‘While I Yet Live’: Contradictions galore

Billy Porter, who won every award the theater can give for his star turn as Lola in Kinky Boots, has some stories to tell about his life. How we wish he had decided which one or two to tell. While I Yet Live, an autobiographical serious comedy he has been working on for years, has so many back-stories and changes of tone that his big rich cast — including the wondrous S. Epatha Merkerson as the mother — seems whiplashed from the contradictions. This is a memory play about growing up gay, black and Christian in a Pittsburgh home dominated by lots of strong, vibrant, scripture-quoting women. There is also a man there, his stepfather, who sexually abused the boy for years. And maybe, just maybe, his mother, born with a mysterious degenerative palsy, knew it.