“It may seem like a modest show,” the journalist Donald Hutera recently wrote of This Bitter Earth, “but it has real resonance.” A small play—just two actors—performed in a small theater, it’s directed by the Pose actor Billy Porter, fresh off his role as the Emcee in the West End revival of Cabaret. The themes, from class to race to sexuality, are serious. The play was written in 2017 by Harrison David Rivers, and its central conflict is sparked when Neil, a wealthy, white, Black Lives Matter activist, accuses his boyfriend Jessie, an introverted Black playwright from the Midwest, of political apathy. Time and place? The years 2012 to 2015, and New York City and Minnesota (where Rivers lives). —Jeanne Malle