Blue Door is part confessional crisis, part historical saga -- or part Philip Roth's The Human Stain and part Alex Haley's Roots. It's showing in the smaller Leo K Theatre at the Rep, which features continental seating (no center aisle) and jumpy Rep subscribers. We sat down 10 minutes early and stood up 8 times to let people in and out. Holy crap. Don't let anyone tell you older people are all ruled by the pull of gravity.

The lights went down, then came up on this guy sitting at a desk on an otherwise empty stage. He gets up and starts to talk about how his wife is divorcing him because he wouldn't go on the Million Man March. He's older, refined, a philosophy of mathematics professor. Reg E. Cathey gives Lewis a smooth jazz DJ's bass rumble, but with a stiffness in his bones, a man used to talking, used to holding himself a certain way. Only he's got insomnia, so he's talking to himself, hearing voices.

Hubert Point-Du Jour does all the voices, Lewis's ancestors Simon, Jesse, and Rex, slave, free man, and activist, OD'd brother. They're all talking back to Lewis, who likes to think he's post-race in his academic bubble, and blames his unease at visiting the country on "tree anxiety." This is the kind of play where you later learn that that means someone was lynched. It gets a bit much, calamity after calamity packed into 95 minutes -- you start to think of the characters as the abused one, the lynched one, the Black-power drug addict. But Point-Du Jour never chickens out, and his energy carries the play along through winding stretches of backstory.

While Cathey does some of the best acting we've seen recently -- he's completely convincing, muttering ruefully, arguing with his past, snarling at imaginary accusers -- the play's author, Tanya Barfield, hasn't given him enough math philosophy for it to stick. Lewis's philosophy is all soundbites, his book on the repudiation of time just a prop to show us how his denial of his past has shaped his outlook on life. Yet a scene where Lewis, at a tea party, surrounded by white professor's wives, heads down the rabbit hole of self-consciousness -- trying to react to how he imagines they see him -- and gets asked for the "black" perspective, is worth the price of admission. Cathey brings the whole party to life, takes us inside Lewis's head, makes us see it -- all alone.

Barfield's off-tackling a touchy subject. If no one's really going to argue that you shouldn't know your past, there's a lot of gray area when it comes to the difference between assimilation and ghetto culture. Her own concerns seems echoed in the play, when Rex asks Lewis what color his "audience" is, if they aren't white, if a black audience would even come to hear him. That's a tea party question, we thought. Anyone teaching the philosophy of mathematics would be happy to have any audience at all.

Blue Door
Seattle Repertory Theatre
Through March 4
Tickets: $26-$40 (under 25, $10 w/ID)
206-443-2222

(L-R) Reg E. Cathey as Lewis and Hubert Point-Du Jour as Rex in Tanya Barfield’s Blue Door. Photo copyright Chris Bennion 2007.