I managed, luckily, to see Ain’t No Mo‘ before it quickly closed on Broadway after opening to ecstatic reviews. After numerous celebrity interventions the show hung on for one extra week and I happened to be in town for its penultimate show. I was floored.
The basic premise for this mind-blowing assemblage of skits is an America which is offering black citizens free one-way tickets back to Africa. Gate Agent Peaches is hurrying passengers along as this particular flight is going to be the last one. If you stay, the law will no longer protect you. (Weirdly that seemed too realistic.) The flight number is 1619, the year the first enslaved Africans were carted to our shores. Peaches might say “Category is… Critical Race Theory Extravaganza!”
The show opens at a funeral for Brother Righttocomplain. In his eulogy Pastor Freeman lets his congregation (the audience) know that all prior grievances from his people are now dead and buried with the election of Barack Obama as President. This evolves into wildly uncomfortable humor delivered on purpose with the intention to provoke. He chides the audience to shout the N word during one sequence. The African American woman in front of me looked around as if to say “you better don’t”. My take was she was warning everyone not just nearby white people. The author, however, seemed to have none of that trepidation.
Every scene was memorably outrageous and bitingly on point. The tone is satire ratcheted up to offend, illuminate and tear down any pretense of tiptoeing around the issues of race. All of that in an uproarious comedy brimming with stinging bitch slaps to a myriad of targets.
Peaches is played by the play’s author Jordan E. Cooper in a memorable drag turn filled with the expected laughs. Not all the energy is clearly black and white. Grays pepper the proceedings too. Mr. Cooper spends a minute commenting on how badly he was treated by other black men in his formative years.
There is a segment lambasting the real housewives and other similar franchises. This one slays. A well-to-do family who has climbed up the ladder to “a deluxe apartment in the sky” has mixed feelings about returning to Africa. They would be giving up a lot of delicious capitalistic trappings and, notably, their homeland was Nigeria. A hidden surprise awaits.
This production is Broadway handsome with colorful and witty technical elements. Steven Walker-Webb’s direction keeps the laughter escalating. When there is a moment of pain, the contrast is vivid and deeply disconcerting.
Ain’t No Mo’ is a triumphant piece of theater. That all of this hilarious mayhem came out of one person’s young mind is revelatory. Boundaries were pushed and the results were riotous… this full throttle comedic attack on our fucked up racial history needed to be absorbed by so many more people. That it made it to Broadway is a step. Let’s see what the Tony Awards have to add. They better not forget the creative force that is Mr. Cooper and at least two of his superb castmates, Marchánt Davis and Crystal Lucas-Perry.
There will likely be no productions of Ain’t No Mo’ planned in the state of Florida any time soon.
Ain’t No Mo’ closed on December 23, 2022.
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