InterAct’s ‘This Bitter Earth:’ A moving tragedy about love and politics

In This Bitter Earth, a tender tragedy about the intersection of the personal and the political, the playwright Harrison David Rivers takes on two challenges: the depiction of interracial gay love and a restlessly nonlinear narrative.

The play, whose title is taken from a bluesy 1960 love song popularized by Dinah Washington, involves an attraction — really a collision — between two apparent opposites. Jesse (David Bazemore) is an earnest Black playwright, not unaware of race or history, but determined to focus on his art. His white boyfriend Neil (newcomer Gabriel W. Elmore, in an immensely likable performance) is both a child of wealth and privilege and a Black Lives Matter activist. Conflict, as we can imagine, ensues.

InterAct Theatre Company’s satisfying production — its second live staging under pandemic protocols — is directed with care and precision by Tyrone L. Robinson, with an emphasis on the easy, often scintillating chemistry between the two politically mismatched men.

In about 85 intermission-less minutes, the action hopscotches around the period between March 2012 and December 2015, and between St. Paul, Minn., (where Rivers himself lives) and various New York City locations.

Both the burgeoning protest movement sparked by police (and other) killings of Black men and women — years before George Floyd’s murder made the world take note — and the growing mainstream acceptance of gay relationships provide the play’s charged backdrop. References to gay Black poet Essex Hemphill, a favorite of both characters, tie the two themes together.

InterAct producing artistic director Seth Rozin has described This Bitter Earth as unspooling “through the jumbled lens of memory.” That idea helps. So, too, do the projections of dates and locations, which orient (and occasionally disorient) us. Still, the play’s complex structure, with its repeated evocations of a single cataclysmic event, seems at least as much a demonstration of Rivers’ virtuosity as a narrative necessity.

On Colin McIlvaine’s set, an apartment bisected by a sidewalk and bathed in Shannon Zura’s purple lighting, Jesse frames the action with a monologue about his problems with balance. The language is poetic, and the malady, though real, is also symbolically suggestive — of the relationship and perhaps the society that complicates it.

The pairing between the lovers, who meet at a New York City rally in which Neil has taken a leading role, is a canvas on which Rivers dissects the pressures on high-achieving Black men. Bazemore’s emotionally reserved, slyly witty Jesse prefers to devote his talents and energy to the theater. But his chosen life with Neil connects him, however reluctantly, to the politics of the day, even if he leaves the marching to his boyfriend.

At times, the two traffic in the expected: Jesse derides Neil for his “white guilt,” and Neil criticizes Jesse for his apathy. When Neil points out that they’re living in a world that still can’t entirely accept that “Black Lives Matter,” it is Jesse who retorts: “All lives matter.”

But Jesse can’t remain permanently on the sidelines (or can he?). And surely mutual desire can’t forever fend off the varied forces threatening to tear the couple apart. This Bitter Earth is an elegy — a deeply moving one — to the relationship, and a dirge about what happens next.

“This Bitter Earth,” presented by InterAct Theatre Company at the Proscenium Theatre at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks St., through Feb. 20. Masks and vaccine proof required. Seating is distanced. Tickets: $35 Information: www.interacttheatre.org or 215-568-8079.