But Rashad has another surprise, tickets to a benefit concert organized by Kashif (think Chance the Rapper, but awful). Genesis refuses to go. As she’s told Rashad before, she doesn’t like Kashif’s music; it’s misogynistic. When Rashad insists they attend, she tells him that she knew Kashif in college, and that he raped her friend. Rashad, who sees Kashif as a champion of black men, insists that Genesis give him “the benefit of the doubt.” But of course, as Genesis then reveals, there is no friend. Kashif attacked her. Rashad walks backs his defense, too late.
To make Rashad less terrible, Ms. Webb has saddled him with not one but two back stories about wicked women, one eye-rollingly tragic. If this distributes sympathies more evenly (as does Mr. Belcher’s charisma), it skids awfully close to false balance. But it allows the play to skewer #NotAllMen counterarguments: Yes, Rashad is a two-time victim and not an aggressor, but Genesis will show him that in the larger conversation about sexual assault, that may not matter. Ms. Webb also neatly demolishes the “as a father of a daughter” rhetoric, with Genesis saying, “If I didn’t have a father, son or man, I would care about black men who die in the street.”
These late conversations are when the “The Light” becomes its most visceral, but also its most schematic. Ms. Webb writes great lines and great one-liners, but they don’t always sound like spontaneous back-and-forth. The characters matter less than the arguments. If that’s a questionable trade-off, the debate is compelling and sometimes complicated, especially when Ms. Webb brings us to the intersection of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. But to work against the argumentation, the director, Logan Vaughn, pushes the actors into extremes of anguish, cascades of tears and cortisol that leave them sodden and still palpably upset at the curtain call.
This is a tear-struck thesis play, proposing (with echoes of Zora Neale Hurston) that, as Genesis says, “black women are at the bottom of virtually everything in society,” their labor undervalued, their hurt unrecognized. They deserve to be heard and seen and believed, not because they are someone’s wife or mother or daughter, but because they are human beings.
And if the ending of “The Light” is ambiguous it still allows — crucially — for the possibility that after assault, love is still attainable and deserved. Genesis needs “some light. Just a little bit of light in all this darkness.” She may still get it.
