The Brooklyn Rail

Raja Feather Kelly’s work can be subtle. His choreography is less about spectacle than it is, as he once told the New York Times, “behavior with the volume turned up and done to counts.”

In that way, his movement feels more artistic, more tailored to a character, and a body, than an audience’s sweet tooth. The work is sometimes such a natural extension of a character’s physicality it feels invisible; in the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop, Kelly’s choreography for the song “Inner White Girl” was mostly excited knee pulsing and easy shoulder sways. Small gestures reflected the Black protagonist’s longing for the unchecked freedom white female musicians’ melodies and lyrics can enjoy.

While Kelly is celebrated for his choreography—and its experimental flavors through his dance-theater-media company, feath3r theory—he is now marking his Off-Broadway debut as a playwright with The Fires, at Soho Rep. through June 16. Kelly, in a piece almost devoid of dancing, is keenly attuned to characters’ movement, and, as a writer, equally invested in their desire to be understood, and as such, loved.

That yearning radiates most fervently from Jay, Sam, and Eli, three Black queer men who all inhabit the same Brooklyn railroad apartment over different years, 1974, 1998, and 2021, respectively. All writers battling a depression that manifests as confining agoraphobia, Jay, Sam, and Eli remain trapped indoors but also in the hellscape of their minds.

Jay shacks up with a male lover whose charm does not free Jay from society’s homophobia; years later, Sam, the lover’s son, discovers Jay’s writing and tries to translate its and his father’s queerness to his unyielding mother; and, just after COVID lockdowns lift, Eli, Sam’s sister’s friend, wants the world to come into his apartment, but only if it will fully see him—the Grindr “fuckboys” who pop in and out provide no such intimacy, and that lack muddies his writing as a cultural critic, and, worse, his self-confidence.

Kelly illustrates three time periods, but not three acts: theatrically, all three storylines happen at once in the same apartment. While there is no musical choreography, this inventive mode does make The Fires a dance: Jay, Sam, and Eli—and the friends, family, and fuckboys in their worlds—all inhabit the same space, gliding around each other, with characters from different decades often sharing the same couch. This lends a poetic quality to The Fires, and makes it something of a ghost story: the past, present, and future are always in the room with you. Jay’s tragic demise haunts the pages Sam discovers, and, later on, Eli similarly reads those musings to find his own star in the constellation of Black, queer isolation that sunk its teeth into the apartment long before he moved in.

With so many ghosts, the air in the apartment is thick. Each man, battling his own melancholy, moves through the space as if through chowder. (When Jay’s successful, straight brother—from Virginia, with a wife, Virginia—enters the apartment, watch how easily he takes up space, how fluidly he moves about it.) However, fleeting moments of creativity or id do jolt the men into activity. It is in these breaths—Jay sleeping with his lover, Sam realizing his mother can’t accept her husband’s queerness, and as such his, and Eli, aglow, on a call with a crush—that the men find clarity. This self-knowing derives from a care, long overdue, they can offer themselves, and that they know the world outside owes them.

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,” James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time. “I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

The men in The Fires dare to grow and self-know. Jay bucks social norms, Sam breaks from the obstinance of his mother’s convictions, and Eli risks vulnerability with men too unafraid to be as free.

Kelly wrote his play in reaction to reading three seminal Black texts in quick succession: Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Eddie Glaude’s Begin Again. Each of those books are, in their own ways, messages to another generation. The Fire Next Time opens with a letter from Baldwin to his teenage nephew discussing the history of race in the United States. Coates, in Between the World and Me, also writes to a teenage relative, his son, divulging how, decades after Baldwin died, racism remains inextricably woven into contemporary American society. And, most recently, in Begin Again, Glaude reaches back to detail Baldwin’s life and then posits how our country may rebirth itself with Baldwin’s wisdom enshrined.

Now, in dramatic form, Kelly shares another story, one perhaps also meant to be gifted to future generations. The Fires was written over the course of a few years; within that time, Kelly has become a parent.

It is through the writing and documentation of marginalized lives, The Fires suggests, that present generations may see their achievements and struggles reflected back to them, especially when the prevailing culture otherwise trivializes or diminishes their essence.

More powerfully, Kelly articulates the anguish of trying to summon the words that properly distill an experience. Kelly’s characters see their selfhood tied to their writing—its quality and perception—and, without a fitting audience, Jay, Sam, and Eli are only shouting into the black hole of their apartment. To Sam, it is a tragedy that his mother finds false serenity in vanilla poems clipped from magazines: they are not only elementary prose and poor distractions from grief but also negate the work he’s done to excavate and express his father’s identity, one his mother denies.

Who, today, in a rapidly changing New York, holds onto the play’s enviable railroad apartment, somewhere in South Brooklyn, where the ghosts who once lived there still meander and try to make sense of their journey? Eli, in the play’s 2021, may have finally connected with his crush. What’s next for him is unclear, but Kelly reveals that self-learning is a communal act: it is gleaned from our interactions with others, and past selves. Eli reaches back to Sam, who reaches back to Jay, who, without an apparent or exalted queer lineage, sees his personhood in something more ancient, mythology. For the play’s men to know themselves, they must also be seen, understood, and loved by others. It is not a necessity Jay or Sam fully received.

But outside Eli’s apartment, birds surely chirp and sirens do wail. There’s terror, and community, beyond. Someone might be at the door, which, like all of us, longs to be open.