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promise of a post-racial nation has gone to rot, and whatever Obama-era optimism that might once have poked through has been replaced by the relentless capitalist-police-prison treadmill that’s enough to make a soul-weary Black American tire of all this dragging turbulence and fly away to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.
