THE HANGOVER REPORT – Jordan E. Cooper’s speculative AIN’T NO MO’ uses unforgiving satire to crack open the Black experience

Jordan E. Cooper in his own play “Ain’t No Mo’” at the Belasco Theater (photo by Sara Krulwich).

This past week, Jordan E. Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo’ opened on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre. The work was previously seen Off-Broadway in 2019 at the Public Theater. The biting satire on the Black experience – comprised of a series of sketches tied together by the speculative premise of an impending mass exodus of Black Americans to Africa – arrives on the Great White Way at a time when our country’s reckoning with its racial problems has reached a boiling point. Suffice to say, the play lands on the Main Stem (pun intended) more urgent than ever.

In structure, Cooper’s play is segmented into four distinct sketches depicting a number of scenarios, namely a talk show gone awry, a trip to to an abortion clinic, a bougie family get together, and the somber emptying of a penitentiary. Dispersed throughout are scenes at the airport where a gate agent – played in drag with wicked glee by Cooper himself – prepares for the last “exodus” flight back to Africa. In turn slicing and wildly imaginative (some of Cooper’s verbal flights of fancy are downright operatic), the playwright uses unforgiving satire to crack open the Black experience to mine unspeakable truths, achieving a similar effect as Robert O’Hara’s Bootycandy and George C. Wolfe’s landmark The Colored Museum. Indeed, like those seminal works of theater, Ain’t No Mo’ boldly taps into a place of such deep pain and sorrow that the only action left is to laugh, and laugh hard.

Although the physical production has been expanded to fit the Belasco Theatre’s larger stage, director Stevie Walker-Webb’s staging has thankfully retained the intensity that marked his Off-Broadway production at the Public. Also intact is the sensational ensemble work of the six-member cast. In addition to Cooper’s caustic performance as Peaches the airport gate agent, Ain’t No Mo’ features a quintet of expert performances – including an incendiary turn by Crystal Lucas-Perry, who left Roundabout’s controversial revival of 1776 (playing none other than John Adams) for this show – that portray a dizzyingly eclectic array of characters across the play’s five sketches. Collectively, they’re chameleonic performances run the gamut from heartbreak to unbridled hilarity to unadulterated rage.

RECOMMENDED

AIN’T NO MO’
Broadway, Play
Belasco Theatre
1 hour, 45 minutes (without an intermission)
Open run

Categories: Broadway, Theater

Leave a Reply