While I Yet Live Review

If plays were judged on emotion and intent alone, Billy Porter’s While I Yet Live would be a smash hit. The Tony-winning actor-singer—who’s still knocking ’em dead as Lola, the drag queen with the most fabulous footwear on Broadway, in Kinky Boots—opens his heart for this semiautobiographical drama. And he pours it all out on stage at Off Broadway’s Duke on 42nd Street: a stepfather’s sexual abuse; his mother’s degenerating cerebral palsy-like illness; and her fierce devotion to her faith, inextricably entwined with her very slow struggle to understand and accept that her son is gay and ”God made [him] this way.” He pours out all that and more in the play, which takes its title from a gospel song (”Give me my flowers while I yet live…I’d rather have just one tulip right now than a truckload of roses when I’m dead”). There are Bible verses, dead relatives, Thanksgiving dinners; I’d say everything but the kitchen sink but that’s there as well. Is While I Yet Live a dysfunctional family drama? A coming-of-age tale? A confessional? D: all of the above.