Choir Boy, written by Tarell Alvin McCraney – who also penned the play on whichBarry Jenkins’ film Moonlight was based and co-wrote the script with Jenkins – has had the kind of stage life most playwrights could only dream about. A meditation on Black queerness, experience and spirit, Choir Boy premiered in London’s West End, was nurtured in the US and landed among the bright lights of Broadway’s 2019 season.
Now National Theatre of Parramatta, the performing arts company as ambitious and necessary as its name, has secured this international hit and brought it to Riverside Theatres in time for Sydney WorldPride. An Australian tour will follow, taking to new audiences this play-with-music about identity, difference, history and all the ways we are shaped into becoming ourselves.
On a spare set (realised by Paper Jam Productions), a few modular pieces and one vertical structure are thrown, thanks to Karen Norris’s lighting, into church-windowed relief. We are in the world of an elite, fictional Black boarding school in the US. Pharus (Darron Hayes, who also performed the role in the US) is the gifted leader of the school’s venerated choir, and when the play begins he’s in his element, singing the solo at the school’s end-of-year assembly. His voice is beautiful, his command of the stage notable, but when a fellow student in the choir taunts him with homophobic slurs, Pharus falters. What will happen to the choir, and these boys, as they enter their final year of high school?
Bobby (Zarif), the culprit, has problems of his own. He’s also related to the headmaster (Robert Harrell), so we see right away that there will be no neat answers to this conflict. The headmster brings in an old white colleague, Mr Pendleton (the local stage legend Tony Sheldon, who came out of retirement to play the role), to build the students’ critical and creative thinking, or at least a sense of comradeship, but it’s a volatile environment. Intentions on all sides, especially at first, are tough to parse. The boys face a number of pressures – class, family, religious, personal – and Pharus’s queerness, which he both delights in but also feels shame over, is treated like a rising threat.
In a school that can offer its students a safe place to learn within an unjust world, inside a tradition of gospel music that can lift the spirit but which also serves as the voice of exclusionary religious rhetoric, how can these students learn to grow up and grow towards each other with love and care? Is that even an achievable goal?
Choir Boy offers these questions to audiences as suggestions of plot, snatches of mood and something that feels more like the crest of an emotion than a fully formed story: it is a chorus of aching hearts. Its philosophy is sharp and striking, especially as the boys consider the meaning and legacy of the songs they sing so beautifully. You’ll notice, occasionally, that the narrative beats are a bit thin and loosely held. You might wonder if all the clever dialogue – and it is frequently dazzling, especially when Pharus has the floor – isn’t quite taking off. But the conventional school story structure here is most effective as a vessel for its character exploration. Pharus is three-dimensional and complex, his brothers in song less so, but all of them – even those who bully Pharus – are treated tenderly by McCraney.
The co-directors Zindzi Okenyo and Dino Dimitriades wisely dial into that tenderness, crafting their scenes like love letters. In their hands the action is emotionally driven and gorgeously paced, and it makes plenty of room for the play’s truest sense of magic and its deepest well of feeling: the music.
The choir, played by Hayes, Zarif, Gareth Dutlow, Abu Kebe, Tawanda Muzenda, Quinton Rofail Rich and Theo Williams, are glorious. Shaped behind the scenes by musical director Allen René Louis, they sing heart-aching and arresting renditions of gospel and spiritual songs that carry the play forward. They sing scenes into life and sing through transitions of time and place; they move props with voices raised and bodies in unison (Tarik Frimpong created the step-fuelled choreography) and summon a sense of wonder.
Could the play be meatier? Sure. Does that ultimately matter? Maybe not. Choir Boy feels like a poem inside a play: the plot bends to make way for imagery, music, glimpses at young hearts. Its questions and concerns are bigger than a story and its music touches the sublime. This production invites us to lean in and feel. It guides us to really listen. May that be a skill we take out of the theatre with us and into the streets.
Choir Boy is at Riverside Theatres, Parramatta until 11 March
