Table 17 Tickets

“It’s as much an event as a play,” says Zhailon Levingston, the director of Table 17, the American romcom which opens at the Kiln Theatre this week. Intriguingly, he adds, "These characters need an audience, and the question it asks the audience is, how do we show up for them?”  Earlier this year, aged just 31, Levingston won the Tony Award for directing a Broadway musical, only the third Black American ever to win the award, which he shared with Bill Rauch, his co-director on Cats: The Jellicle Ball. The show which closed in August was a groundbreaking show which took Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats and joyously queered it by borrowing from ballroom culture. It was a show that was definitely and defiantly event theatre. Levingston’s Tony triumph was a long way from where Levingston began his career selling tickets for Broadway shows on the streets of New York, dreaming of making his mark on theatre.   “I think the idea that our major commercial institutions are a place where a black person’s creative taste can be honoured has taken a while to happen. But I am not here without George C. Wolfe and Kenny Leon, those major folks who made such big strides forward. But it is not just about representation. Representation is achieved when just one of us breaks into a space. I think I am part of a generation which is investigating not just representation, but who are trying to reimagine how we work and how we do it in these spaces. There are so many black directors coming down the pipeline now, and there are increasingly more ways to get your voice heard and work out there, so it isn’t about any one individual being in a particular place in our industry; it is about many of us finding ways to tell new stories, including stories about what it means to make art.”  Table 17, Douglas Lyons’ rom-com about black love and two ex-lovers (played by Marisha Wallace and Jamael Westerman) who, several years after their break-up, come together for a meal at a restaurant, has already found success in LA and New York and offers London the first chance glimpse of Levingston’s work, but surely not the last. Table 17 might seem very different from Cats: the Jellicle Ball, but Levingston—whose production of Chicken and Biscuits back in 2021 made him Broadway’s youngest Black director reckons there is much to connect them, not least the way that they both offer a theatre experience for the audience which “doesn’t just stop at the proscenium or ask the audience just to be flies on the wall, but needs them to be active heartbeats in the room.”