‘These Characters Need an Audience’: Zhailon Levingston on Table 17
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“It’s as much an event as a play,” says **Zhailon Levingston,** the director of [Table 17](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/play/table-17-tickets), the American romcom which opens at the [Kiln Theatre](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/venue/the-kiln-theatre) this week. Intriguingly, he adds, "These characters need an audience, and the question it asks the audience is, how do we show up for them?”
Earlier this year, aged just 31, **Levingston** won the Tony Award for directing a Broadway musical, only the third Black American ever to win the award, which he shared with **Bill Rauch**, his co-director on *Cats: The Jellicle Ball.* The show which closed in August was a groundbreaking show which took **Andrew Lloyd Webber**’s *Cats* and joyously queered it by borrowing from ballroom culture. It was a show that was definitely and defiantly event theatre. **Levingston**’s Tony triumph was a long way from where Levingston began his career selling tickets for Broadway shows on the streets of New York, dreaming of making his mark on theatre.
“I think the idea that our major commercial institutions are a place where a black person’s creative taste can be honoured has taken a while to happen. But I am not here without **George C. Wolfe** and **Kenny Leon**, those major folks who made such big strides forward. But it is not just about representation. Representation is achieved when just one of us breaks into a space. I think I am part of a generation which is investigating not just representation, but who are trying to reimagine how we work and how we do it in these spaces. There are so many black directors coming down the pipeline now, and there are increasingly more ways to get your voice heard and work out there, so it isn’t about any one individual being in a particular place in our industry; it is about many of us finding ways to tell new stories, including stories about what it means to make art.”
*Table 17*, **Douglas Lyons**’ rom-com about black love and two ex-lovers (played by **Marisha Wallace** and **Jamael Westerman**) who, several years after their break-up, come together for a meal at a restaurant, has already found success in LA and New York and offers London the first chance glimpse of Levingston’s work, but surely not the last.
*Table 17* might seem very different from *Cats: the Jellicle Ball*, but **Levingston**—whose production of *Chicken and Biscuits* back in 2021 made him Broadway’s youngest Black director reckons there is much to connect them, not least the way that they both offer a theatre experience for the audience which “doesn’t just stop at the proscenium or ask the audience just to be flies on the wall, but needs them to be active heartbeats in the room.”
**Levingston** says that his ideas about theatre were strongly influenced by growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and attending the local Baptist church.
“In the church the person with the highest status in the room, the pastor, is constantly giving the congregation permission to validate what’s happening. The pastor will say, 'Can I get an amen?. Can I get a witness? ' I think what I’m interested in as a director is the role of the witness in the theatre, the idea it’s not a passive role. The witness must make themselves known, and if they don't, then they are just a spectator.”
So, while *Table 17* is definitely a play, it is one that encourages the active engagement of the audience both through the way the play is presented—the theatre space becomes the restaurant where the estranged couple are meeting—but also through the dramaturgy of the play.
"There is space for audiences to air their grievances and concerns about these characters, gossiping about what’s happening and countering and correlating the opinions they have with those of others in the room.” It sounds like a lively place.
He’s been delighted by the response of audiences at the Kiln during previews, previously wondering if British audiences would be up for the experience. But they are. As a director, he says that in bringing *Table 17* to the UK, he’s had to operate a bit like a cook. “You have the base food, but it has to be seasoned differently in relation to the audience response, in the same way everyone makes fried chicken a bit differently.”
*Table 17* might be a very enjoyable comedy about two people meeting up years after the last spoke, but for **Levingston**, it is about much more.
“I think it is about how hard it is to stay at the table, but how if you do manage to stay, even when things are really hard and uncomfortable, that may produce another way of being together. The act of staying is a rigorous one and can be the bedrock of what actual love looks like.”
Perhaps in a polarised world, where we all live in our own little echo chambers, maybe there is a lesson in that, not least because the question the play poses is not just about why the lovers are there and what might or might not be possible given what they have already gone through, but also the gauntlet it throws down to the audience: can we be in this room together and have wildly different opinions about what we are seeing?
“I don’t want to give anything away, but there is a moment when something happens to one of the characters, and every night the audience yell at the stage in anger, and then just three minutes later they are showing such care and concern for that character. It is thrilling because I think all the work I’m trying to do as a director is to prove the common narrative that we no longer know how to be in the room together is completely wrong.”
Playing at the Kiln Theatre until 24 October 2026, book your [Table 17](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/play/table-17-tickets) tickets with us today.