Lyons, Douglas (Actor)

The Tony winner leads a top-notch cast in Zhailon Levingston’s alluringly designed production of Douglas Lyons’s hopeful new play.There are certain anxieties you learn to live with as an avid follower of New York theater, and one of them is this: the most extraordinary artists making work for the stage might at any second be whisked off to the more lucrative world of TV and film, never to return.I have had this simmering worry about Kara Young for a few years, and ever since she won a Tony Award in June for her impeccable comic performance in “Purlie Victorious,” the threat level has seemed high. As the fall season begins, though, we are still in luck.Off Broadway, at MCC Theater, Young is channeling her extraordinary charm, and her silent-screen-star expressiveness, into a new romantic comedy, Douglas Lyons’s “Table 17.” An 85-minute romp, it wears its belief in true love — and in theater — rather fetchingly on its archly posed sleeve.Young plays the restlessly single Jada, who tossed her therapist’s cautious advice about her former fiancé out the window the instant he called and invited her to dinner. It’s been seven years since they met at a nightclub and two years since their painful split. Of course she doesn’t want him back — unless he admits to wanting her back, in which case she would be willing to concede, eventually, that the longing is intensely mutual.“From our first silly night on the dance floor, he had me,” she reminisces to the audience as she tries on one possible outfit for their reunion. “And I just knew I had found my person.”Disclaimer to rom-com haters: “Table 17” is not for you. It is, however, for a lot of us — fans of the genre and anyone to whom theater of late has felt more arduous than entertaining. This is a play that wants you to have an amusing, untaxing evening out, and everything about Zhailon Levingston’s alluringly designed production, with its top-notch cast of three, is calibrated in service of that aim.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More