Review: Two Young Black Men of Caribbean Descent Live on the DL in Foxes

Despite recent setbacks in some pockets of America (looking at you Florida), as a country we’ve made decent strides in LGBTQ rights over the past 30 years, with 71 percent of Americans now supporting gay marriage. But of course that doesn’t hold true in every culture, no matter what country you live in. Many gay and queer people are still ostracized or risk violence from families and communities if they dare to come out, forcing them to keep their mouths shut while they lead secret lives and have sex on the sly, often referred to as living on the DL (the Down Low).

That’s the case for the two young London-born men in Dexter Flanders’s striking new play, Foxes, now running at 59E59 Theaters. While Flanders treads territory familiar to every gay or queer person who has clawed their way through a painful coming-out process, he also explores the specific difficulties posed by coming out in a religious household with roots in Jamaica, a country in which LGBTQ people can still face unchecked violence if they live openly.

Foxes, however, takes place in the more accepting UK, where Daniel (Raphel Famotibe) has just learned that his girlfriend, Meera (Nemide May), is pregnant. The news has brought shame on Meera’s Muslim family, forcing her to go live with Daniel’s Christian, Jamaican-born mother, Patricia (Suzette Llewellyn), and his sister, Deena (Tosin Alabi). He’s supportive of the pregnancy and wants to be a good dad, but one day he gets into an angry wrestling match with his tightly closeted friend, Leon (Bayo Gbadamosi), who impulsively plants a kiss on Daniel. Suddenly Daniel feels waves of attraction for his “bruda” and decides that he has to tell his mother about his newfound attraction to men. The confession leads to fraught complications between Daniel and the people in his life, and forces him to decide between living his truth and living a lie.

Flanders has taken a familiar story line and given us something that feels fresh by viewing it through a cultural lens that we rarely see onstage. The storytelling is enhanced by James Hillier’s energetic direction and the cast’s all-around top-notch acting. Daniel’s midshow standoff with his mother sets us on edge with two high-voltage performances from Famotibe and Llewellyn, who delivers a slap that I could feel on my own face. Alabi convincingly embodies an independent-minded daughter willing to stand by her brother and call out her mother’s irrationality. May plays Meera with strong, no-nonsense determination, and Gbadamosi, wearing a masculine track suit and Foot Locker jersey (costumes by Renzo Allen), plays Leon sympathetically but unsentimentally — we feel for him even as he tears Daniel a new one for spilling his guts and potentially blowing Leon’s ironclad cover.

The dialogue does, however, lapse into sentimental clichés now and then. “That moment you kissed me … I’ve never felt so alive,” coos Daniel to Leon in a Hallmark-movie moment. Treacly scenes like that can be forgiven when the performances are this strong, but less so the surreal sequences that depict Daniel imprisoned in his own mind. During these scenes, lighting and video designer Will Monks darkens the stage and splashes all sorts of interstellar projections onto the beige backdrop of Erin Guan’s London-flat set, accompanied by Josh Anio Grigg’s eerie sound effects. These distracting interludes, which depict Leon’s ambivalence about his sexuality and his impending fatherhood as though he were Christ on a cross, rehash what we already know. Cutting these special effects would have kept the action tighter — and brought down the run time from its one hour and 45 minutes in the process.

Yet even at its current length, Foxes flies by. Famotibe and Gbadamosi have real onstage chemistry, and you can’t help but root for these two to find a way to make it work — even if it’s not ideal. This isn’t a Hallmark movie after all. It is a story of hope, but it’s a hope tempered by a damnably tough reality: Sometimes we’re more comfortable believing a lie.