A play about love in London has entranced New Yorkers

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.

Emmalee Reed/CNN/Emmalee Reed/CNN

“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.”

当演员 Charity Bedu-Addo 第一次读到《Shifters》的剧本时——这是一部由剧作家 Benedict Lombe 和导演 Lynette Linton 构思的亲密的黑人爱情故事——她就知道自己得到了一部意义非凡的作品。

“我简直爱不释手，”贝杜-阿多在谈到她第一次接触这部剧作时说道。当时这部剧作原定于2024年在伦敦西区上演。贝杜-阿多最初是作为替补演员出演，如今她已在这部曾获劳伦斯·奥利弗奖提名的剧作的英国改编版中担任女主角。“我一路读回家，甚至在过马路的时候都舍不得放下。那天晚上我就把整部剧都读完了，”她说道。

观众们也有着类似的感受。过去两年里，这部剧以其对一段不完美爱情故事的感人刻画，深深吸引了无数观众。畅销书作家、狂热的戏剧爱好者以及文化评论家都盛赞这部作品，认为它是黑人戏剧史上的一部杰作。如今，在纽约，经常可以看到一群年轻的千禧一代观众，其中大部分是黑人和有色人种，他们走出樱桃巷剧院时，情绪激动，一边走一边讨论着这部剧。听到他们讲述这部剧如何瞬间引起共鸣，如何将自己对生活和爱情的恐惧与希望投射到自己身上，这令人感到耳目一新。

乍看之下，《变身者》似乎是一个很简单的概念，我们在《恋恋笔记本》或《缘分天注定》等电影中都见过类似的桥段。两位昔日好友兼恋人，德斯和德雷，在一次葬礼上重逢，他们长达数年的爱情故事在接下来的一个小时四十分钟里徐徐展开。前一刻，两人已年过三十；下一刻，他们又回到了千禧年初的青少年时期；如此往复，贯穿了影片的始终。

每一段时光片段都揭示了时间、成长经历，甚至个人梦想如何塑造我们的人生轨迹，以及最终谁会陪伴我们走过这段旅程。如同这类关于人生轨迹交错的故事一样，叙事并非线性。它探讨了记忆和视角等概念，营造出一种模糊不清的过渡状态，这或许会让人感到迷茫，但实际上并非如此。

艾玛莉·里德/CNN/艾玛莉·里德/CNN

“我和贝内合作的时候，她经常写一些像‘德雷消失了’这样的情节，”林顿说道，他最初委托隆贝创作了这部黑人英国爱情小说。“我们以前总是开玩笑说，这不可能。她写的东西非常优美，但也激励我去尝试。”

“贝内做任何事都非常用心，”贝杜-阿多说道，“绝非偶然。每一个省略号都经过精心设计，每一首歌都恰到好处。” 剧中艾丽斯·史密斯翻唱的《我对你施了魔法》（I Put A Spell On You）那令人难忘的开头和弦，加上循环效果，与剧目开篇完美契合，便是最好的证明。阿维洛·隆贡巴的刚果经典歌曲《卡罗琳娜》（Karolina）、P-Square的《无人能及》（No One Like You）以及斯凯普塔的《太多男人》（Too Many Man）等歌曲，常常伴随着隆贝的创作过程，引得观众阵阵赞许。当德斯和德雷轮番播放这些对2000年代成长起来的人来说耳熟能详的歌曲时，观众们也常常发出赞许的惊叹。

贝杜-阿多说，隆贝同样“让读者很容易就能想象出这些角色，感受到他们的感受，理解他们的层次，同时又让他们保持轻松、有趣和真实”。

饰演德雷的丹尼尔·埃兹拉认为，这部剧邀请我们重新记起那些可能被时间掩埋的过往。“我觉得我们常常忘记，我们人生蓝图的很多部分其实早已形成：我们做的很多决定，我们做的事情，都源于过去发生过或做过的事情。”埃兹拉说道，“这部剧非常真实地展现了这一点。我认为它能让人们重新感受到恋爱的纯粹滋味。”