I went to see Blue Door by Tanya Barfield at the Rep on Saturday night. It was okay—the writing, the performances. None of it will linger long in my memory.

The play concerns Lewis, a black mathematics professor (Reg E. Cathey, clearly at ease on stage and pleasurable to watch) recently divorced and up for a night of insomnia and visits from the ghosts of his ancestors (played by the hardworking—sometimes too obviously so—Hubert Point-Du Jour).

Lewis has lived his life with the constant accusation of being Not Black Enough—by a black student who calls him an Uncle Tom, by the memory of his dead brother, by his white wife who divorced him, in part, for not attending the Million Man March—while the world in general sees him as Too Black (by virtue of being at all black). But Lewis is an intelligent, wry man and seems to live uneasily with, by not hobbled by, this tension.

This is the argument of the play, established in the first scene: Lewis is getting carried away by some kind of classical music (Bach?) while an African voice, singing in Yoruba, keeps interrupting. Then the ancestors come and tell the stories of courting during slavery, being castrated and hanged for trying to vote, and what they think of Lewis: “no matter how many polysyllabic words come out of your mouth, you can’t never escape… being black hangs over you like a shroud. You’re shackled by your blackness.”

Most of the play is anecdotes from 200 years of a black American family (some are amusing, many are sad, many are flat), but the tension between Too Black and Not Black Enough remains—Lewis wants to get lost in Wittgenstein and pi while everyone else pushes him towards blue notes and black history, including the playwright. In the final scene, Lewis has abandoned his classical rapture and is happily singing the Yoruba song with his great-grandfather. It’s a touching image but a morally unsettling way to end the play. Is Barfield saying that a black American isn’t complete until he digs into his Africanness? That he cannot, if he chooses, live on Bach alone?

That conclusion seems kind of… limiting.