| AIN’T NO MO: Saturday matinee (SPOILERS) | |
| Posted by: lordofspeech 05:33 pm EST 12/19/22 | |
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| AIN’T NO MO: MANY SPOILERS A mixed bag of semi-daring and semi-sophomoric sketches, all rather loud a la Saturday Night Live, with much use of the n-word (often pronounced nee-yay-guh, with 3 syllables) and pop culture and drag queens. The author played a drag queen in it, and he was a decent performer, and there were other show-y, Saturday-Night-Live-type performances in it. The overarching fantasy of the piece (that he/she/author is an airline stewardess shepherding us all aboard an airplane to Africa,helmed by Obama) turned very dark at the end of the show, when our heroine missed the plane and was gassed to death. The author seemed possesed of a horrible, internalized sense of desperation. But there was nonetheless something genuine and brave about it all. Lee Daniels made a pre-show announcement urging us all to help make the show a success, and that had a “new,” community feel to the whole thing…plus the loud recorded dance-music as we found our way to our seats was different, jive-y. There were two busses from Philly who came to see the show…so there’s a very fun grass-roots feel to the audience outreach. The most interesting sketch had the ghost of a young (black) man who’d been shot multiple times, begging for his wife not to abort their baby. She was in a clinic for abortions for non-white people and the waiting list was in hundreds of thousands. Brave that it touched on the disproportionate rate of abortions in the African-American community. There was also a funny SNL-like skit about a TV show about baby-mamas with one trans-African-American (not genitally trans, but color-trans), plus another about upper-class, “assimilated” African-Ams who’ve got their collective spirit of “black” chained in their basement, and she breaks free, like a liberating poltergeist. And that actress has a field day! I’m not sure how white people will like it, whether it’s relevant to their experience or whether it even seeks universality. But the crowd was very mixed and the overall crowd seemed to be having a good time. It has a very particular point-of-view on the black experience in America. But it doesn’t give off the self-pity vibes of, say, A STRANGE LOOP, and it has a fun, community feel to it. The opening scene is led by a preacher which gets the audience revved up to say that Obama is my “nee-yay-guh”, but then he also tells us that that’s only for the “colored” to say. If this show can galvanize a black theatre-going audience to show up for Broadway, that would be great. And its ideas could bear fruit for Lee Daniels, I’m sure. It’s hardly as ground-breaking or funny as The Colored Museum was, and doesn’t really go anywhere that’s not politically safe. The lead male, who plays the preacher, the ghost, and an upper-class husband is very handsome and charismatic, with a wonderful speaking voice. |
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