Okay, so. Let me be clear about what is happening at the Harrington Stage right now, because I do not think people are treating this with the appropriate level of seriousness.

Davine Okafor is back on Broadway.

Nineteen years away. Nineteen years of film credits, of prestige television, of being the person you watched on a screen and thought — yes, but imagine her live. And now she’s in previews for What the Water Holds, Kezia Abara’s new musical at the Harrington, and I was in that theater on Thursday night, and I need you to understand: the screen has been borrowing her. The stage is where she lives.

Here is why this matters beyond the obvious joy of getting a Davine Okafor performance within actual physical reach. The conversation happening in the industry right now — the one about filmed productions, about streaming, about whether you even need to get on a subway to experience great theater — is real, and I respect it. But there is a specific argument that What the Water Holds is making from inside the Harrington right now, and it is an argument made entirely in bodies.

Choreographer Kezia Abara has built a piece of large-group work in the second act that I am still thinking about three days later. The ensemble — twenty-three performers — begins the act’s central number in complete stillness, scattered across the stage, and then they move together not in unison but in what I can only describe as cascading agreement: one body initiates a weight shift, and it ripples outward through the group across eight or nine bars of music, so that by the time the full company is moving, it looks less like a dance sequence and more like a tide. The technical demand of that kind of controlled propagation — every performer tracking the ripple, adjusting their own timing to serve the visual argument rather than their own counts — is extraordinary. You cannot film that and have it be the same thing. The live version exists in your peripheral vision. You feel it before you fully see it.

And then Davine Okafor steps into the center of it, and the whole room — GONE. I mean the audience just left their bodies for a minute. She has one entrance in that act, one point where she moves through the ensemble, and she does this thing with her back — a long sustained contraction, almost Cunningham in its deliberateness, that lands directly against the joy of the people moving around her. The contrast is the meaning. She is the grief and they are the continuation. I have been watching theater for fifteen years and that two-count movement told me more about the play’s thesis than anything else in the evening.

Nineteen years she’s been away. The stage kept her instrument in storage, and it is IMMACULATE.

Now I will be honest with you, because I always am: the first act has a pacing problem. Director Solomon Vance is doing interesting things with the dramatic structure — overlapping scenes, the way memory works, the way community grief works — but there’s a stretch in the middle of act one where the musical language isn’t covering for the structural ambiguity the way it needs to, and the audience around me was genuinely restless in a way they were not restless in act two. That is a fixable problem in a production still in previews. But you deserve to know what you’re walking into.

What you are walking into is Davine Okafor performing at a level that justifies the ticket price, the subway ride, the babysitter, the dinner reservation you moved. You are walking into an ensemble doing some of the most technically demanding group movement I have seen outside of a contemporary dance concert, integrated into a musical form like it was always supposed to live there. You are walking into a conversation about what the stage can do that the screen cannot, and you are getting the argument made in the clearest possible terms.

The industry needs to pay attention to what Kezia Abara is building with twenty-three bodies and some very intelligent lighting. But mostly the industry needs to acknowledge that Davine Okafor just reminded all of us why we started coming to theaters in the first place.

Get to the Harrington before this opens. Previews run through the 14th.