There’s a certain throwback charm to Table 17, Douglas Lyons’s new one-act rom-com that opened Friday at Off Broadway’s MCC Theater, one that recalls the string of early-aughts movies like Love and Basketball and Love Jones whose posters hang in the hallway just outside the auditorium. The delightful Kara Young brings a sassy sister-next-door energy to the role of Jada, an Atlanta-based flight attendant who’s agreed to a dinner maybe-date with her ex-fiancé, an aspiring music producer named Dallas (Biko Eisen-Martin) whom she has recently unblocked on social media after two years.

In separate opening monologues, both characters immediately break the fourth wall to share their mixed feelings about the reunion and to seek advice about their respective wardrobe choices. That engagement with the audience, a fixture of Black communal spaces from churches to movie houses, plays an even bigger role as the play unfolds and the characters deliver a series of revelations that have us reassessing each of them — and their chances of getting back together.

Eisen-Martin and Young are appealing performers, but they keep interrupting their conversation to deliver thought-bubble side commentary that mostly swipes a neon-bright Highlighter to what we already know. One wishes that Lyons and director Zhailon Levingston had trusted the cast and the material for the audience to register both their ardor and their ambivalence without all the sit-com flourishes.

The real standout of the show, which runs just under 90 minutes, is Michael Rishawn who seamlessly morphs into a handful of secondary roles that could not be more different from each other. The sharpest is a decidedly gay shade-throwing restaurant host/waiter who rolls his eyes at the straights but whose facade of dismissal is deepened about his regret over his own “chronically single” status. While he also gets all the best punchlines (“No, I can’t pull any strings. I’m not Geppetto”), Rishawn also shines as a buff gym-bro bartender who hits on Jada in a flashback as well as a fellow flight attendant turned rival love interest to whom Jada turns when Dallas gets too absorbed in his career.

Table 17 doesn’t break the mold of the rom-coms that serve as its inspiration, and there’s a pedestrian quality to some of the metaphors that the characters use to describe their experiences. (Does Dallas really have to share how he failed his first driving test to convey the idea that he has blind spots in his life?) But there’s a certain comfort-food quality the very form of the rom-com, and you’ll find yourself rooting for this lovesick, commitment-starved couple to succeed. Maybe even enough to shout at the stage for them to make things work.