men learn: "Admit, take the blame, apologize."

The only set (designed by Colin McIlvaine) is a series of sliding chain-mail curtains, an unsubtle suggestion of the urban prisons these characters live in.

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Lights Rise on Grace

Presented by Azuka Theatre at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., through Nov. 22.

Tickets: $30.

Information:  215-563-1100 or www.azukatheatre.orgEndText