A stripped-down Afro-British love story expands the Black Love canon  

 

My dear friend, Gabby, who I met on my first day of college and is extremely smart, is in love with Love Island. The show airs for an hour for 6 days each week. Miss a day and you’ll feel woefully behind the endless online discourse — there are fan TikToks (Gabby makes recap videos), cast-off podcasts, and YouTube live streams of viewer reactions. I caught the last few episodes and the finale when Gabby came to visit and was stunned when during a grocery store-themed challenge to “prepare the couples for the real world”, they transferred slimy foods like baked beans, pickled eggs, and ketchup onto a scale using only their mouths. I felt disgruntled when I saw the women arrive to their final dates in full glam, softly curled hair, and ball gowns while the men showed up in the same shorts and shirts they wear all day. And I rolled my eyes so hard they almost got stuck listening to a conversation between two cast members who’d been dating for the entire 6 week run and the convo never went deeper than pizza toppings. I cannot understand what thinking people see in the program. Absolute gobbledy-gook brain rot framed by technicolor backgrounds and draped in the veneer of natural human beauty. 

 

This is not love! I rankled, tsk-tsking at the millions of people who tune in for an hour, 6 days a week, and cast votes for which couples they stan (or hate) the most. Apparently, I’m in the “stush” minority — the show is a global hit, it’s ballooned to 25 international spin-offs since the original UK season in 2005. I’d be open to changing my mind if they changed the cast — I want to see grown women who understand that being called “go with the flow” and “resilient” is not a compliment. Change the challenges, too. Make the men plan the dates. Replace mouth-to-mouth baked beans with the sorts of things that really test romantic relationships: distance, career, personal growth, loss. As for the tropical vistas in the background, those can stay. 

 

 

Another UK export has landed in the US this summer, but this one offers a vision of romantic love with a reasonable thread of realism. Shifters, a West End hit by Congolese-British playwright Benedict Lombe, will run at Cherry Lane Theatre through August 30. Cherry Lane is the oldest continuously run-ing Off-Broadway theater in New York. It was a farm silo for about 100 years before it became a theatre in 1923, but it’s been recently purchased and renovated by the film company A24. Now, you can feel the money ooze out of the brick walls. Some of the updates were genius. Each of the 167 seats features a dual cup/umbrella holder that should be mandatory city-wide (!!!). Plus, there’s an Instagrammable cherry red double door poised for a social media takeover and a full coffee bar that could generate foot-traffic on non-show days. While aesthetics soar, logistics flounder. The designers did not anticipate 167 theater-goers’ lavatory needs. The loo line coiled so far around the lobby they had to hold the start of the show. (Shifters is an hour and 40 minutes with no intermission.)

 

Once underway, we meet 34-year old Dre at his late grandmother’s repast. He admits to distracting his mind with the buffet while his heart watches the door. Then we see Des arrive — as an adult at the repast, and again as a high school classmate. We’re transported back and forth in time via a stripped down set. Suspended tube lights, hanging from the ceiling at various angles like abstract icicles, frame the stage and change colors to signal a time shift. The lights take us back to Des and Dre in their high school English class, and at the debate club he begged her to join. He used the clever guise of needing her sassy, always right disposition to win the debate tournament’s cash prize, but Des can see as well as the audience does that he really just wants to spend more time with her. The rhythm and rationale of debate continues throughout the show as it ping pongs through the vignettes that comprise their love story. We see nearly everything between the initial teenaged meet-cute and their re-encounter as young adults, with wholly separate lives, in their old neighborhood. The question at hand, rendered slightly ironic since Des is short for Destiny, is fate: how much of what you choose really matters if you chose it already? 

 

 

The premise will be familiar to anyone who’s ever fallen deeply in love, and doubly so if that love started young. This is the thought experiment of what it would have taken for that love to have worked against all odds. The obstacles in Dre and Destiny’s way are the ones you’d expect: attending different colleges, pursuing a career that requires you to move, healing mother wounds, not feeling brave enough to say how or what you’re really going through. Each of those is enough to stop a young love in its tracks, Destiny and Dre have to face it all. At times, the hard parts felt repetitive, like when Destiny tries and fails to explain how a childhood sexual trauma ate away at her relationship with her father and leaves her feeling distant. (The play didn’t include graphic retellings, but a content warning might have been a nice heads up.) The audience hears the story before Dre does, but we have to wait years for her to get up the gumption to share. Dre isn’t perfect either. Though he may know how to calm her down during panic attacks and how to match her slick mouth, he, too, has pain that echoes through his life. In their best moments, they’re laughing and dancing to music — his: Nigerian, hers: Congolese, theirs: international millennial hits by Drake. In their hardest moments, one is crying into the other’s open arms.

 

In this sort of text, the viewer-defined happy ending comes down to the performances. Of course it’s written as a love story but if you hate Dre or find Destiny unnerving, you’ll pray the two stay separate and bury the sparks from their past. You’ll only want to see them together, remaining hopeful in the face of all the back and forth, if you like or love them, too. In a word, Daniel Ezra’s Dre is earnest, delivering a what-you-get-is-what-you-see honesty in a dating world where so many show up as their representatives to hide their true intentions. Besides the black Air Forces, a sneaker that Black Americans associate with dangerous and unbalanced tendencies, he was swoon-worthy. Dre is the kind of young man you’d want for your daughter, the guy you’d date for six months all the while wondering “how did I get so lucky?” (A brown-skinned woman in a baby blue top sitting in the two rows behind the stage cradled her head in her hands anytime he spoke, and cooed anytime she smiled. Since we could see her so clearly from across the stage, she was nearly a third character animating the audience reaction to the performers’ chemistry.) 

 

 

Heather Agyepong’s Des, who transferred from the original London production, is a harder sell. She has to walk the line between the sweet softness we expect from women in love stories and the hard shell made popular by Hallmark films where the post-divorce big city woman comes back to her small town and tries not to fall for the local lumberjack. Most of the time I had a soft spot for Des, but there were glimpses of malintent that gave me pause. When it seemed like she was holding back to spite Dre, my protective urge kicked in and I wanted to climb on stage and “pull her for a chat”. While it’s generally not my place to comment on a performer’s looks, I think it must be said that Heather Agyepong’s deep skin tone and natural coils were a welcome sight in a genre where colorism and texturism dictate which women deserve happy endings. 

 

I certainly preferred this spin on Black love much more than the recent American stage play Table 17, which I felt told Black women to settle for less and take what they can get. (My exact words were Traum-com.) Thankfully, there’s none of that in Ms. Lombe’s play, which depicts an aspirational love connection with healthy communication and no infidelity. Sometimes the conversations were overplayed, cheesy exchanges we’ve heard before “you didn’t stay/ you didn’t ask me/ I’m asking now” but I didn’t mind enduring those to get to the fresh ones. “I let you go/ that’s not your fault/ then why do you still think it’s yours?” made my heart skip a beat as did the measured vulnerability in the skeptical declaration, “if soulmates are real you’ve always been mine”.

 

 

In the final scene, we get the moment we’ve been waiting for: will they or won’t they? Are nearly 20 years of memories enough? Is trying to relive their young love one more time worth rearranging their adult lives for? I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I’ll warn you that the closing moment is a mirror. You’ve lived this story and you know how it goes which is why I predict that Shifters will be just as popular on Cherry Lane as it was in the West End (and then A24 will make it a movie). What I can appreciate about this UK export is its realness. It’s no big lift to love the swimsuit clad hottie when every night is a sleepover, every day is a game, no bills need paying, and your frontal lobe is still cooking. At this point in my life, the most romantic thing two people can do is build a “big, easy, epic love” in the face of the challenge real life is certain to bring. 

 

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟

 

Shifters opened at Cherry Lane Theatre on July 15, 2026. Shifters was written by Benedict Lombe, who is only the 3rd Black woman to have written a show for the West End, directed by Lynette Linton, and stars Heather Agyepong and Daniel Ezra. I attended the matinee performance on July 18 and offer my thanks to Sacks & Co.

 

The production will run through August 30, 2026. Tickets for evening shows are $59 and up.