Sick, old, and tired, Alfred pushes most people away. But he's maintained a long-term relationship with Lillie. It helps that Lillie only pipes up when Alfred is in the mood to listen. Lillie, you see, is a vintage 1960s phonograph console, and she sounds a lot like Nat King Cole when she does give forth. Nat King Cole, Alfred says, can "answer all the questions in the world."
Kwame Kwei-Armah's play Let There Be Love takes its title from a Cole recording, a mildly up-tempo song of qualified optimism. Pretty much the same can be said of the play that ACT has appealingly mounted at the Geary Theater, and it's a comfortable introduction to a playwright who has developed a reputation in his native London for socially charged plays that often confront the black immigrant's status in the UK. That is certainly one of the dynamics at work in Let There Be Love, but it is nearly a red herring in a play that is fundamentally about forgiveness.
Kwei-Armah's parents emigrated to England from Grenada, a former British colony in the Caribbean, and it's also where the character Alfred was born and raised before he and his wife moved to begin a new life in the old world. That new life fell to pieces years ago, with his wife abandoning him and only one of his two daughters maintaining the merest shred of a testy connection. Despite his verbal abuse (he repeatedly calls her a "pussy hole"), she arranges for a caregiver to check in on him several days a week. And then the play quickly enters odd-couple territory, where the road forward is pretty much as you'd expect.
Alfred isn't about to suffer a stranger in his house, let alone an English-mangling chatterbox recently arrived from Poland. "How long you been thieving English jobs, Ms. Polish?" asks Alfred, who must have faced the same questions decades before. But Maria is pretty much immune to his insults, and the therapeutic bonding we know will develop begins when Maria expresses an interest in Lillie, the gramophone. "First thing I ever bought in England," boasts Alfred before resuming a cussedness that is no match for Maria's blithely insistent ministrations.
There's a too-good-to-be-true trajectory in Alfred's arc toward reclaimed happiness, but the play is still capable of inducing smiles. Maria believes in retail therapy, with Ikea as her Freud, and Alfred becomes a convert after she drags him to an Ikea store. In addition to this sort of idiosyncratic quirk, Kwei-Armah also playfully makes points with language and cultural chasms that begin to shrink.
Carl Lumbly solidly inhabits the bitter, ailing Alfred, and the performance provides a potent contrast to the happier Alfred that is gradually coaxed out. Greta Wohlrabe has infectious charm as Maria, while Donnetta Lavinia Grays believably seems ready to explode with bottled-up rage �" when she isn't exploding with the unbottled sort. Director Maria Mileaf has staged the play with room for both passion and compassion to effectively intertwine.
But some of the language can get lost on its way to the audience. The Caribbean cadences that Lumbly and Grays employ in the their rapid-fire father-daughter arguments, at least for me, left some of the dialogue in the dust. It's not a problem when Alfred and Maria are in conversation, at least in part because things must slow down as Maria searches for a word in English, or Alfred must come up with an explanation. "This word 'fuck' is bad word in English, no?" asks Maria, pronouncing it more like "fook." "Then why you use?" To which Alfred succinctly replies, "It brings a wonderful focus and clarity to my sentences."
Let There Be Love will run at the Geary Theater through May 3. Tickets are $20-$105. Call (415) 749-2228 or go to act-sf.org.