The cast of Moreno
(Picture: Handout)How will a highly-paid, Mexican-American NFL player react when his black teammate takes the knee? That’s the premise of US newcomer Pravin Wilkins’s first full-length play, which is hugely entertaining and politically sparky, if sometimes cumbersome in its plotting.
It also has novelty. Sport rarely gets a run-out in London theatre: the macho melodramatics of American football even less often. You can almost smell the testosterone in Nancy Medina’s production, which conjures the heady, crotch-grabbing, often adversarial swagger of the locker room with just four talented actors, some stylised action and a thumping soundtrack.
Indeed, it’s curious that this play has landed in London so soon after Red Pitch and Fair Play at the Bush, which similarly distilled the kinetic energy of estate soccer and athletics. Maybe theatre has got over the idea of sport as a fitter, richer rival, and realised its dramatic potential.
Anyway, Luis Moreno (a charismatic Sebastián Capitán Viveros) is a high-rolling hotshot, signed to an eye-catching new contract after a potentially career-ending injury. His new, deliberately un-named team is represented by bullish white quarterback Danny and two black defenders: easygoing Cre’von and stern, thoughtful Ezekiel. When Trump becomes president, racists are emboldened and symbolic protest sweeps through their sport, the uneasy truce they hold between individualism and teamwork begins to fracture.
Wilkins has interesting things to say about how economics and ethnicity play into ideas of validation. But there’s too much yik-yak explanation in the first half, and it feels like ‘issues’ have been apportioned like numbered jerseys. Ezekiel lives in the shadow of activist parents; Danny has a gay brother; Moreno is triggered into taking a side when his own mum is threatened.
Once that happens, though, the ideas become more subtle and provoking. Will Moreno’s participation accelerate or hijack the protest? What constitutes a victory? And how, as Ezekiel says, do they get the “mythical conscientious white folks” on side?
Although the story hits many obvious marks, the action is thrillingly pacy and the relationships well drawn, particularly Moreno’s bromance with Hayden McLean’s likeable Cre’von and his struggle to understand Joseph Black’s forceful Ezekiel.
Viveros, who made a quietly confident London stage debut in Lynn Nottage’s Evening Standard award-winning play Sweat in 2019, is almost unrecognisable here as the cocksure but fretful Moreno. Matt Whitchurch gives an energetic performance as Danny but, for once, the white guy has the least important voice on stage.
Despite its mechanically engineered narrative, this is an arresting debut, full of brio and confident dialogue. Ezekiel constantly drops references that Moreno doesn’t get, and this gains an extra level of knowing audacity in Medina’s production, given most of the audience probably wouldn’t know a tight end from a wide receiver. I loved Moreno despite its faults. And I don’t even like sport.
