A play about love in London has entranced New Yorkers

CNN — When actor Charity Bedu-Addo first read the script for "Shifters" — an intimate, Black romance conceptualized by playwright Benedict Lombe and director Lynette Linton — she knew something significant had landed in her hands.

"I couldn't put it down," Bedu-Addo said of her initial encounter with the play ahead of its original 2024 run on London's West End. Starting off as an understudy, Bedu-Addo now plays the female lead in an across-the-pond adaption of the Laurence Olivier Award-nominated play. "I went all the way home. I'm literally crossing traffic, couldn't put it down. Read it all that night," she said.

Audiences have felt similar. For the last two years, the story has entranced showgoers with its heartbreaking portrayal of an imperfect love story. Bestselling authors, fervent theater-goers, and culture critics alike have all heralded the production as a special chapter in the canon of Black theater. Now, in New York, it's common to see an audience of young and mostly Black and POC millennials exit the Cherry Lane Theatre, filled with emotion as they dissect the play on their way out. It's refreshing to overhear how the play instantly resonates, how one's own fears and hopes about life and love were just reflected back at them.

At first glance, "Shifters" seems like a simple concept and one we've seen in movies such as "The Notebook," or "Serendipity." Two former friends-turned-lovers, Des and Dre , reconnect at a funeral, and their yearslong love story unspools into the next hour and forty minutes. In one moment, the pair are in their 30s, in another, they've slipped into their teenage years in the early aughts, and so on for all of the subsequent moments in between.

Each vignette of time reveals how time, our upbringing, and even our individual dreams shape the path of our lives and who ultimately ends up beside us for the ride. As is common with these tales of sliding doors, the narrative isn't linear. Through its grappling with ideas of memory and perspective, there's a liminality that could be disorientating, but it isn't.

"When me and Bene were collaborating she used to write things like, 'Dre disappears,'" Linton, who originally commissioned Lombe to write this Black British romance, said. "We used to joke all the time, it's not possible. She'd write the most beautiful things, but it inspired me to then try,"

"Bene is very intentional with every single thing that she's done," Bedu-Addo said. "There's no accident. Each ellipsis is meant to be there. Each song is meant to be there." The haunting opening chords to Alice Smith's cover of "I Put A Spell On You," with its loop effect and cued to the top of the play is proof. Awilo Longomba's Congolese classic "Karolina," "No One Like You" by P-Square and Skepta's "Too Many Man" soundtracked Lombe's writing process often illicit approving exclamations from the audience as Des and Dre swap a playlist of highly recognizable tracks for anyone who came of age in up in the 2000s.

Equally, Lombe "makes it very, very easy to picture these characters, to feel what they're feeling, to understand the layers, but also to keep them so light and so fun and so real," said Bedu-Addo.

Daniel Ezra, who plays Dre, sees the show as an invitation to remember the parts of us that may be buried in time. "I think we forget that so much of our blueprint was built before: so much of the decisions we make, the things we do, come from things that have happened or have been done before." Ezra said. "The show does a really good job of mapping that in a very real way. I think it brings people back to that pure feeling of being in love."