Ryan J. Haddad’s name isn’t the one above the title at the Larchmere Room this week, but his new solo-adjacent form is already rearranging what I expect from a two-hander about inheritance. The play in question is “Bequest,” by Simone Oduya-Fletcher, directed by Marcus Oyelaran-Whitfield, and it is the clearest articulation I’ve seen this season of a structural idea that’s been circling downtown for a while: the generational-transfer play, where one older character hands a younger one not an object but a vocabulary.
The formal claim here is specific. Oduya-Fletcher writes two characters, an aging drag historian named Teddy Okonkwo-Reyes and his twenty-four-year-old nephew Dmitri, across a single unbroken ninety minutes in which the dialogue never once settles into a clean back-and-forth. Teddy talks in loops, correcting himself mid-sentence, revising his own history in real time, while Dmitri’s lines arrive flat and clipped until, somewhere around the fortieth minute, he starts picking up Teddy’s rhythms without noticing he’s doing it. That’s the whole play, formally speaking: a vocabulary migrating from one body to another, rendered as a literal shift in sentence construction. It’s a smart, legible idea, and Oduya-Fletcher trusts it enough not to explain it, which is more than I can say for most plays working this territory.
This sits in a lineage I’d place closer to Richard Greenberg’s generational dialogues than to the queer memory-plays it’ll get lazily compared to, with a structural debt to Suzan-Lori Parks’s repetition-and-revision technique, the way a line returns changed just enough to tell you time has passed inside it. Oduya-Fletcher isn’t hiding that debt. She’s using it the way you’re supposed to use tradition, as a tool rather than a costume.
Where the play loses its nerve is the last fifteen minutes, when Okonkwo-Reyes gets a monologue that abandons the loop structure entirely and goes straight, plainly, movingly linear, as if Oduya-Fletcher lost faith in her own device right when it mattered most to keep it. I understand the impulse. A climax wants clarity. But the entire argument of the preceding seventy-five minutes was that this story doesn’t move in straight lines, that lore gets passed down crooked, and then the play hands you a tidy, straight-ahead speech to cry at. It works as a speech. It fails as the ending to this particular play, because it answers a question the form had spent an hour and a half insisting was unanswerable.
Oyelaran-Whitfield’s direction mostly serves the text well, though his decision to light the loop sections in the same wash as the linear ending flattens a distinction the script itself is making. If the language is going to shift registers that hard, the stage should tell you so before the words do.
Marisol Chen-Abayomi plays Dmitri with an exactness I didn’t expect from the character’s opening scenes, when he reads as merely sullen; by the second act she’s letting you watch him absorb Teddy’s cadence syllable by syllable, which is the production’s best piece of actual craft. Theo Vasquez-Lindqvist’s Teddy is looser, funnier, occasionally coasting on charm when the text wants precision, but the two of them together generate real heat in the loop scenes specifically.
Go for the first seventy-five minutes, because you will not see this particular formal mechanism handled this cleanly again this season, and stay for the last fifteen because watching a strong structural idea lose its nerve in real time is its own kind of education.
