"Fairview" starts off like a television sitcom. Beverly (Heather Alicia Simms) is preparing a special birthday dinner for her mother. But her catty sister is slinking around, her husband may have forgotten the root vegetables, and her teenage daughter is being, well, a teenage girl. (MaYaa Boateng is wonderful in this role).

There are hints that something else is going on. The song Beverly is listening to as she dances around the dining room table keeps switching to something else — and eventually it becomes clear that the fourth wall is not a wall at all, but a mirror that the characters occasionally look into, or deliver a soliloquy to. 

But we are being set up, as the second act makes clear. The show rewinds and starts again, but this time, it's as if we are watching a rerun of that sitcom on mute. The characters perform the same actions (the smart choreography is by Raja Feather Kelly; Sarah Benson directs) but they are overlaid with audio-only dialogue as a quartet of white people watch and critique the show. 

They are good-natured white people. Likely liberals. And yet they talk about race as if it's a thought experiment, a fun idea to play around with, instead of something that is deeply serious and affects every aspect of the lives of people of color. 

I won't spoil the third act which is a subversive piece of theater that will push some people far out of their comfort zones and propel others into a sharp new understanding of race in America. But it does become clear that what Drury wants people — especially white people — to take away from this show is that black people often feel like they are performing for people who are white; that everything African Americans do — even in their own private spaces, their own homes — can come to feel like it's in the context of white people and white spaces. Here, Beverly making dinner becomes a kind of uncomfortable minstrelry, not because it is this by nature, but because white observers see it that way.

"Fairview" (the title is pointed) wants to change that even if only for a few minutes, even if only for a few members of the audience. It uses a device to do that that may be shocking, but it succeeds.

"Fairview" by Jackie Sibblies Drury, choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly, directed by Sarah Benson. A SoHo Rep production at Theatre for a New Audience. Through July 28.