‘Ain’t No Mo’’ Review: After Great Tribulation, an Exodus of Black Citizens

Jordan E. Cooper’s new Broadway play starts with the kind of roof-raising scene most writers would have stashed away for a big bang of a finale. Pastor Freeman (Marchánt Davis) is standing by a coffin, about to give the eulogy for Brother Righttocomplain, a stalwart member of the African American community who embodied protest and grievances. Righttocomplain’s purpose has just ended, though, hence the funeral: It is Nov. 4, 2008, and Barack Obama has been elected president, ushering in a promising new era for Black Americans.

“Ain’t no mo’ shot down dreams with its blood soaking the concrete outside room 306,” Pastor Freeman declares. “Ain’t no mo’ riots.” The list goes on as he revs up, whipping his congregation and the audience into a frenzy. By the time he asks, “Can I get a Chaka Khan?” it’s impossible not to answer back. Were the show a traditional musical, the scene would have been the 11 o’clock number.

Instead it is the first exclamation point in an evening of many.

Starting on such an expansive note is a bold move for Cooper, a 27-year-old writer making his Broadway debut, but “Ain’t No Mo’,” which opened on Thursday at the Belasco Theater, bursts with confidence. It is confident in its voice, in its beliefs, in its artistry, in its wicked humor and angry pain — or pain-laden anger. It is also confident that Stevie Walker-Webb’s production and the cast, both of which are largely unchanged from the play’s premiere at the Public Theater, in 2019, can handle it all.

As the funeral concludes, we are abruptly transported to an airport, where a gate agent named Peaches (Cooper in high drag, a feather stuck in a hat jauntily pointing up) is on a Bluetooth call, trying to get stragglers to hurry up to Gate 1619: Just as that number refers to the arrival year of the first enslaved Africans in America, the U.S. government is now offering a one-way flight to Africa to those slaves’ descendants — and it’s about to depart.

Peaches, with whom we check back at regular intervals, acts as a link between the vignettes that make up “Ain’t No Mo’,” a structure borrowed from George C. Wolfe’s epochal 1986 satire “The Colored Museum.” (Cooper is also the showrunner of the BET+ sitcom “The Ms. Pat Show,” which he created with Patricia Williams; coincidently, a flight attendant in “The Colored Museum” is called Miss Pat.)

While the segments are self-contained, that flight looms over them all, a statement of simultaneous hope and despair. Cooper deftly shuffles moods and emotions throughout the brisk one-act show, often within the same scene. He is playing with the idea of discomfort, and tries to not let the audience become too settled in either laughter or pathos, but the balance is not always as precise as it needs to be. “Ain’t No Mo’” has an immediate impact, but its biting commentary on race doesn’t leave a bruise: Though I loved it at the Public, I haven’t found myself thinking about it since, whereas I frequently flash back to, for example, “An Octoroon,” another sharp comedy about race.

The most unabashedly parodic of the sections is “Real Baby Mamas of the South Side,” which takes place during the taping of a reality-TV show and features a quartet of guests hosted by the unctuous Tony (Davis, who handles all of the male-presenting characters). The most provocative panelist is the “transracial” Rachonda (played by the new cast member Shannon Matesky), whose real name is Rachel and who is actually white; she, too, is in drag, in this case Black drag, to establish the identity she craves.

All of the women in this scene are pretending — watch them toggle out of exaggerated Black vernacular when the cameras aren’t rolling — but Rachel/Rachonda is usurping. Finally Tracy (Ebony Marshall-Oliver, last seen on Broadway giving a comedy master class in last season’s “Chicken & Biscuits”) just can’t take the posturing anymore and says that Blackness is not something you can just decide to put on, while Rachonda replies that she’s living her truth.

The argument eventually ends with fisticuffs because Cooper doesn’t seem sure how to exit out of the premise any other way. This happens with a couple of other scenes — including the key final one — which start off strong and peter out.

The dramatic counterweight to “Baby Mamas” is “Circle of Life,” which takes place in a waiting room — Scott Pask’s versatile set quickly adapts to a variety of locations. Trisha (Fedna Jacquet) is waiting for her number to be called for an abortion, though it may take a while because the electronic counter is currently at 73,543, which sounds bad enough until you learn it’s out of millions. Trisha is at a community center rather than a clinic, and one of the tweaks made to the script for the Broadway production explains that it’s because women can’t get abortions anymore. (Other updates include a mention in a news montage of the racist attack in a Buffalo supermarket, and Vice President Kamala Harris now being the co-pilot on the flight to Africa: “Be nice y’all, she has already made a promise that if you got weed on board, she will look the other way,” Peaches says, “so keep it cute.”)

While Trisha is set on terminating her pregnancy, the father, Damien, is begging her to change her mind. It’s not long before we realize why he is so adamant, a wrenching revelation that Cooper can’t quite steer to port.

The scene is a formidable opportunity for the actors, led by Cooper himself, and the play as a whole is a terrific showcase for them. They make a strong case for a Tony rewarding ensembles as they switch roles with striking ease — with help from Emilio Sosa’s costumes and Mia M. Neal’s wigs — and take charge when the script comes up a little short.

Crystal Lucas-Perry, for instance, shines in two segments with tricky tonal shifts. In “Green,” she plays Black, who has spent 40 years locked in the basement of the home of a wealthy family who snicker at the Africa exodus. (“We’ve worked way too hard to end up sitting on a flight with the same destination as a Latoya.”) Black is the embodiment of something they have worked hard to purge, the portrait of Dorian Gray kept hidden away. And now it’s out, and it’s very angry — you might wonder what Jordan Peele would have made of this.

Lucas-Perry also nails the evening’s single most poignant moment as an inmate being released, and realizing that some items are missing from her belongings. In a few seconds, we understand the cost of incarceration, the realization of what was lost. The protective armor of wisecracks has been pulled, and only the ache remains.

Ain’t No Mo’
Through Feb. 26 at the Belasco Theater, Manhattan; aintnomobway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.