Buckle up buttercup and get ready for the most courageous and outrageous show I’ve seen so far this year. AIN’T NO MO’ presented by SpeakEasy Stage and Front Porch Arts Collective, a winner of six Tony nominations including Best Play 2023, written by the youngest Black American Playwright nominated for a Tony Award, Jordan E. Cooper, who also starred in the critically acclaimed but short-lived Broadway production. This production, brilliantly directed by Dawn M. Simmons, features an astonishing cast in multiple roles who give us big, juicy performances which rivet us to the stage, Black history in America, and this frightening time in American culture. They deliver Cooper’s dazzlingly written, fearless, disturbing satirical vignettes–where the riotously funny rubs up against raw truth to devastating effect.
De’Lon Grant /Photo Nile Scott Studios
As the lights go down, and before anything happens onstage, we are all of us together, Black and White, called to church by a sassy, disembodied voice to be part of the world about to unfold before us:
“Welcome yo ass to The Roberts Theater. Yessss, we in Boston, bitch!…This is your church.
Ok. I am already laughing my a-off. The language is blunt and funny, and sets the tone for a no-holds-barred sojourn through the history of race in America sparing no one discomfort from the consequences of following wherever discomforting questions lead. Cooper admits he’s the kind of person who finds the funny at a funeral; here he says the unsayable, excavating dark humor from our dark history in this absurd cultural moment, with eye-opening results while opening a path to talk about tough things.
As the lights come up, we all find ourselves at a rousing funeral service presided over by the ironically monikered Pastor Freeman (the exceptional De’Lon Grant) for the death of “RIGHT TO COMPLAIN,” murdered by the election of the first– albeit “light-skinned”– negro President of the U.S. The preacher skewers those who mourn the loss of righteous indignation in the light of Obama’s election while celebrating the right to “name our children Tyquamotrin and MonaLisaLaKeishawanda, in peace, without a giggle… or a sneer.” We’re all laughing now. But eventually, in the shadow of Trayvon, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, it’s clear that “right to complain” was buried prematurely; in its place is a new plan, instituted by a dominant white culture which fears competition from a race on the rise having already elected one Black president: either co-opt or annihilate Blacks in America. Or the following:
Grant Evan/ Photo Nile Scott Studios
The government is offering the entire American Black population free one-way tickets back to Africa! A Black flight attendant and drag queen named Peaches (a brilliant Grant Evan) has the job of ushering Black Americans to their flight through Gate 1619– a portal to the thematic landscape before us: this reverse diaspora mirrors an earlier voyage, the first Middle Passage of 1619, a hellish journey suffered by the first Africans to arrive in North America, enslaved.
What follows onstage is a scathing satirical odyssey of the ways in which Black identity and culture has survived under duress, has been manipulated, destroyed and/or corrupted into self-hatred by a dominant White culture which has absorbed the blood, sweat, and tears of a race with scant recognition or recompense– and in 2025, with seemingly no let up.
From left: Dru Sky Berrian, MaConnia Chesser, Kiera Prusmack, and Schanaya Barrows/Photo Nile Scott Studios
On a simple set enhanced at key moments with effective video projections, director Dawn M. Simmons has her finger firmly on the pulse of this tonally tricky material, simultaneously locating its humor, rage, and pain. She elicits hilarious, heart-wrenching, and extravagantly detailed performances from this nimble ensemble. There’s an upwardly mobile Black family who have no intention of going back to Africa, quipping that watching The Lion King will suffice. They then do their best to repress the Black person named Green (McConnia Chesser) chained up in their basement. In another tour de force moment, Chesser breaks our hearts as an inmate being released from prison who must finally accept that she has to leave without all of the belongings she came in with. It’s a gut-wrenching scene.
From left: MaConnia Chesser, Kiera Prusmack, De’Lon Grant, Schanaya Barrows, and Dru Sky Berrian/ Photo Nile Scott Studios
One lengthy, extended, screamingly funny vignette stands out as the play’s centerpiece: a scripted “reality” show called “Real Baby Mama’s of the South-Side.” The extraordinary Schanaya Barrows, Dru Sky Berrian, Kiera Prusmack and again McConnia Chesser rip the mask off fake reality with an added twist: one participant Rachonda, actually a white woman named Rachel, makes the case for “standing in her truth as a”transracial” Black woman! When she notes that “race” is only a construct, we understand there’s no easy way out of this rabbit hole of identity in a world of malleable truth, which is then reflected in our contemporary mirrorverse of “news”and entertainment.
90 minutes later, Cooper leaves us with an ending as liberating as it is eviscerating. All masks are off as the naked truth stands before us. As the flight takes off, a golden bag full of the “entire story as a people in this country” is left behind. The blood and humiliation, the lost wealth, family, art, culture and identity…again, what’s been taken cannot be given back. What has been done cannot be undone. Cooper leaves us at sea with only ourselves to look to for direction in the storm.
So gratified he asked the questions and this cast and crew have brought them vitally alive on stage. SEE THIS NOW at SpeakEasy Stage through February 8!
