Review: ‘When We Are Found’ at Penumbra rows fiercely into the misty past

You might call Donja R. Love’s new play the afterlife of a sigh.

“When We Are Found” is about a man in a small boat who’s lost at sea and alternately frightened and comforted by fever dreams. But while Love’s hero would easily fit in “The Life of Pi,” who also needs faith and spirituality to survive, his quest extends the timeline.

For the main character in “Found” plumbs the gaping aches and personal triumphs of ancestral memory.

A poetic two-hander that’s now up in a powerfully acted premiere at Penumbra Theatre, “Found” is suffused with metaphors and West African symbols. It orbits a figure named the Seeker (Halin Moss) who interacts with others named the Fish and the Dirt, the Sun and the Moon — all played by Anthony Adu in a succession of Gregory Horton’s colorful costumes — on his uncertain journey to reunite with a loved one.

With its vivid imagery, “Found” can easily fall into a muddle of abstraction. That it feels visceral and grounded is a credit to Leslie Parker’s joyful choreography and Lamar Perry’s muscular staging. Perry has characters enter loudly and forcefully through the audience, adding to the show’s immediacy, intimacy and surprise.

“Found” continues Love’s historic queries at Penumbra. Two years ago the playwright interrogated the slavery subconscious in “Sugar in Our Wounds” at the St. Paul playhouse, showing two gay Black men finding freedom in love in the era of bondage.

With “Found,” Love situates two queer lovers further back. For the hourlong one-act is about a trip from the Americas to West Africa as the Seeker reverses and relives the Middle Passage.

“Found” has a transporting set by scenic designer Nicholas Ponting, whose nautical expanse is bathed in Sammy Webster’s blue lighting scheme and saturated with waves by projection designer Miko Simmons.

Both charismatic and compelling, Adu and Moss build their characters with intensity and verve. Adu has the wider range of roles and imbues each with a distinct physicality and energy. His Sun, for example, is fresh and zesty while his Fish, in a blue, scaly get-up, is full of sass.

Innocent and unknowing, Moss’ Seeker pushes along on found hope and scrappy dreams. The actor imbues his lead character with a winning joy, suggesting that faith and feeling can offer as much fuel as food.

“Found” unfolds in a mélange of evocative imagery, dance and pungent poetry. In the first few minutes of action there are no words at all, just ebullient movement as the two men bound onstage and relish each other’s company.

But then the weather changes and an electrical storm tears them asunder. Thus begins the quest for an epic reunion.

Lyrical and rhythmic, Love’s writing is strong for much of the play. But the playwright loses clarity and the script wobbles near the end as the Seeker ends his voyage and Perry searches for a fitting gesture to encapsulate the show.

Still, “Found” is a noble and worthy effort, and Love joins a conversation about the Middle Passage that James Weldon Johnson, in “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” described in sore poetry: “we have come over a way that with tears has been watered, /we have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.”

Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has argued that an acknowledgment of such trauma and a reclamation of memory is necessary to heal historic wounds.

Love has answered both writers in his way. For “Found” may be a work in the most ephemeral of art forms, but it’s still a testament to the long love of steely souls.

When: 7:30 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 2 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., 4 p.m. Sun. Ends May 18.

Where: Penumbra Theatre, 270 N. Kent St., St. Paul.

Tickets: $45. 651-224-3180 or penumbratheatre.org.