When There’s A Second Knock On The Door:
Love and Lockup in Furlough’s Paradise
In Furlough’s Paradise, a. k. payne has crafted something that moves like a whisper but hits like a reckoning. Now in its West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, this 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winning one-act plants two women in a fractured apartment and lets memory, grief, and buried rage do the heavy lifting. Sade is on a three-day furlough from prison. Mina has returned home following the death of Sade’s mother, Lashonda. They’re cousins. They’re strangers. They’re mirrors. What unfolds over a single weekend is part ritual, part reckoning.
Kacie Rogers and DeWanda Wise
The structure is deceptively simple. Three days. One apartment. Two people. But underneath the naturalistic shell is something far more intricate. payne maps trauma and tenderness onto a ticking clock. Sade and Mina move through the days like they’re trespassing on their own lives.
The performances make the space feel alive and volatile. DeWanda Wise is magnetic as Sade, alternating between bravado and vulnerability with surgical precision. Her pain is sharp, her humor scalding, her presence unignorable. Opposite her, Kacie Rogers gives a masterclass in composure. Her Mina is tightly wound, the kind of woman who has learned to metabolize grief into accomplishment. When these two collide, it’s not just a reunion. It’s an exorcism.
DeWanda Wise
What truly anchors Furlough’s Paradise is the emotional whiplash of Sade and Mina’s reckoning with each other — and themselves. There’s a moment, quiet yet scorching, where Sade lashes out, not in rage, but in grief twisted into resentment. “I just think it’s funny how you keep acting like we the same, when we always been different,” she spits, a line that doesn’t just cut through Mina, but through the very myth of shared struggle. The play refuses the comfort of solidarity clichés. It demands we sit with the brutal truth: proximity doesn’t equal parity.
Then, almost in the same breath, the play cracks open. Sade confesses to having had a child, a child she’s lost not just to the system, but to time, to memory. “I don’t know where she is now, so don’t ask me bout her.” It’s devastating. Not just the admission, but the way Wise’s performance makes it feel like a knife dragged slowly across the skin of the audience’s chest.
DeWanda Wise and Kacie Rogers
Mina, too, unravels. Her veneer of control fractures as she admits to the hollow performance of her success. “I have become extraordinarily good at making white people comfortable, and I do not consider it a blessing.” It’s in these confessions, these collisions, that the play truly sings — not in the surreal, not in the stylized, but in the jagged dialogue of survival.
The setting, Mina’s minimally furnished apartment, is a character of its own. Scenic designer Chika Shimizu offers a space that’s not quite full and not quite empty—transitional, held together by memory. Cricket S. Myers‘ sound design adds to the atmosphere with unsettling subtlety. The ticking of a clock, sitcom laughter leaking from another room; these small sounds feel enormous, reminding us that even in stillness, time is running out.
Kacie Rogers and DeWanda Wise
Not everything lands as cleanly. At times, the production veers into embellishment with cinematic projections and stylized dance interludes. Against a script this tightly wound and performances this precise, such flourishes feel less like insight and more like Broadway spectacle. The rawness of Sade and Mina’s world hardly needs adornment.
The humor is sharp, specific, rooted in a shared cultural past. Whether they’re recalling blanket forts or mocking Google-era bougie hobbies, the laughter is more than comic relief. It’s memory made audible. It’s resistance in the form of recall.
DeWanda Wise and Kacie Rogers
payne’s language pulses with realism and lyricism in equal measure. Their characters speak with rhythm, not theatricality. The brutality of the carceral system, the cost of exceptionalism, the myth of meritocracy for Black women—these themes aren’t layered on but baked into the DNA of the play.
By the time Sade reads her mother’s obituary aloud and the knock at the door comes again, the play has done something rare. It has carved a space where freedom is not a destination but a mirage. Where family isn’t salvation, but maybe a pause. That’s not resolution. It’s something better. It’s survival—complicated, unresolved, and beautifully human.
DeWanda Wise
In a theatrical moment often defined by spectacle or polemic, Furlough’s Paradise reminds us that sometimes the most political act is to sit in a room with another person and simply refuse to look away. payne’s extraordinary script deserves every accolade, even if this production, with its unnecessary flourishes, occasionally obscures rather than illuminates the raw power at its core. What remains undeniable is the devastating precision of the text and the remarkable performances that anchor it, making this a flawed but necessary theatrical experience — not despite its imperfections, but because of them. The play doesn’t offer clean lines or easy truths, and the production mirrors that messiness, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Yet it’s in that unevenness that the audience is forced to grapple with survival, with rage, with the unvarnished textures of grief. This isn’t theatre that aspires to polish; it demands confrontation. You don’t walk away enlightened. You walk away unsettled — and that, in this moment, might be the most honest thing art can do.
DeWanda Wise and Kacie Rogers
photos by Jeff Lorch
poster photo by Justin Bettman
DeWanda Wise
Furlough’s Paradise
Geffen Playhouse, 10866 Le Conte Avenue in Westwood
75 minutes, no intermission
Wed-Fri at 8; Sat at 3 & 8; Sun at 2 & 7
ends on May 18, 2025
for tickets, call 310.208.5454 or visit Geffen Playhouse
for more shows, visit Theatre in LA
