A play calculated to make anyone who sees it take the stairs, “Lift,” at 59E59 Theaters, is the debut full-length drama from the novelist Walter Mosley. After terrorists attack a skyscraper, two young African-American executives find themselves trapped in an elevator. The intercom won’t function, the doors won’t open, the hatch is locked, cellphones won’t work and, hey, is that the smell of smoke?
Mr. Mosley’s addictive crime novels, which include the cherished Easy Rawlins series, rely on reversals of plot and unexpected revelations of character. That works well in a 300-page book, less so in this 100-minute play, presented by Crossroads Theater Company. What begins as an entertaining chiller swerves into a drama of self-revelation and then into an unconvincing romance.
Neither Tina Pardon (MaameYaa Boafo), a business analyst, nor Theodore Southmore (Biko Eisen-Martin), known as Big Time, who works in strategic planning, is particularly good in a crisis. Tina risks their lives so as to relieve herself outside the elevator car; Theodore has bouts of moaning and gibbering. “I’m worried,” he says, “that any minute I’m gonna fall a thousand feet and get crushed under a ton of metal.”
As their ordeal wears on, they put aside panic long enough for contentious discussions of race, class and sex. But the promise of a politically charged examination of prejudice and assimilation in the workplace ultimately gives way to a focus on personal relationships.
Even if you can’t really believe in their characters, Ms. Boafo and Mr. Eisen-Marin are attractive and agreeable performers. And Mr. Mosley supplies them with enough twists and turns and shearing cable to make the play’s first hour brisk and breathless.
Then come those genre shifts. Shoddy production values don’t help. The director Marshall Jones III signals scene changes with mood lighting and adult-contemporary instrumentals.
This is no time for elevator music.