Chiaroscuro: A Light and Dark Skin Comedy

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The National Black Theatre production in association with the Flea Theater of the long awaited world premiere of Chiaroscuro: A Light and Dark Skin Comedy has unfurled like a dream adrift at sea. Penned in 2010 by the late Black Arts Movement stalwart Aishah Rahman, the play invites its audience aboard the S.S. Chiaroscuro, a cruise ship for Black singles that’s ostensibly sailing to “nowhere” — a metaphor Rahman takes seriously and exploits with both mischief and gravitas.

The concept of chiaroscuro—typically reserved for the painter’s brush, —bursts vividly into theatrical life. The Italian term chiaroscuro, literally meaning “light-dark,” has long been a cornerstone of visual art, evoking not only tonal contrast but emotional complexity. On canvas, it refers to the stark interplay of light and shadow—a technique used to model volume and evoke depth, both physical and psychological. Leonardo da Vinci harnessed chiaroscuro to breathe life into his figures, lending them a haunting three-dimensionality that transcended the flat surface. Caravaggio, ever the theatrical provocateur, wielded it more boldly, draping his scenes in shadow to heighten the drama, to arrest the viewer with a sense of immediacy and raw emotion.

Both masters understood what truly great theater also knows: that light and darkness are not just visual elements, but emotional registers. In the right hands, they don’t just reveal form—they reveal truth. Rahman masterfully transposes this interplay of light and shadow from canvas to stage, using her richly drawn characters as living palettes to explore race, identity, and the complex hues of personal and collective history.

This is a comedy only in the same layered, bittersweet way that The Merchant of Venice earns the title—a piece that dances between laughter and lament. There’s even a lyrical passage delivered in verse, as if Shakespeare himself were riffing in a Harlem jazz club. And jazz, in fact, is the operative metaphor here: Rahman’s language swings, slides, and syncopates with improvisational brilliance, conjuring both joy and discomfort in equal measure.

Anchored by the trickster steward Paul Paul Legba — a droll and enigmatic figure played with sly precision by Paige Gilbert — the narrative wades into the romantic and existential disquiet of six Black passengers seeking love. The three men each find “the winner’s cameo” under his stateroom pillow, a gift intended to earn a valuable “brownie point” with each man’s female recipient of choice. But this is no straightforward dating drama. As its title suggests, Chiaroscuro is a meditation on colorism, self-perception, and the often unspoken hierarchies within Black desire. There is an irony here in that the play is only getting produced now a decade after Rahman’s death when a play like the acclaimed 2002 Pulitzer finalist Yellowman by Dael Orlandersmith found many venues for its tale of color disparity in the lives of two young friends/lovers going through the growing pains of prejudice within their own families.

Absurdist in tone and sharply satirical in structure, Chiaroscuro evokes the disorienting elegance of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, where a dinner party disintegrates into chaos when the servants disappear and the guests are unable to leave, even days after they’ve run out of food and water. Most of the guests on this particular journey keep asking for a Captain and keep wondering why there are no other guests or crew members. But Rahman’s surreal fantasia is perhaps more indebted to the theatrical lineage of George C. Wolfe’s 1986 The Colored Museum, an episodic, sketch-comedy-inspired mode that allows the play to toggle between farce and fury, beauty and pain.

An Othello parody, hilariously reimagined and painfully apt, emerges mid-cruise, underlining Rahman’s facility with pastiche as well as her sharper aim: interrogating how skin tone, particularly among Black women and men, becomes a currency in the marketplace of attraction. Ebony Marshall-Oliver plays Gina Rose, determined to get married at all costs, including “passing for white-almost” wearing a very wet looking white skin clarifying mask for the bulk of her cruise. Any bare skin revealed by clothing is covered by armpit-length gloves and high taupe stockings and bodysuit. The fairness is accentuated by a very long black wig that epitomizes “raven-haired beauty.” It is only when she gets cast unwillingly as Desdemona in the cruise play that she brings her charade to an abrupt halt.

TL Thompson plays Russ, the well-off suave gentleman that is totally smitten with Gina Rose, or rather the circus sideshow she has become. Insincerity piles on to more insincerity. He may only be interested in her because of how successful she has been in her attempt to deceive. It was once stated to describe the erecting of a baseball stadium in the midst of a middle-America cornfield, but it applies here too…”If you build it, they will come.” Once she strips off the wig and the face mask, he gives a valiant shot to save face (his own face, that is) by declaring he still sees himself with her always and forever. Gina Rose can’t help but assume the position that she can’t be with someone who would have wanted her only because of the lengths she went to to entrap a man. Theirs is not a happy ending unless you consider Gina Rose has learned to love herself above all else and a man like Russ doesn’t need to change because as James Brown instructed, “It’s a man’s world.”

The other four singles are so adrift, pardon the pun as we are mired in ship and ocean imagery. The young stud Nayron (a GQ cover Sidney DuPont) is attracted to the not quite middle-aged Sienna (a very composed Gayle Samuels) who becomes the cougar here because it’s really fun to get that much attention. Normally she does background checks on her men but even she admits it would be a waste of money and time as Nayron is very upfront about his recent release from prison. Sienna could be happy being adored by a young man but she still has feelings for a man who may or may not be the father of her now young adult daughter.

And that man just happens to be on this cruise. Tilman (a totally upfront and finessed Lance Coadie Williams) is that man, someone who has been more on his own pursuing a career in jazz than settling down with that one woman. And like these other singles, he always wants what he can’t have. He doesn’t take Sienna’s neediness seriously enough to marry her, yet he almost stalks the young La Honda Deja Vue, (Abenaa Quïïn) prepared to let the diva wannabe write her own ticket into his life. He may not want to end his days alone but he knows what he wants and it is she. She knows what she wants as well, and it’s Russ. And if La Honda’s looks could kill, Gina Rose would be overboard.

The actors playing the six singles have one very important thing in common. They are exceptional in their ability to let us see beyond what could easily be stereotypes. These are six vibrant individuals who share the heartbreak of being alone…a lot. And this cruise is not a love boat, but a serious commitment. The ensemble, though lacking a singular breakout performance, operates in effective harmony. Together, they embody a chorus of longing — romantic, cultural, and existential. Their interplay reveals a community in quiet turmoil, a people searching for self-worth and recognition not only in the eyes of others but within the mirror of their own gaze.

Director abigail jean-baptiste stages the voyage with verve and sophistication, helped in no small part by Jungah Han’s reflective set — a silvery, liminal space that transforms the stage into a mirror of Black consciousness, fractured and fluid. While the text occasionally slips into didactic territory, jean-baptiste’s production maneuvers through inventive visual language and tonal agility to keep the ship from stalling.

Han’s scenic achievements are matched by the lighting design of Maruti Evans. Evans mines every possible nuance of stagecraft to shine light on pitch black and the very many mirror and otherwise reflective surfaces. Azalea Fairley stuns us with a never ending costume parade for all seven of the actors. From the introduction of the singles all in white as they climb the “ramp” to board the ship, it resembles a throwback to the legendary Soul Train Line, a dance tradition from Don Cornelius’ TV show where dancers formed two lines and a couple (here the individual cruise guests) strutted down the middle space in sequence. It was voguing before we ever used the term “voguing” and our guests on the S.S. Chiaroscuro take the moment to eyeroll and brazenly flirt with the audience. It is hard to keep track but it does look like Fairley uses every offstage moment as an excuse for actors to change into another splendid ensemble.

If Chiaroscuro occasionally falters under the weight of its ambition, it ultimately dazzles with its daring. Rahman has crafted a bold, theatrical puzzle box — part satire, part sermon, part séance — that speaks to the depths and contradictions of Black desire in all its shadowed hues. The play doesn’t just shine a light; it refracts it—casting humor and heartache in tandem. With Chiaroscuro, Rahman leaves us with a final, luminous testament to her unique voice—both searing and sublime.

Chiaroscuro: A Light and Dark Skin Comedy (through June 22, 2025)

National Black Theatre in association with The Flea

The Flea Theater, 20 Thomas Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.tickettailor.com

Running time: one hour and 55 minutes including one intermission