Place six, highly individual and equally quarrelsome men in a small kitchen, and it’s inevitable that they’re going to make a mess, literal and otherwise. Yet while Katori Hall’s “The Hot Wing King” has its problems, you’re unlikely to feel that having too many cooks on board is among them.
On the contrary, this likable but lumpy production directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, which opened on Sunday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center, is never better than when its all-male ensemble is functioning as an awkward but interdependent unit — riffing with, scoring off and rubbing up against one another. They have that palpable, physical ease with one another, both contented and irritable, that comes from being part of a family.
Not all of these people are blood kin. But Hall, the author of the Olivier Award-winning “The Mountaintop” and a writer with sincere affection for every character she creates, is asking what constitutes a family in a world of fragmentation, one that keeps pulling people apart. It’s a subject she explored in her “Hurt Village” (2012), set in a housing project facing demolition and a 21st-century response of sorts to Lorraine Hansberry’s epochal “A Raisin in the Sun.”
In material terms, the world of “The Hot Wing King” — which takes place in a very comfortably appointed home in Memphis — is far less bleak. (Michael Carnahan’s set feels like a place you could happily move into on the spot.) That the couple who lives here happens to be gay allows Hall to challenge conventional definitions of manhood and fatherhood in black America.
She uses the bright, peppy context of a classical sitcom structure to do so, along with that genre’s shortcuts to resolution. When the play begins, Cordell (Toussaint Jeanlouis) is feverishly preparing for a spicy chicken wing competition to be held the next day. He has only recently moved in with Dwayne (Korey Jackson), a hotel manager, and has yet to find work in Memphis.
The 42-year-old Cordell left his family in St. Louis for Dwayne (and has yet to tell the folks back home that was the real reason for doing so), and he is feeling rudderless and resentful about being financially dependent on someone else. So he pours his energy into making great wings, focusing obsessively on a new recipe he describes as “spicy Cajun Alfredo, with bourbon-infused bacon,” the scent of which wafts into the audience.
His central helpers, in addition to the ever-patient and sorely tried Dwayne, are their best buddies: the zinger-slinging, designer-label-crazy Isom (Sheldon Best) and the football fanatic Big Charles (Nicco Annan). They are all expected to work late into the night dismembering chickens, stirring pots, adding spices and soaking wood chips, activities that consume a lot of antic stage time.
There are, of course, distractions, including the arrival of EJ (an appealingly natural Cecil Blutcher), Dwayne’s 16-year-old nephew, and EJ’s father, TJ (Eric B. Robinson Jr.), a grifter and occasional holdup artist. EJ’s mother died on a drug binge while being restrained by police, an event for which Dwayne, her brother, blames himself. Dwayne would now like for EJ to live with him, which sparks resentment from both Cordell and TJ.
The balance between social soap opera and buoyant comedy isn’t always gracefully sustained. Nor is the script able to comfortably fold its more somber subplots into the running, frantic story of the cooking contest.
When characters, especially Cordell, talk about their deeper feelings, they tend to shift into improbably poetic flights of diction. (“I see why you steady treat me like a child. I am. It’s like I’ve just been pushed out of the womb and I’m getting hit with the cold and the air and the lights and the truth.”)
What’s refreshing here is the matter-of-fact depiction of black gay characters who may be dissatisfied, to varying degrees, with their own behavior but not, ultimately, because of their sexuality. Watching Cordell and Dwayne casually snuggle and kiss, draping their bodies over each other, you sense a bond in which erotic attraction has segued into something both more relaxed and more complex. You don’t doubt that these men were meant to be together.
Not that the script stints on the rapid-fire exchange of put-downs that has long been a staple of gay comedy. “I can smell shade a mile away,” Isom says contentedly. “I’m a walking umbrella.” And, yes, the same character may worry that he’s the kind of guy whom other men want only for a single night.
But by and large, these men are disarmingly comfortable with their sexual identities. This means that when TJ complains that Dwayne and Cordell are dubious role models to a growing boy, no one’s really buying it, including TJ himself. And when the play’s four gay characters launch into a spontaneous performance of Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much,” it’s hard to imagine anyone not subscribing to what one character calls “the gospel according to Luther” or to the aura of good fellowship that floods the stage.
The Hot Wing King
Tickets Through March 22 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; 212-244-7529, signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
