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

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    In Jordan E. Cooper’s biting satire, Black Americans descended from slaves are offered one-way airfare to Africa.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.)From left: Fedna Jacquet, Ebony Marshall-Oliver, Marchánt Davis, Crystal Lucas-Perry and Shannon Matesky in a scene titled “Real Baby Mamas of the South Side.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhile 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.Lucas-Perry, center, shines in a segment called “Green,” our critic writes. She plays Black, who has spent 40 years locked in the basement of the home of a wealthy family. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe 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. More

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      Review: ‘1776,’ When All Men, and Only Men, Were Created Equal

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      A revival of the musical about the Declaration of Independence underlines the gender imbalance among the Founding Fathers — and everything else.A transformation that’s either wondrous or scandalous, depending on your taste, occurs less than a minute into the Roundabout Theater Company’s otherwise disappointing Broadway revival of “1776.”Barely a line has been uttered or a note sung when the performers, who identify as female, transgender and nonbinary, and are wearing more-or-less contemporary streetwear, hike up their black tights and white socks to simulate breeches, don buckle shoes in place of clunky boots, step into frock coats of various colonial cuts and become (thanks to Emilio Sosa’s outstanding costume design) our Founding Fathers. That includes Elizabeth A. Davis, who makes a very visibly pregnant Thomas Jefferson.Though some will see the casting — which is diverse not just in gender but also in race and ethnicity — as a stunt and a travesty, I’m in the wondrous camp. Neither the 1969 musical nor (as “Hamilton” has proved) history itself is so frail as to crumple under new ways of looking at our theatrical and national past. Anyway, if you prefer, you can simply ignore the fact that these fathers aren’t men, and focus — or try to — on the plot, which encompasses nothing less than the months of negotiations and maneuverings that led, just barely, to the Declaration of Independence.But if you are willing to allow yourself a double vision, as the directors Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus clearly hope, you can take independence a step further. The white maleness of the characters becomes a semi-translucent screen through which we see the many other people, including people like the cast, whom the Declaration never even considered.Sara Porkalob, center, as the pro-slavery Edward Rutledge, who dissects John Adams’s hypocrisy in the song “Molasses to Rum.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor me, that double vision is the best thing about the production, which opened on Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. In theory, it deepens the ideas being batted about in the hot, fetid, fly-infested Philadelphia summer. So the “obnoxious and disliked” John Adams, as played by Crystal Lucas-Perry, who is Black, is not just an abolitionist on principle but in essence. And when Sara Porkalob, as the pro-slavery Edward Rutledge, dissects Adams’s hypocrisy in the song “Molasses to Rum” — showing how the North benefits from the slave trade as well as the South — the fact that she is Filipino American both intensifies and complicates the argument.If that sort of complication were itself great theater and not just a promising premise, this “1776” might be amazing. That the production is instead so overpumped and overplayed as to be hardly comprehensible is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the musical, which is plenty complicated as written — if not so much in its few and often trite songs, by Sherman Edwards, then at least in Peter Stone’s book, a masterpiece of condensation without diminishment.At first dismissed as Bicentennial-era pageantry, “1776” has survived all the ensuing upheavals of American history precisely because it is, within the confines of the genre, remarkably sophisticated about the forces at play in forging a nation from colonies harboring antithetical philosophies — and in forging a musical from similarly unlikely and conflicting raw materials. An Encores! production in 2016, which featured a racially diverse cast but the usual gender assignments, showed it could be modern and yet thoughtful and moving.But the current revival seems interested in the cast’s experience at the expense of the audience’s. I can understand that impulse, especially when creating space on a major stage for actors who rarely get it.Still, the best interpretations are those that, regardless of the performer’s professional history, find feeling in the specific actions of the text rather than in their personal feelings of exclusion from it. The Broadway veteran Carolee Carmello thus creates the character of the Pennsylvania holdout John Dickinson mostly by holding back on the outrage and offering smiles and politesse in its place. And as Abigail Adams, the Broadway newcomer Allyson Kaye Daniel is gently firm and dryly touching, achieving a lovely, modest balance in those contradictions.Carolee Carmello, center, as the Pennsylvania holdout John Dickinson. She’s joined by, from left: Oneika Phillips, Gisella Adisa, Porkalob, Sushma Saha, Nancy Anderson and Eryn LeCroy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore often, though, the performances are so vastly histrionic and unchecked by the social situation (this is Congress, after all) that they seem inside-out. Adams jumps on tables to make points. Patrena Murray so emphasizes Benjamin Franklin’s winky sententiousness that he seems like a joke, not a brilliant tactician. Eryn LeCroy makes of “He Plays the Violin” — a dainty minuet in which Martha Jefferson sings of her love for Thomas — a full-on psychodrama.It does not help that the new arrangements and orchestrations, aiming to refresh the songs’ profiles in the way the casting is meant to refresh the story, merely make them muddy — and make many of the lyrics unintelligible.If that’s not always a great loss, it certainly detracts from the show’s most powerful number, “Momma, Look Sharp.” A simple minor-key air sung from the point of view of a dead young soldier, it is performed here (by Salome B. Smith) as a belty anthem, complete with a moaning and heaving ensemble and a figure apparently representing Momma. (She’s looking! She’s crying!) When performers mime the emotions we should be having, the storytelling contract has been broken.Nor do Page (who is also the show’s choreographer) and Paulus (who has directed Broadway revivals of “Pippin” and “Porgy and Bess”) show much interest in the show’s humor. As some of it is ribald and sexist — probably accurately so — they prefer to defuse it by winking as if to say: Don’t worry, we don’t mean any harm. What a wasted opportunity! In dealing with such material, a nonmale cast might mean harm in the best way, forcing us to think about the character of men in their time and ours, and providing the kind of added value a regendered revival seemed to promise.Instead we get subtracted value. I don’t mean for the cast, who deserve the opportunity, or even for the theater as an industry and an ecosystem. As the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar said in a New York Times round-table discussion about putting history onstage, there is merit in “moving people into the center of narratives who have never been there for the public to see.” I agree. And if those narratives sometimes fail, well, so do most others; we might as well be open to everything.But underlining one’s progressiveness a thousand times, as this “1776” does, will not actually convey it better; rather it turns characters into cutouts and distracts from the ideas it means to promote. The musical even shows us that. It’s only when Adams stops yelling and starts plotting that he begins to turn the tide toward ratification. Just so, theater makers should have enough faith in the principles of equity and diversity to let them speak for themselves. Are they not, as someone once put it, self-evident?1776Through Jan. 8 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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       ’1776’ Musical Returns to Broadway With a Diverse Twist

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      A revival of the classic musical offers a fresh twist on the founding for the post-“Hamilton” era.“Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves,” Crystal Lucas-Perry said of the Broadway revival of “1776,” and its cast of female, nonbinary and trans actors. Clockwise from top left: Sav Souza, Lucas-Perry, Elizabeth A. Davis, Carolee Carmello, Patrena Murray and Oneika Phillips.Camila Falquez for The New York TimesHow do you solve a problem like America?For the creators of the musical “1776,” the answer was to wrap it in jaunty tunes, 18th-century double entendres and enough twisty dialogue to make a dramatization of the debate over the Declaration of Independence feel like a thriller.Premiering on Broadway in 1969, the musical ran for 1,217 performances, won the Tony Award for best musical and, over the last 50-plus years, has left more than a few critics scratching their heads over how such a resolutely square show won over Vietnam-era America.But 1776 isn’t what it used to be. In 2022, a touchstone of national identity has become a culture-war hot potato. And “1776,” which arrives this month on Broadway in a new revival for Roundabout Theater Company, isn’t the same either.The revival, directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus, has the familiar rousing melodies (in new, rock-infused arrangements), star-spangled color scheme and corny dad jokes. But they’re delivered by a racially diverse cast of women, nonbinary and trans actors, whose embodiment, Paulus said, wakes the language up.“I want the audience to hold that dual reality, of what the founders were, but also a company of actors in 2022, who never would have been allowed inside Independence Hall,” Paulus said in a video interview last month, after the show concluded its pre-Broadway run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where she is artistic director.The idea, she said, using a phrase that has become something of a mantra for the show, “is to hold history as a predicament, rather than an affirming myth.”Announced in 2019, the revival may initially have seemed to be riding the post-“Hamilton” vogue for all things Founders, while doing that show’s inclusive casting one better. But the two-year pandemic delay — which saw nationwide racial-justice protests, a bitterly contested presidential election and the Jan. 6 insurrection — have only heightened the stakes.“The deeper you get into it, the more poetry, the more stuff, exists inside of it,” Page said, in a separate video interview.At bottom, “1776,” he said, is “about a clandestine meeting of people who desperately want to change the world.”Then again, “1776” was never the whitewashed retro-patriotic celebration it is often remembered as. For all its traditionalist guys-in-powdered-wigs look, the show — with songs by Sherman Edwards, a history teacher turned Brill Building tunesmith, and a book by the playwright Peter Stone — was as politically pointed in its time as “Hamilton” (and perhaps, some argue, more so).Written ahead of the Bicentennial, it was meant to humanize the founders — “Demigods? We’re men, no more, no less,” Benjamin Franklin declares — while also challenging what the authors described as the “jingoistic” history they had learned in school.Sara Porkalob, center left, Lucas-Perry and Davis in the production during its pre-Broadway run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.Evan Zimmerman for Murphy MadeThere was the bite of songs like “Momma, Look Sharp,” a denunciation of the carnage of war that might have been sung by a G.I. on Hamburger Hill. And there was “Molasses to Rum,” a chilling call-out of freedom-espousing New England’s complicity in the profits of slavery.The production even stirred its own mini-controversy: When cast members were invited to perform the show at the Nixon White House, they were asked to cut “Cool, Cool Considerate Men,” a satirical minuet of money-loving conservatives who move “ever to the right, never to the left.” (They refused.)“I continue to be surprised when I meet people who say, ‘Oh, 1776! It’s my favorite musical. It’s just what our country needs!” Paulus said. “I keep thinking, what are they talking about?”But then, when the touring production company NETworks first suggested the show to her in February 2019 as a possible revival, she knew little about it, except that it had beaten out “Hair” (which she had directed a Broadway revival of in 2009) for the Tony. “I had a vague assumption it was a kind of a celebratory look at American history,” she said.When she read the book, on a long plane ride, she said, she “almost fell out of the airplane.”In particular, she was struck by the dramatic climax: the debate over Thomas Jefferson’s fiery denunciation of the slave trade, which was ultimately cut from the Declaration, to secure unanimous approval.Even talking about it now, Paulus still sounds incredulous. “I was unaware of that crossing out,” she said. “How could I not know?”“That began my journey into the show,” she continued. “I had to reckon with my own experience of American history.”A 2016 Encores! concert staging in New York had already used some racially diverse casting. Paulus said she was told off the bat that the estate would be open to an all-female cast, but she emphasized that the production takes a less “binary” view of gender.There was a first reading in New York in August 2019, with the principal actors, including Crystal Lucas-Perry as the irascible and obstinate John Adams, leader of the “independency” faction. By early March 2020, the show was fully cast, with an opening in Cambridge set for that May, to be followed by a national tour and then a Broadway run.Instead, they retreated to Zoom, like the rest of American theater. Without the pressure to stage the show, Paulus said, they could go deep in American history, including meetings with various scholars like the political theorist Danielle Allen and the historians Vincent Brown, Jane Kamensky and Annette Gordon-Reed.With the approval of the creators’ estates, the show includes a (wordless) depiction of a 14-year-old Robert Hemings, Jefferson’s enslaved bodyservant (and brother to Sally Hemings), inspired by Gordon-Reed’s scholarship. It also adds a long excerpt from Abigail Adams’s famous letter advising John to “remember the ladies.”While the gender-flipped casting may be the show’s claim to “firstness,” the core of the production is a grappling with race.Even before the murder of George Floyd, Paulus said, discussions around race within the company were “very raw.” Then came the protests, and the roiling conversation on racism, representation and hierarchy in the theater set off by the “We See You, White American Theater” open letter.In September 2020, the American Repertory Theater announced a set of initial antiracism commitments. When it came to “1776,” she said, the conversations prompted by the protests “impacted everything about our process.”Paulus said she first met Page (whose long résumé as a choreographer includes extensive collaborations with Beyoncé) in 2017, when he was starting the M.F.A. program in directing at Columbia. He was initially hired as the show’s choreographer, in 2019. In the summer of 2020, he also became co-director.“I felt that the most powerful and honest reflection of our collaboration,” Paulus said, was to be “coequals.”Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus directed the production, which starts previews at the American Airlines Theater on Sept. 16 and opens Oct. 6.Matthew MurphyThe George Floyd moment, Page agreed, “changed everything” about the show. The team, including the set designer Scott Pask, had already started moving away from the original scenic designs, which Page described as attempting to land the show too much “in the world of realism.”“We came together and said, this doesn’t feel right anymore,” he said. “We started asking, when you break it all the way down to the core, what is this piece about?“These were men who were attempting to make a change inside the world,” he continued. “Who cares about the chair they sat in, and are we getting it right?”The production, with its spare, Brecht-influenced design, is set not in Independence Hall in 1776, but onstage in 2022, where it’s performed by a company of actors from the present who arrive in street clothes, with no fanfare, before putting on their 18th-century(ish) waistcoats and period-appropriate shoes.(One performer also puts on a beaded necklace — seemingly a nod at the fact, mentioned in Stone and Edward’s original authors note, that Native American leaders would often appear before the Continental Congress, as leaders of independent nations.)Page, whose other recent directing credits include this summer’s revival of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” at Barrington Stage Company, also cited the importance of an “affinity space” for Black cast members, which helped guide the show’s exploration of race.“With the other cast members, the main thing we communicated was, ‘You’re going to feel some things,’” Page said. “What the Black cast members asked was to leave your fragility at the door.”In a group interview with four of the show’s founding “fathers,” Elizabeth A. Davis, who plays Jefferson, recalled a video meeting in which cast members presented their family trees, as part of an exploration of how personal and national history intersect. She said she could still remember exactly where she was sitting — “in my grandmother’s old room, in the middle of Texas” — as Black colleagues described hitting the so-called slavery wall, beyond which ancestry can be hard to trace.“It was a profound moment for me,” she said. “It was understanding something not just intellectually, but viscerally and cellularly.”Lucas-Perry nodded. “I remember saying, ‘I feel a little without,’” she said.The 2020 protests, Lucas-Perry said, contributed to a “hyper-awareness” of the way the casting altered the meaning of the text, and the importance of a production using diverse bodies “just because it can.”“Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves,” she said. “We were looking for ways of taking advantage of moments where you can dig deeper into what it means to be other.”“Momma, Look Sharp” lands differently sung by a Black woman (the big-voiced Salome B. Smith, as a courier bringing news from the front) to another Black woman, after the founding “fathers” have left the room. (The courier’s piercing “Momma!,” Page said, echoes Floyd’s cry as he gasped for air.)But the show’s dark heart is the silky and sinister “Molasses to Rum.” Traditionally, it’s presented as a vocal tour de force (see John Cullum’s stentorian baritone in the 1972 movie), and critics have often paid more attention to the singing than the chilling substance of the song.In their staging of the song (sung by Sara Porkalob), Page and Paulus force the audience to consider the enslaved people who form one corner of the Triangle Trade not as abstractions, but as real bodies, massed in a wordless chorus that includes the Black actors who play Adams, Franklin and John Hancock. (The sometimes defiant choreography, Page said, reprises some gestures from “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men.”)Carolee Carmello, who is joining the Broadway production as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania (one of the cool, conservative men), played Abigail Adams in the 1997 Broadway revival, which had a white cast. She had heard “Molasses” hundreds of times, but wasn’t prepared for seeing it in the new production.“The understanding of what they’re actually arguing about is extremely powerful,” she said.Lucas-Perry said the song “feels like it goes on forever” — “and it did go on forever,” she added, referring to slavery. “I’m not going to lie,” she said of the scene. “There’s not a night where it doesn’t hit me.”“Hamilton” was fundamentally celebratory, reflective of the liberal optimism of Obama-era America, and the feeling that the arc of history was bending its way. Page and Paulus’s “1776,” for all its humor and exuberance, is darker and more uncertain.But neither show is the last word on the founding, or on the Declaration, a document that might be seen as the ultimate American classic: time-bound and flawed, but also profound and visionary — and requiring continual revival and reinterpretation, by a perpetually changing cast of Americans, to stay alive.Page summed up the heart of 1776, and “1776,” crisply: “How do we self-proclaim our presence in the world?” More