NEW YORK — Jordan E. Cooper’s “Ain’t No Mo’,” a blast of a Broadway show, doesn’t so much occupy the space between sketch comedy and old-school play as smash a hole in whatever barrier long has been assumed to divide them.
Angry, funny, uncompromising and performed at an extraordinarily high level, “Ain’t No Mo’” puts you in mind of such antecedents as George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum,” the Wayans family’s “In Living Color” and even “Saturday Night Live,” on rare occasion, but it’s also very much aligned with other radical Black work on Broadway currently, from Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play” to Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over” to the Michael R. Jackson musical “A Strange Loop.” The worldview is much the same: America is built on an original sin, the promise of a post-racial nation has gone to rot, and whatever Obama-era optimism that might once have poked through has been replaced by the relentless capitalist-police-prison treadmill that’s enough to make a soul-weary Black American tire of all this dragging turbulence and fly away to greener pastures.
All that, and it’s a 90-minute comedy. No mean feat. And here’s another reason to the see the show: it abandons caution to the winds and really, really goes there, meaning wherever the heck Cooper wants.
It’s pitched at people who secretly like Dave Chappelle and understand the crucial importance of risk when it comes to satire but don’t want to depart from their core, anti-capitalist worldview, which Chappelle always threatens to do. Which is why you don’t find him on Broadway.
Still, Cooper is no progressive patsy: on the contrary, his show is very much aware of paradox and salient when it comes to the contradictory terrors of living life as a Black American these days on Stateside terroir, an emotion that a good chunk of the rest of the stressed-out nation demonstrably shares. “Ain’t No Mo’” is, in many ways, a show fighting back against the chaos and panic so prevalent in post-Trump America, feasting as it does on violence and division.
“Ain’t No Mo’” takes little comfort in Black religiosity, which it sees as failing to mitigate the danger, danger, danger.
The idea of an great Black exit on a Boeing jet actually is what unifies all of the material here: the abiding premise of the show, first seen in 2018 at New York’s Public Theater’s Public Studio, is that the U.S. government has offered all Black citizens descended from slaves a one-way passage back to Africa. On African American Airlines Flight 1619.
Why not, some of the characters in the show think. Better than a jail cell or a coffin.
Much of the show, directed by Stevie Walker‑Webb, is set at the airport where a character named Peaches (Cooper) has the job of checking in passengers for this reincarnation of the racist actions of the so-called American Colonization Society, which encouraged some 16,000 former slaves to go to Liberia in 1820. These scenes are superb: theatrical, funny and deeply moving as Peaches gradually is reduced from cheery customer-service agent to an agonizingly naked soul, stripped of every last vessel of identity.
And that’s not the only moment when “Ain’t No’ Mo’” shocks its audience into silence: Crystal Lucas-Perry plays, among other characters, a prisoner who finds herself suddenly freed from jail by this edict. Handed her little clutch of stuff by a jailer and told to leave, she says that what has been returned her in this bag is incomplete. “I had a son,” she says, illustrating in an instant the toll of mass incarceration and, on a yet broader level, the human inability to go back in time, even when something new appears to arrive. It’s a blistering moment, as potent as anything to be found on Broadway so far this season.
But then all the ensemble performers here — Fedna Jacquet, Marchánt Davis, Shannon Matesky and Ebony Marshall-Oliver — are superb. And while this is no traditional Broadway attraction, with all the attendant risks for the producers, the production values for the show are inventive and strikingly well realized: Scott Pask’s set has a looming 747, ready to leave with whomever wants to abandon the perils of the American present and head to skies that cannot be any less friendly.
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At the Belasco Theatre, 111 W. 44th St., New York; aintnomobway.com
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