In 1833, London was embroiled over slavery in Britain’s colonies: after a revolt in Jamaica and pressure on the home front, Parliament instituted the Slavery Abolition Act. Enter Ira Aldridge (the excellent Ryan Vincent Anderson), a young African-American actor, to replace an ailing Othello at Covent Garden — and to expose, as the first black actor on that stage, London’s hypocrisies and bigotries. In the beautifully crafted comedic drama Red Velvet, on stage at the Theater at Monmouth, playwright Lolita Chakrabarti imagines what happened offstage at Covent Garden. Jennifer Nelson directs a dynamic and deftly performed production of the play, both an affecting portrait of Aldridge and an acute meditation on the politics and powers of theater.

Chakrabarti bookends that night with glimpses of an older Ira, about to play Lear. He stoops, coughs, and swats away a feisty young Polish reporter (Meghan Leathers). Compared with the aggressive reporter, a tightly wound German stagehand (Emery Lawrence), and his own worried Scottish assistant (James Noel Hoban), Anderson’s Ira is wry, lyrical, loose. His languidly delivered remark that last night’s moon was “like a bowl of milk — I wanted to drink it,” reveals his casual but powerful sensuality. Under the reporter’s questioning, this aged Ira circles ambiguities about why, since 1833, he has never again played Covent Garden.