Seattle-based playwright Karen Hartman’s Roz and Ray features only two actors, but this quiet little medical drama in the Leo K. Theatre (running through November 13) is probably the most intersectional show in Seattle theater right now.
Ray Mendes (played with infectious warmth and passion by Teagle F. Bougere) is a funny, black, boisterous, sorta-closeted queer, single father who hates disco and is trying to raise two boys with hemophilia, a rare genetic disorder that makes you bleed too much. “The 1980s can suck my hairy hole!” he says, establishing the era and his sense of humor.
Ray meets and eventually seduces Dr. Roz Kagan (played with wry restraint by Ellen McLaughlin), an older, straight white woman—one of the first in the field of hematology and oncology—who’s pushing a miracle cure for hemophilia called Factor VIII, which clots blood.
