A still from Time Is on Our Side depicting Emily Dalton and Jordan Brown.
Emily Dalton and Hashemite kingdom of jordan Brown in Time Is on Our Side. Credit: DJ Corey Photography

This autumn, doors are reopening, seasons are being announced, and tickets are on sale—something previously routine that feels especially precious 17 months after COVID-19 airtight area theaters. If press night for Perisphere Theater's product of R. Eric Thomas' Fourth dimension Is on Our Side at the Silver Stage Black Box is any indication, this season's new normal volition include temperature checks and showing a vaccination bill of fare at the door and seating masked at less-than-a-quarter capacity.

The play opens with a sound montage (by artistic director and dramaturg Kevin O'Connell) that prominently features the cowbells from The Chamber Brothers' "Time Has Come up Today" every bit a leitmotif.  Sitting beyond from ane some other are Curtis (Jordan Dark-brown) and Annie (Emily Dalton), hosts of The Schuylkill River Projection, a podcast about Philadelphia history recorded in the S Philadelphia house Annie inherited from her grandparents. Within, peeling layers of wallpaper and aging plaster reveal the laths underneath. The flooring's disrepair similarly shows layers: linoleum tiles over floral-patterned ceramic tiles over floorboards (just two visual illustrations of the themes of historical concealment and rediscovery by prepare designer Greg Stevens).

Most of their episodes follow a familiar format: podcast cohosts bantering near their research, with tangents and anecdotes that make the hosts' personalities key. But once a month, they produce an original radio dramatization of their inquiry with local vox actors Claudia (Pauline Lamb, who also serves as properties designer) and Rene (Leo Delgado). Thomas is cleverly leaning on the fourth wall here: Not merely is the play'southward opening sound montage the podcast's opening montage, merely when Lamb and Delgado double as other characters, the audience is led to wonder if it is a pragmatic effort to keep to a small bandage or if, since the actors are playing actors, information technology is a plot bespeak.

During a pause in recording dialogue for a new radio drama almost a Philadelphia stop on the Underground Railroad, Claudia discovers an old diary belonging to Annie's grandmother, Gisella (Lamb), that had been stashed in a secret compartment in a music box. The entries are dated from 1966 to 1994, and much of it details Gisella'south friendship with Bea, a fellow schoolteacher. Curtis reads betwixt the lines and suspects they were in love. Annie, despite being a lesbian, has a hard time entertaining the possibility she is not the offset in her family, and despite beingness the host of podcast that dramatizes the lives of lesser known people in local history, she is further unnerved past Curtis' overzealous digging before she is prepare—even later it becomes obvious Gisella and her husband Lawrence (Delgado), a carpenter and ward leader with a penchant for progressive causes and a day planner that is so quotidian it seems cryptic, had ties with gay rights activists of their generation.

Thomas' script is intimately epic, recreating a Philadelphia that is vivid even for those who have not spent a 24-hour interval there in many years, in which queer millennial characters have messy reactions as they notice but how petty they know of the history of gay and lesbian life before the AIDS crisis, before Stonewall, in a city that is neither New York nor San Francisco, when "queer" was still exclusively a slur, when the closet was oftentimes the safest choice fifty-fifty for people who knew exactly who they were and whom they loved. It'south not just a question of whether they take a correct to unearth the past: Can they even empathise it fully? Of the main characters, simply the decidedly unscholarly Rene has cultivated friendships with his gay elders, such every bit the unapologetically campsite and randy Mr. Ramondi (Lamb), from whom he has learned the lost art of cruising. In plough, Rene teaches Curtis in a memorable bit of comic choreography.

As Annie and Curtis, Dalton and Brown create a great on-phase chemical science. Whether through their delivery of on-mic podcaster banter or contrasting body linguistic communication, they chop-chop constitute that the characters are the sort of friends who can and will button each other'south boundaries. Later and then many months of virtual theater when eye contact was impossible, information technology'south a revelation to come across an player like Lamb use her eyes to pigment the feel of an open up space like the metropolis park that Thomas has written.

Gerrad Alex Taylor'south directorial hand is non immediately obvious, simply in that location is clearly an intelligence and artistry coordinating the script, performances, and the design elements, which demonstrate that a small theater troupe like Perisphere is perfectly capable of the 1000 storytelling that makes information technology worth returning to the theaters at this indicate in our history.

At Silver Spring Black Box Theatre to Aug. 28. 8641 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. $16–$32. perispheretheater.com.