Review: With Season 17, The Fire This Time Festival Remains Undimmed in Dark Times

The Fire This Time Festival

With plays by Preston Crowder, Donathan Walters, Teniia Micazia Brown, Mo Holmes, Naomi Lorrain, and DeLane McDuffie

Directed by Ken-Matt Martin

Presented by FRIGID New York and The Apollo at the Jonelle Procope Theater at The Apollo Stages at The Victoria

233 West 125th Street, Manhattan, NYC

January 23-31, 2026

Malik Childs (foreground), Naomi Lorrain, and Victor Musoni in Goose. Photo by Maya Jackson.

The Fire This Time Producing Artistic Director Cezar Williams ended his preface to the performance of the festival's annual 10-Minute Play Program that we attended with James Baldwin's assertion, "There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform." As the current federal government openly suppresses and attempts to disappear certain types of representation, Baldwin's words hold as true as ever, and work like that showcased by The Fire This Time remains as vital. As Fire This Time founder and Executive Producer Kelley Girod underscored in her own prefatory remarks, theater doesn't happen in a vacuum, and activism onstage and offstage are not meaningfully separable. For its 17th season, The Fire This Time has moved its short play program, reliably a highlight of NYC's theater calendar, uptown, to the Jonelle Procope Theater at The Apollo Stages in Harlem, where Girod is Director of New Works. In addition to the short play program, which presents work by "early career playwrights of African and African American descent," the festival is presenting screenings of the triptych PASSION: Survival Source Material for the Betterment and Preservation of Our People, a multimedia Black Queer+ theater project using innovative, multi-platform cinetheatre recordings of three plays by Fire This Time alum Gene Powell. These screenings are free, and RSVPs can be made here.

Nikiya Mathis and Kareem Lucas in Black to Save the Day. Photo by Maya Jackson.

Williams noted that race and care emerged as the unofficial theme of this year's group of short plays, and these concerns are clearly at the forefront of Preston Crowder's pointedly hilarious riff on the superhero genre, Black to Save the Day. Black to Save the Day introduces costumed villain the Gentrifier (Malik Child) with a crash of thunder and lightning, but his plans to unleash a devastating wave of gentrification with the push of a big red button soon meet resistance in the form of Sista Steele (Nikiya Mathis) and her pink furry handcuffs (flashes of colored lighting cleverly lend a comic book/Adam-West Batman effect to their tussle). Although her jacket sports an X-Men logo on the sleeves, Sista Steele is a member of the Black Superhero League, which, we quickly learn, is not part of the well-funded upper echelon of superhero teams. The arrival of Fire Blade (Kareem Lucas) on the scene, who left the Black Superhero League (and, on a personal level, Sista Steele) for the (white, wealthy) Great Supremacy League, prompts arguments over community care, tokenism, selling out, and whose problems count as "real" and important as Fire Blade tries to convince Sista Steele to follow in his footsteps. While the play and the performances–Lucas's pomposity, Mathis's retro-flavored cool, Child's starstruck reaction to Fire Blade–are extremely funny, the questions raised are at least as serious as a supervillain attack, especially for those who, as Sista Steele puts it, have long been forced to make "miracles with pennies" in trying to help their communities.

Nikiya Mathis and Victor Musoni in White Diamond. Photo by Maya Jackson.

From the fantastical world of costumed heroes and villains, the second play of the program, Donathan Walters's White Diamond, takes us into the everyday experience of a mother and son preparing for the funeral of a loved one. Andrea (Nikiya Mathis) is scouring the basement of her recently deceased mother's home for the white diamond brooch that her mother insisted that she be wearing in her casket. Andrea's son Hakeem (Victor Musoni) is there to help, but time is running out before the viewing begins. As the two search, a discussion about whether Hakeem's father will show up at the funeral leads, via some intermediate steps, to a disagreement over whether Hakeem's boyfriend of several years should sit next to him in the front row of the church. This disagreement spurs a larger conversation that encompasses the pressure that Andrea feels to do right by her mother, her mother's own admirably unconventional younger days, Hakeem's weariness of "living the family lie" regarding his queerness, and his request of his mother to deal openly with yet another family secret–through all of which Mathis and Musoni's sensitive performances never lose sight of their characters' tenderness, grief, and dignity.

Malik Childs and Naomi Lorrain in Everything But-. Photo by Maya Jackson.

A different kind of relationship provides the focus of Everything But-, by Teniia Micazia Brown, which finds a young woman named Theia (Naomi Lorrain) and a young man named Ezra (Malik Child) hitting a critical inflection point in their romantic attachment. As the play starts, Theia tells Ezra–in a manner that suggests that she can get caught up in her own head–about a realization that she had about why she originally fell for him. However she intended it, Ezra does not react well to what she shares; she brings up his recently having had sex with someone else; he apologizes; she deconstructs his apology; and so on from there. With Lorrain and Child's grounded, eminently relatable renditions of two individuals who came together while heartbroken, the play examines the distance between self-presentation (including to oneself) and actual desire or need, as well as between what someone wants from another and what that person can or is willing to give. Such distance is marked by two different sets of kisses that suggest the limits, whatever the comforts and even joys, of a romantic relationship kept deliberately in semi-committal stasis.

Nikiya Mathis in Clumsy. Photo by Maya Jackson.

The fracturing domesticity of Everything But- gives way to something more surreal in Clumsy, from Mo Holmes. A car crash, suggested by light and sound design, disgorges a young man (Victor Musoni), bloodied and drunk. His vehicle has crashed into the kitchen of a middle-aged woman (Nikiya Mathis) who swiftly follows asking whether the young man is dead with asking him if he wants some food. Although confused, he agrees, and as she prepares grits on a hot plate that he lends her, the pair share things about themselves. He laments the pressure and criticism he faces from his parents, whom he lives with, while she, for instance, recollects someone he reminds her of, describing her unconscious efforts to replace that person in her life, and asserts that, in her experience, the state of "figuring things out" does not stop as one ages. As in White Diamond, Musoni and Mathis bring emotional weight to the back-and-forth between this duo, and when the young man begins to spiral, declaring that he can't deal with what happened and that he would be better off dead, the woman's comfort involves her knowing things she shouldn't, throwing everything into a new perspective.  

Kareem Lucas and Naomi Lorrain in DNR. Photo by Maya Jackson.

DNR, by Naomi Lorrain, similarly includes a late moment that prompts a rethinking of perspective, which it comes to via a fraught nexus of family, death, and money. Camo-bedecked Solomon (Kareem Lucas) is hunting, making poor but extremely funny use of his duck call, when his cousin Nicole, or Nikki (Naomi Lorrain), dressed more for a nice latte than for the woods, tracks him down. The reasons for Solomon's standoffishness become clear as the play progresses, including that Nikki, a queer writer with a successful career, never came back after leaving for college. In Solomon's view, she abandoned their family, and while he struggles to take care of his own family, including his hospitalized mother, Kate, he also violently resents any suggestion of strings attached to financial help from Nikki or her own mother. Nikki sees things differently and ultimately presents him with a difficult choice–but is Solomon right to deny its binary quality? DNR's highlighting of the financial cost of care echoes some of the concerns of Black to Save the Day, as the frictions between Solomon and Nikki echo the disjunction between one's own and others' views, expectations, and definitions of the self that troubles the couple in Everything But-. As these frictions play out, Lorrain and Lucas invest Solomon and Nikki with compelling depth and pathos while they navigate the rocky terrain not only of their emotional and monetary strains but also, and inextricably, the resentments and bonds inescapably rooted in their family and its history.  

L to R: Kareem Lucas, Malik Child, Nikiya Mathis, Victor Musoni (rear), Naomi Lorrain (front) in Goose. Photo by Maya Jackson.

In closing the short play program, DeLane McDuffie's Goose lightens the tone again, its comedically presented critique forming an apt bookend with Black to Save the Day. The play's title refers to a man whom Crackerjack (Kareem Lucas) tells a group of people sent him to them. Crackerjack believes these people–Topaz (Naomi Lorrain), Scarecrow (Victor Musoni), Rabbit (Malik Child), and assertive leader Cap (Nikiya Mathis)–to be protesters about to set out for the National Mall. But is he right or a bit of a goose himself? And what significance does his reaction have if he is wrong? Together, the group creates the sense of different periods (Topaz looks straight out of the Civil Rights Era while Crackerjack's jeans and graphic tee would not warrant a second look on a contemporary NYC street) and approaches to protest and, more specifically here, resistance (the pro-firearms Scarecrow clashes with the pro-education Rabbit), especially as resistance intersects with systemically racist capitalism. The idea of giving the unheard a voice by "claim[ing] what’s ours" that emerges at the play's energizing conclusion offers not only a cathartic rallying cry for Cap's group but also perhaps a guiding principle for many of the characters in this exceptional program of short plays.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards