Red Theater’s Kairos Makes Us Look at
Time and Life from an Unexpected Perspective
Chance encounters rarely end this interestingly. In Lisa Sanaye Dring’s new play Kairos—premiering now at The Edge Off Broadway by Red Theater—a run-of-the -mill fender bender leads to love and the opportunity to attain immortality. The latter prospect raises a myriad of thorny questions about how one looks at both the future and the past, while also threatening to alter the dynamics of other extremely close relationships. All big questions and all beautifully addressed in this often quite humorous and decidedly unconventional psychological thriller.
Gina (Tamsen Glaser) and David (Johnard Washington) are in a slight quandary when we encounter them. They’re outside a mall in some unnamed city and David has just run into Gina’s car. They’re haggling on whether to call the police or just handle it themselves through their insurance companies. It doesn’t take long for the seriousness of their conversation to slide to lighter banter and then become sallies of wit that turns to flirtation. They’re both young. Their dress and speech mark them as professional and socially very savvy, making you smile wryly at their ease and fluency in au courant contemporary American English. She’s white, he’s Black and they seem to click into place like a perfectly matched magnetized set.
Through the sparkle and crispness of Dring’s writing, along with performances by Glaser and Washington that become more engrossing by the second, you quickly feel an attachment to these two people. And under the guidance of Clare Brennan’s wonderfully lucid direction, both actors achieve an authenticity you always relish encountering. They each reveal, through movement as well as word, just enough honesty and vulnerability toward one another to cause the audience to fall for them just as they fall for each other.
Time lapses are an essential part of Kairos and are used to connote advances in days, weeks or months. Lights on the stage go down and then come up again showing the couple, who’ve usually also changed costumes, in a new phase of their relationship. They’re together when they learn of a new scientific breakthrough called Prometheus, a serum that allows people to live forever. It will be globally available, but there are several restrictions to its access. To receive it, you can’t be over 35. You can’t be pregnant. You can’t be too young. And even though you may be eligible to take it, you may not be selected to get it. But they both fit the eligibility profile and it doesn’t take them long to firmly decide they want it.
Although they both harbor reservations about this incomprehensible possibility, it’s Gina who’s most concerned about how the opportunity will impact other people in her life; specifically her older sister whose age and motherhood disqualify her from access to the serum. Death and loss are something they learned very early in life when they lost their mother. As children, they saw how raw and wrenching extreme illness can be. Gina’s worried about what effect this extraordinary bit of cosmic largesse will have on their ties to one another when one may never have to face their own demise and the other most certainly will. Around the world, people are reacting as if this new revelation is either fundamentally apocalyptic or a new renaissance’s dawn.
David’s confrontation with his core feelings about the possibility of living forever comes later. Never enjoying a close relationship with his father, he doesn’t achieve his epiphany until after he learns his father has suddenly passed away. As he goes through the depths of self-reflection that frequently accompanies tremendous loss, he begins to realize how much of what his father did for him, or to him, was driven by love. Realizations that made him think more about what time means qualitatively rather than by its linear measure. Greeks refer to looking at time from this perspective as kairos, and by its very nature and purpose, Dring’s masterful new play compels us to look at it from the same vantage point.
On opening night, it clearly seemed to be working. Casually scanning the small theater, eyes were locked on the stage, anxiously waiting to see what new development might arise that could alter the final decision of either character. Ears listened closely for words that might sway an outcome that looked more and more uncertain as it listed precariously at crucial intervals.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion regarding the eventual outcome. Judging from the passion fueling their standing ovation, most found it more than satisfying. Unexpected and extremely creative in the way it presented its conclusion, it was like being gifted an astounding surprise; one that renews your confidence in the capacities of the human spirit.
Along with a story that’ll likely float around your consciousness for a very very long time, and delightful acting and directing, Manuel Ortiz’s scenic design, in conjunction with James Arakas’s lighting, made for their own form of theatrical gratifications. Simple, pure, perhaps even inspired, together they showed how much could be achieved through a minimalist vision. Ortiz’s stylized tree of life, lit so delicately and beautifully by Arakas, was an ideal ever-present backdrop and a potent symbol of what it is to live.
photos by Wannabe Studio Photo
Kairos
Red Theater
The Edge Off Broadway, 1133 W. Catalpa Ave
Wed-Sat at 7:30; Sun at 3; Sat at 2 (Nov. 16)
ends on May 18, 2025
for tickets ($10-$50), visit Red Theater
for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago
