Heather Agyepong and Daniel Ezra in Shifters. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, an intimate two-hander, charts the relationship of Des (Heather Agyepong) and Dre (Daniel Ezra) from ages sixteen to thirty-two, as an adolescent friendship shifts into a tentative romance shifts into estrangement shifts into what seems like permanent distance. The vagaries of sixteen years bring them closer together and farther apart, and they hurt each other deeply, as each battles their own demons as best they can. Lombe’s language can lean toward the generic, but what she, director Lynette Linton, and both actors bring to the table is a sense of groundedness about who these people are and how well they truly know each other. The play is strongest in its most specific memories, its smallest telling details.

Dre and Des meet at sixteen when Dre’s widowed mother moves from the UK back to Nigeria and he’s uprooted from London to live with his grandmother in a small, predominantly white community. Des, the daughter of a widowed local doctor, is the first Black classmate he meets. They’ve each lost a parent and Dre has also lost a brother, but more than their shared racial background or traumatic adolescence, they’re drawn together by a restless, sparky cleverness that each recognizes in the other.

We in the audience first encounter them in the waning moments of the funeral of Dre’s grandmother. The guests have descended on the buffet to take away the leftovers, and Des has a mouthful of pastry. They’re thirty-two now and haven’t seen each other for about eight years; both the distance between them and their deep-rooted connection are evident from the get-go. Dre has remained in their hometown, while Des is on the briefest of stopovers, with a plane to catch back to her far-off life. But when her flight is delayed by weather, she comes with Dre to his grandmother’s house and helps him go through her things. 

Funerals are memory-triggers anyway; being faced with all of the artifacts of Dre’s history is another, and the play jumps back and forth in time across their relationship, giving us the past in vivid monologues and the present in uncomfortably charged scenes. “Time is moving and standing still as memory is made skin,” Des says; they’d allowed themselves to forget what they meant to each other and now it all comes flooding back. 

There’s nothing particularly unique in their story, nor in the intercut structure of flashbacks and returns to the present moment by which Lombe tells that story. She builds the script with an admirable structural crispness, though, using direct-address second person to narrate the flashbacks, positioning us as if we were Des and Dre and then dropping us back into the observing present. And at nearly two intermissionless hours, it’s longer than it needs to be, lingering too long in some of the flashbacks and yet speeding up oddly to get to an ambiguous, suspended ending.

Still, there’s a comforting richness to the characters, a sense of their deep roots in both their adjacent but different Black immigrant communities (Dre’s Nigerian and Des’s Congolese) and in their chosen lives: Dre as the chef/owner of a local restaurant, Des as an artist whose father still doesn’t understand what she does. And the grounded, open-hearted performances, under Linton’s direction, make us lean in to learn more, to know these people better. (I’d trade some of the musing about the nature of time and memory for more worldbuilding around their adult lives.) 

The Cherry Lane, arranged with a bank of seating upstage of the actors, facing the traditional audience, becomes intimate enough to clock every facial expression and muscle twitch, and both Agyepong and Ezra let us read their thoughts on their bodies. Dre and Des’s lives have moved on since they saw each other last: Des is engaged; Dre has a partner and a young son. But there are also still wounds and losses in their lives that haven’t been resolved—and some that are shared for the first time here, in moving ways. 

The clever production design enhances that sense of intense, sometimes claustrophobic intimacy. Alex Berry’s set and Neil Austin’s lighting design fuse into a stark light-limned box, a literal container whose color shifts convey alternately time, place, and/or mood: notably a crisp blue for flashbacks. Shiny black banker’s boxes form furniture and open to reveal Dre’s grandmother’s belongings, pieces of Des’s art, and other objects from their shared history. 

The connection of memory and affection between them is strong, but they’re also moving through the play and away from each other. I happen to have just finished reading Whistler, the new novel by American writer Ann Patchett. And on the level of plot and character, this very American and very New-York-y novel about a middle-aged white woman rebuilding a relationship with a stepfather who left her life nearly fifty years ago has nothing in common with Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, a very British play that’s about the relationship between an early-thirties Black couple and deeply immersed in the cultural nuance of difference between two different African emigre communities. But one thing I always admire about Patchett is her deep well of compassion for and generosity toward her characters: They are people that make mistakes and fail and damage one another but they’re always doing the best they can. 

I felt the same about the couple in Shifters: this relationship ultimately tracks the failure of two people to be in the right place and time to be what and who the other needs, to heal each other’s traumas. But they’re both trying, so hard, to do the best they can.