As the first half of the 2022-23 theater season draws to a close, is Jordan E. Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo’ the most outstanding American play of the year? Even though it’s not a traditional play, but more of an out-and-out comedy revue with a devastating undertow?
What gives Ain’t No Mo’ its ineluctable strengths? It’s 27-year-old Cooper’s response to the threat posed by a segment of today’s population, the vocal aggregate calling for the United States to be declared a white Christian nation — and the potential ramifications were such a supremacist goal accomplished.
Is Ain’t No Mo’ timely at this frightening American moment? You betcha, when a desperate former American president calls for a suspension of the Constitution and at a weird moment where teaching the history of slavery is increasingly discouraged.
[Read Sandy MacDonald’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Cooper imagines that the day has arrived when the racist faction has prevailed and the entire African-American population has been ordered back to Africa. All Blacks are leaving on African American Airlines through Gate 1619, the number denoting, of course, the year the first slaves arrived in the not yet united states.
Presiding at the gate, as the very last passengers are boarding, is the comically agitated and blonde-bewigged Peaches (Cooper in drag). Peaches serves as something of an interlocutor, appearing between the several sketches the playwright has concocted to address problems considered common to the black community
The first of these — the revue’s introductory turn — takes place in a church presided over by a preacher (Marchánt Davis), who, not unlike Black priests everywhere, expects congregation members to be loudly vocal witnesses.
The day’s sermon is being given November 4, 2008 — in other words, on the election day Barack Obama becomes the United States’ first Black president. The preacher sees the victory as an opportunity to rally round what, in polite (white?) society, is considered a racial slur.
The preacher exhorts his congregation — and the audience — to repeat, repeat and re-re-repeat the n-word as a sign of a significantly liberating new step for the American Black population.
As he does, he makes a few points. One is that the n-word has a different and pejorative meaning for whites, whereas it can be considered differently in the Black community. A second point nailed is that Obama’s election is a promise that the succeeding skits, while eliciting chuckles, yuks, and guffaws, present as a promise soon lurched back like a carrot on a stick.
The other sketches, unfolding more currently, include one in which Davis is the fey emcee of a television girl-talk show in which the talkers — as often as not attacking one another – eventually turn on a transracial woman. Another happens in an abortion clinic and, sure thing, addresses the Roe v. Wade decision.
There’s Cooper tackling prickly contemporary subjects that often affect Blacks more than whites. It’s clear Cooper has much on his fertile mind and won’t rest until he airs it all, more power to him.
A later sequence visits the home of Blacks resisting the expulsion, their plight not so instantly hilarious but, under the comedy’s circumstances, relatable. What they decide won’t be revealed here, but it’s hardly reassuring.
Where Cooper is ultimately heading involves a brilliant twist that raises Ain’t No Mo’ to award-winning spheres. Okay, here’s a spoiler alert but maybe an alert worth the sneak-peek. Playwright Cooper informs spectators that everything Blacks have contributed to this currently benighted nation will also leave on that Gate 1619 last plane.
Placed in the waiting area is a moderately sized black bag entrusted with glitter that Peaches, as the last to board, is to take with her. Contained in it is this country’s entire Black heritage. What Cooper is implying by way of the black bag – and what happens to it, not to be spilled here – is an enormous jolt to the psyche. It’s a piece of indisputable stage artwork.
Cooper, perhaps best known to audiences for his role on television’s Pose, is the general of this enterprise, but his armed forces are many. Funny as he is from start to finish, so are the supporting cast members, Billed for context reasons, as Passenger #1-#5, they are, in numerical order, Fedna Jacquet, Marchánt Davis, Shannon Matesky, Ebony Marshall-Oliver, and Crystal Lucas-Perry.
Don’t ask for a stand-out. Under Stevie Walker-Webb’s rat-a-tat direction, they’re all equally accomplished, although Lucas-Perry, until recently John Adams in 1776, has quite a showy outburst in a sketch where she’s a prison inmate pressing her reasons for not wanting to be released to the ominous flight.
Other major Ain’t No Mo’ contributors are Emilio Sosa for marvelously flashy and giggle-inducing costumes, lighting designer Adam Honoré, sound designers Jonathan Deans and Taylor Williams, wig and hair designer Mia M. Neal, and fight and intimacy director Rocío Mendez.
Scott Pask is the set designer, doing his usual top-drawer work. His show curtain is an American flag, but it’s not red, blue, and white. It’s red, blue, and black, immediately suggesting the racist depths Ain’t No Mo’ will be probing. Later, behind Peaches and her reception counter is a high wall covered with a drop showing the seemingly endless African American Airlines plane the final passengers will fill. And yes, It does pull away for take-off, so that the country’s Black heritage ain’t no mo.
It’s a lift-off of such immense implications that any American observer remaining unmoved when it occurs may find it necessary to reevaluate his or her genuine patriotism.
Ain’t No Mo’ opened December 1, 2022, at the Belasco Theatre and runs through December 23. Tickets and information: aintnomobway.com
