The production — which features a mutable haunted house set by Riccardo Hernandez with lighting by Lap Chi Chu and projections by Hana S. Kim — begins in a promisingly satirical vein, as the family gathers around the dinner table. Deborah, a business executive, has recently been left by her husband, and she’s doing her best to hold on to the illusion of a stable, wholesome middle-class life.
Little things — like the ceremonial unfolding of napkins and pushing one’s chair neatly under the table — mean a lot to Deborah, played with a witty, fast-fading sitcom brightness by Ms. Aziza. She also insists on maintaining a flow of polite conversation about how everybody’s day was.
What this family says and what it thinks, though, are entirely different. And each member is given a spotlighted moment to tell us what’s really on her or his mind.
For Deborah, it’s the increasing racial insensitivity and sexual harassment she experiences at work, incidents she chooses to ignore as much as possible. “No one gets ahead by reporting things,” she says.
Her policy of denial is challenged by Lauren’s new (and first) girlfriend, the self-named, radiantly confident Upendo (Ashley D. Kelley), an opinionated community organizer who is a figure of both parodied pretentiousness and life-altering wisdom. (It is Upendo who explains the play’s title, which refers to how black women find their own inner, eternal music as they die.)
That’s a tough double burden for any performer to pull off. Ms. Kelley (who appealingly played the title character in Kirsten Childs’s “Bella: An American Tall Tale” last season) doesn’t manage to reconcile the ambivalence with which her character has been written. But she’s a convincing object of desire for Lauren, who is still trying to figure out the specifics of her sexuality.
It is as a lesbian identity story that “Eve’s Song” works best. The show is never more winning or convincing than when we’re allowed to spend time in Lauren’s head as she sorts out just who she wants to be. Ms. Raquel, a recent graduate of the State University of New York at Purchase, gives such a likably direct performance that you root for her throughout, even when her character makes some unlikely emotional U-turns.
