[When I read the review of Candrice Jones’s FLEX in the New York Times on 25 July, I didn’t pay it much attention. Despite Naveen Kumar’s praise (“a slam-dunk New York debut”; “the playwright Candrice Jones excels equally in sly, sitcom humor and in the swift-tongued rhythms of teenage and athletic talk”), it didn’t seem like a play that would hold my interest.
[I may have judged it on too little information. The play, about to close its Off-Broadway première, may have more to offer, both dramatically and theatrically, than I understood. On CBS 2 News at 6PM nine days later, Dave Carlin reported some facts about the Lincoln Center Theater production that piqued my attention, particularly that the cast plays an actual, unchoreographed basketball game on stage during the show.
[I’m posting four published articles on FLEX (which is sometimes written in upper and lower case letters, but seems to be officially written in all caps, so I’ll follow suit outside quotations) from different outlets. Below is Carlin’s WCBS report, followed by an insider’s chronicle of the road the play took from Arkansas to New York City from American Theatre; a New York Times article on sports, especially basketball, on New York and regional stages; and an online review of the LCT production of FLEX.
[For the sake of the record, here’s the book on the play:
[FLEX was developed in the Berkeley (California) Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor Residency between 19 June and 1 July 2018 and played the next year from 19 to 28 July at San Franciso’s Bay Area Playwrights Festival.
[Jones’s play was then selected for the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s renowned Humana Festival of New American Plays for 2020. The COVID pandemic shut-down was instituted in March of that year, however, two days before FLEX was scheduled to open at ATL.
[A reading at the Arkansas New Play Festival at TheatreSquared in Fayetteville on 22 August 2021 served as further development and a production at TheatreSquared between 29 June and 17 July 2022 was designated as the play’s première, along with a production at the Theatrical Outfit in Atlanta from 7 September to 2 October 2022. FLEX has had multiple productions around the country since then, including its New York première.
[Under the direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, FLEX opened for previews in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, LCT’s 299-seat Off-Broadway house, on 23 June 2023; it had its press opening on 20 July and will close on 20 August.
[Candrice Jones (b. 1981) is a Steinberg playwright and educator from Dermott, Arkansas, a small town with a population of 2,316 in Chicot County in the southeast corner of the state on the border with Mississippi. (The Steinberg Playwright Award is given annually by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust to up-and-coming American playwrights with distinctive voices.) Dermott is the model for the play’s Plainnole (Plain Ol’?), Arkansas.
[Jones has been a fellow at the literary magazine Callaloo for poetry at Brown University and in London. She’s also been a VONA Playwriting Fellow, and CalArts MFA Critical Studies recipient. (VONA, or Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, is an arts organization founded in order to provide emerging writers of color with workshops and mentoring by established writers of color.)
[Jones’s primary goal, she declares, is to write love letters for and to women of the American South. From 2014 to 2018, she produced Re-Imagining the Self, a ten-minute-play showcase hosted by Little Rock Central High National Historic Site and the Weekend Theater. She’s the author of the full-length play Crackbaby (Wasserstein Prize Nomination [established in memory of playwright Wendy Wasserstein for an outstanding script by a young woman who hasn’t yet received national attention]).
[Jones has been a resident fellow at Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire. She’s scheduled to be a resident playwright at Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California, in the fall of 2024. Jones was a 2019-20 Many Voices Fellow and 2020-21 Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. In 2022, she received the Celebrate! Maya Award. Currently, Candrice Jones lives in Little Rock where she’s working on play and musical commissions.]
“NEW PLAY ‘FLEX’
TAKES WOMEN’S BASKETBALL
by Dave Carlin
[The article below was broadcast on CBS 2 News at 6PM on 3 August 2023.]
It’s about ambition that can turn friendships foul, and the actors play the game for real on stage and must adapt the plot accordingly.
Summer youth basketball is getting propelled from the playgrounds and landing on a Lincoln Center stage in “Flex” by Candrice Jones.
“I’m having a ball on stage,” said Erica Matthews, who plays Starra Jones.
Starra is determined at all costs to rise from her high school team and go pro, but the arrival of new player, Sidney, played by Tamera Tomakili, threatens Starra.
“Sidney being there is basically her saying, you’re not going to the WNBA, and that is a hard pill for Starra to swallow,” Matthews said.
Starra plots a secret betrayal that threatens to unravel the team.
As the teammates deal with friction, a hidden romance and teen pregnancy, the actors multitask with lots of running, jumping, passing and shooting.
Depending on how the games on stage go, the script changes, and there are two endings.
But win or lose at the end, the play’s message is the same.
“This sport has brought us together because it is a communal thing, and I think that is the heart of the story, is that, at the end of the day, we need community, we need to be together in order to make kind of everyone’s dream come true,” Tomakili said.
“She still learns that no matter what, your journey is your jurney,” Matthews said. “Learning to play with the team, it isn’t always about you.”
Turning the actors into athletes was basketball consultant Amber Batchelor, of the group “Ladies Who Hoop” [“a nonprofit organization that empowers women of all ages and fosters community through the game of basketball”].
“Jumping into the theater world and being connected to this project has been the thrill of my life,” she said. “Especially some of the character work between Starra and Sidney, and those one-on-one games was really fun to choreograph . . . [.] I think each and every one of them were surprised at how quickly when you just get kind of the basics and fundamentals.”
Batchelor added, “We’re in this amazing time now, there’s a real evolution of the women’s game – not just basketball, but women’s sports as a whole . . . [.] You’re going to see a lot of women playing at all ages.”
The action on a real court or a theatrical one has the power to bring you to your feet, cheering.
“Flex” plays through Aug. 20 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.
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“‘FLEX’: TAKING
THE LADY TRAIN FROM THE ARKANSAS DELTA TO LINCOLN CENTER”
by Kim Euell
[Kim Euell’s chronicle appeared in the Theatre Communication Group’s monthly magazine American Theatre on 12 July 2023. As the title indicates, it traces the path of Candrice Jones’s play from background in Dermott, Arkansas, to the stage of the Mitze E. Newhouse Theater at New York City’s Lincoln Center.]
Candrice Jones’s new play about a Southern girls’ basketball team has come a long way, but it hasn’t been a layup.
Flex, Candrice Jones’s play about an ambitious girl’s high school basketball team in rural Arkansas, is on the move. In the past year, the team known as the Lady Train has journeyed from its co-world premiere at Northwest Arkansas’s Obie-winning TheatreSquared and at Atlanta’s Theatrical Outfit, and now to New York City’s Lincoln Center Theater, where it’s currently in previews, to open officially on July 20. Under the inspired direction of LCT resident director Lileana Blain-Cruz, the Lady Train’s New York debut feels almost miraculous, given the blindsiding bumps it hit along the way.
Jones’s play is set in the year 1997, the inaugural year of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). This momentous event beams a beacon of hope to a group of young Arkansas women, who see winning their state tournament as a ticket out of a dead-end existence in a town where the options are working in a spice factory or at local prisons, or enlisting in the military. But before these young women can get to state, they must overcome a formidable obstacle—i.e., a star player is pregnant, and the coach does not allow pregnant girls to play.
Flex’s developmental journey began when Candrice brought an early draft into a playwriting workshop I conducted for Voices of the Nation (a.k.a. VONA) in the summer of 2017. VONA produces the country’s only multi-genre writing conference specifically for writers of color. Our dramaturgical collaboration continued after the workshop into the following summer, when Flex was among the roster of plays developed at Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor Residency. In 2019, Flex was at the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival prior to being selected for the 2020 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville.
In Louisville, the cast worked with a professional coach on polishing their basketball skills (as they would do years later in New York), in addition to rehearsing their roles with the play’s director. But two days prior to Flex’s anticipated world premiere, ATL suspended all performances due to COVID-19. Given the intense rehearsal schedule and the demands of tech, the reality of the enveloping pandemic had not penetrated the productions’ bubble—until it burst. When the cast gathered on Mar. 18, 2020, at a downtown Louisville restaurant, to celebrate director Delicia Turner-Sonnenberg’s birthday, the celebration felt more like a wake.
This shutdown was especially hard on Candrice, as the Humana premiere would have marked her first full production as a playwright. As the months passed, she busied herself writing and developing new scripts. Eventually she was contacted by Dexter Singleton, director of play development at Fayetteville’s TheatreSquared. He wished to develop the script at the Arkansas New Play Festival, and, if all went well, to premiere the play the following summer (with Turner-Sonnenberg back as director).
Arkansas is ranked the second poorest state in the nation, just behind neighboring Mississippi. So I was somewhat taken aback upon arriving at the award-winning modern architectural facility that houses TheatreSquared. Artistic director Robert Ford and executive director Martin Miller had leveraged the resources to build a stunning wish-list facility with two state-of-the-art performance spaces on the ground level, and a flexible rehearsal and performance space upstairs. Remarkably, TheatreSquared managed to continue producing a full season even as the pandemic raged.
On the day of the new-play festival’s staged reading of Flex in summer 2021, it played to a large, enthusiastic (masked) audience in attendance. At the conclusion of the reading’s talkback, one audience member shouted, “Let’s take this train all the way to New York!” Prophetic words indeed.
Fast forward to the spring 2023. As part of the dramaturgical research for the Lincoln Center Theater production, I’m taking a road trip to the playwright’s hometown of Dermott, Ark., to see how it informed her play. The plan is to rendezvous with Candrice in Little Rock, then set off to Dermott the following morning. Candrice calls to remind me that Fayetteville, which is a well-resourced university town, is “a bubble,” warning me of “sundown towns” I will be passing through, where I should not stop under any circumstances. “Travel with a full tank of gas,” she intones. I am heading out of the Ozarks into the Deep South.
Along the freeway I spot some curious signs. One points out the road to the town of Toad Suck. Large billboards feature Donald Trump, standing alongside a uniformed military officer, warning against the use of electronic balloting machines. (They all say “President Trump,” as though he is still in the White House. Time warp.)
One of the reasons I feel compelled to visit Dermott is because I have been told repeatedly that the Arkansas Delta, where Flex is set, is nothing like Fayetteville, my only Arkansas point of reference. I am also aware that major cultural icons hail from the Delta region: Sister Rosetta Tharpe (whose music is featured in the production), Johnny Cash, Basketball Hall of Famer Scottie Pippin, and playwright Endesha Ida Mae Holland.
During my time in Dermott (pop. 1973 and shrinking), Candrice drives us to many of the locations referenced in the play. We pass the Piggly-Wiggly on our way into town, and we drive by the Morris-Booker Community College, now permanently closed. There are two prisons in the area, a federal and a state facility. We drive in search of dirt basketball courts, only to discover that they have now all been paved over.
Having read that the Delta encompasses the state’s highest concentration of poverty, I quickly deduce that rural poverty does not necessarily resemble urban poverty. There are no unhoused people and no panhandlers to be seen. But the markers of prosperity and development that were so visible in Fayetteville are glaringly absent. Motels, grocery stores, and restaurants are in short supply. Abandoned houses are noticeable, their roofs caving in from lack of upkeep.
On the plus side, the Delta is a treat for the senses, as the soothing sounds of crickets and chirping birds fill the air. Heading out of downtown, I inhale the smell of the rich, dark soil visible in the wide open fields under limitless blue skies. We in the Dirty South, y’all! This is the region that inspired a Kesselring Award-winning play.
On our final day we visited Dermott’s public school, whose campus encompasses kindergarten through grade 12. Candrice’s entire senior class comprised 25 students. Entering through the front doors, we pass through hallways lined with glass cases full of trophies. The gymnasium walls are adorned with individual life-sized banners of uniformed male and female basketball players. Groups of eighth graders file in for physical education and immediately begin shooting baskets.
Candrice engages with a group of girls, asking them their family names, then telling them whose aunt or cousin she played on the team with. While this is happening, one of the girls begins nonchalantly spinning the basketball on the tip of her index finger, Harlem Globetrotter-style. This is when it fully dawns on me how deeply ingrained basketball culture is in this town.
For our visit, we stay in the gracious two-story home where Candrice and her siblings grew up. Railroad tracks border the expansive backyard. It is this proximity that inspired Candrice to name the team in the play the Lady Train. An apt name it turned out to be for the journey that was to come.
Candrice has done a masterful job of maximizing every opportunity to further develop the script. At TheatreSquared, when the final shot that determined the outcome of the championship game was taken, the stage went to black. When the lights came up audiences saw the Lady Train holding their trophy.
At Lincoln Center Theater, by contrast, the audience follows the championship game action quarter by quarter as though they are at courtside. And when the final shot is taken, hit or miss, it determines how the play ends for that performance. When I attended one of the two performances that ended with a “loss,” I was impressed to see that the losing ending was equally if not more moving than the “win.”
Blain-Cruz is an ideal director for this play because of her highly physical approach to staging. She begins each rehearsal with movement and utilizes bumping dance music as an energizer when needed. “I do not underestimate the amount of focus, concentration, and stamina that this show takes—bravo!” she told the actors after their first full run-through.
Flex may be best understood as Candrice’s love letter to women of the rural South. One homage that would be recognizable only to residents of the Delta is the story that the Lady Train’s coach tells about winning the state championship with only four girls on the court. Candrice told me that this is in fact a true story—a feat accomplished by Gloria Harris, legendary coach of the Delta Lady Pirates.
In addition to basketball, the music in Flex provides another portal of entry into the world of the play. Songs like Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” Kurtis Blow’s “Basketball,” Aliyah’s “Are You That Somebody,” and Xscape’s “Just Kickin’ It” transport me back to the ’90s, when I joined the artistic staff of the Tony-winning Hartford Stage in Connecticut. I accepted the position of director of play development to help open the door for underrepresented writers in American theatre. (I knew of only one other person of color in a similar position at a mainstream theatre at the time). Back then, the plays being produced by writers of color in mainstream theatres at the time were typically works that would not challenge the subscriber audience’s assumptions about minority cultures. I knew there were much more impactful stories that were being overlooked and writers who were falling through the cracks.
Working closely at Hartford Stage with then artistic director Mark Lamos and resident director Bart Sher (currently resident director at Lincoln Center Theater) we succeeded in attracting the audience that every regional theatre claimed they wanted—one that reflected the diversity of its community. We had all ages, races and backgrounds on our stages and in our seats. I’ve often referred to my time at Hartford as my “Camelot” moment. And like the legendary Camelot, it didn’t last.
Riding the Lady Train into Lincoln Center has been a particularly satisfying experience for me, as it bookends the work I started at Hartford Stage. Candrice Jones exemplifies a compellingly authentic voice, staging facets of Black Southern life not widely seen on American stages until now. I doubt that this production could have happened as recently as five years ago. For one thing, Blain-Cruz, who chose to direct it, has only been a resident director at Lincoln Center Theater since 2020. As in the play, the winds of change are blowing. Let us see how far they can take us.
[Kim Euell is an Ashland/Bay Area-based playwright, dramaturg, and educator who teaches theater and film courses at the University of Southern Oregon. She’s the co-dramaturg for FLEX at Lincoln Center Theater.]
* *
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“PLAYWRIGHTS WITH
HOOP DREAMS”
by Sopan Deb
[The article below appeared in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the New York Times of 23 July 2023.]
In Inua Ellams’s new play, “The Half-God of Rainfall” [New York Theatre Workshop (Off-Broadway), 31 July-21 August 2023], the gods play thunderous games of basketball in the heavens. For Candrice Jones’s “Flex,” high schoolers practice their defensive stances while scraping by in rural Arkansas. Near the end of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James” [Manhattan Theatre Club (Off-Broadway; co-produced with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago), 16 May-18 June 2023], the two main characters play a one-on-one game of basketball using a crumpled up piece of paper after waxing poetic about the greatness of the N.B.A. star LeBron James.
Basketball hasn’t just been on the playgrounds of New York City this summer. Hoop dreams are also playing out onstage, highlighting a theater, ahem, crossover that has become more pronounced in recent years.
While basketball is not as popular as, say, American football, its cultural reach surpasses that of other American team sports because its players are among the most publicly recognizable. (Three of the 10 highest-paid athletes in the world, when including endorsements and other off-field endeavors, according to Forbes, are N.B.A. players.)
“Watching a basketball game is the same excitement I get from watching great theater,” said Taibi Magar, the director of “The Half-God of Rainfall.” “It’s like embodied conflict. It’s executed by highly skilled performers. When you’re watching Broadway, you feel just like you’re watching N.B.A. performers.”
For Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, basketball is the most culturally important sport partly because so many international stars play in the N.B.A., like the Denver Nuggets’s Nikola Jokic, who is Serbian, and the Milwaukee Bucks’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, who’s from Greece.
“It’s drawing from every place on the planet, which means that the sport has become a really important athletic pursuit globally,” said Joseph, whose play “King James” just ended its run at New York City Center.
And basketball’s prevalence in pop culture — including in the worlds of hip-hop and fashion and more recently in film and television — has also penetrated the theater space. Dwyane Wade, who retired from the N.B.A. in 2019, was among the producers of the Broadway shows “American Son” [Booth Theatre (Broadway), 4 November 2018-27 January 2019] and “Ain’t No Mo’” [Joseph Papp Public Theater (Off-Broadway), 27 March-5 May 2019; Belasco Theatre (Broadway), 1-23 Dec 2022].
“Even if one hasn’t played on a team or hasn’t played organized ball, we all have access to basketball,” Jones, who wrote “Flex,” said in a recent interview. “You go in any hood or any small town, someone has created a basketball goal.”
In casting “Flex,” which is in previews at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, prospective actors recorded themselves playing basketball as part of the audition process. Jones and the show’s director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, who both played basketball in high school, said they wanted the basketball being played onstage to look authentic.
“People have different styles, different ways of shooting, different personalities, different kinds of swagger,” Blain-Cruz said. “We care about the individual in the role that they play and how they’re playing it. And I think that aligns itself to theater.”
Jones’s play, set in rural Arkansas, tells the story of a girl’s high school basketball team in 1998, which aligned with the second year of the W.N.B.A. So as the audition process advanced, the actors were asked to dribble, shoot and do layups for the creative team. Once the cast was set, some rehearsals weren’t about staging at all: The cast had basketball practice at nearby John Jay College.
“There’s a kind of ensemble quality to it,” Blain-Cruz said about the sport. “Like an ensemble of actors playing together, a team of basketball players performing together. Together, they create the event.”
Minutes later, as Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” blared, Blain-Cruz led a warm-up with the cast that included hip openers and upward arm stretches. It could have doubled as pregame preparation. The set itself had a basketball hoop hanging in the rear, and a basketball court painted on the floor. “Flex” refers to a type of play basketball teams run, and the staged work features several instances of game play.
“There’s a real rigor. It is real,” Blain-Cruz said. “That’s what’s so satisfying, I think, about sports onstage. There’s an honesty to it, right? Dribbling the ball is actually dribbling the ball. We’re not performing the idea of dribbling the ball.”
After a recent outing to a New York Liberty game, the actress Erica Matthews, whose character, Starra Jones, is the 17-year-old point guard of the fictional team, said watching the players reminded her of watching live theater.
“Basketball is very intimate. You can play a one-on-one game in a small amount of space,” Matthews said. “They’re actually performing on a stage and with the way the audience is surrounding them, the way they’re cheering, it’s basically storytelling.”
Downtown at the New York Theater Workshop, Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” a Dante-inspired “contemporary epic” about a half-Greek god named Demi who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A., is in previews and is scheduled to open July 31. While “Flex” deals with down-to-earth issues, such as teen pregnancy, “The Half-God of Rainfall” transports basketball to a mythical world for immortals to deal with.
At a recent rehearsal, cast members pantomimed slow motion basketball movements at the direction of the choreographer, Orlando Pabotoy. The actors Jason Bowen and Patrice Johnson Chevannes worked on setting up a proper screen, and Bowen later practiced a Michael Jordan impersonation — complete with the tongue wagging. (Jordan is referenced in the play.)
As Ellams and Magar, the show’s director, looked on from desks cluttered with tiny inflatable basketballs, they worked on reallocating lines as the choreography required. Though this version of Ellams’s poem has a cast of seven, he said it can be staged with as many or as few performers as the production desires. (A 2019 production at the Birmingham Repertory Theater in England had only two actors.)
Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, who has played basketball since he was a teenager, said he created the character Demi to “do all the things that I never could” on the court. He mused that basketball has a greater draw to the stage because it is “a far more beautiful sport.”
“There’s something humbling and mortal about basketball in the sense that there’s a simple equation,” Ellams said. “The ball bounces; it comes back up to your palm. You can break that down. This is solitariness, which invites the blues and what it means to play the blues. There’s a longing.”
“There’s a natural melancholy about it,” he added, which makes it “easier to pair with the human spirit.”
Of course there have been other basketball-related plays. In 2012, “Magic/Bird” [Longacre Theatre (Broadway), 11 April-12 May 2012] explored the friendship and rivalry between the 1980s basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird on Broadway. The 2011 Broadway musical “Lysistrata Jones” [Walter Kerr Theatre (Broadway), 14 December 2011-8 January 2012], inspired by Aristophanes’s “Lysistrata,” followed a group of cheerleaders who withhold sex from their boyfriends on the basketball team because they keep losing games. Lauren Yee’s 2018 Off Broadway play, “The Great Leap” [Atlantic Theater Company (Off-Broadway), 23 May-24 June 2018] also directed by Magar, tells the story of a teenage basketball prodigy who travels to China in 1989 to play in an exhibition game between college teams from Beijing and San Francisco.
Daryl Morey, now an executive with the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers, commissioned a musical comedy called “Small Ball” [Catastrophic Theatre, 6 April-13 May 2018] that played in Houston in 2018. It depicts a fictional character named Michael Jordan — not the Jordan — as he finds himself playing in an international league with teammates who are six inches tall.
“I think basketball is just the most important of all of the sports among the up-and-coming directors and playwrights, at least the ones I’ve spoken to,” Morey said.
Not that basketball has a lock on the theater. Baseball has long been an object of fascination for playwrights, including classic shows like “Damn Yankees” [46th Street Theatre/Adelphi Theatre (original Broadway première), 5 May 1955-12 October 1957]. Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning 2003 play, “Take Me Out” [Joseph Papp Public Theater (Off-Broadway), 5 September-24 November 2002; Walter Kerr Theatre (Broadway première), 27 February 2003-4 January 2004], about a baseball player who comes out as gay, had a Tony-winning revival on Broadway last year. In 2019, “Toni Stone” [Roundabout Theatre Company (Off-Broadway), 20 June-11 August 2019], written by Lydia R. Diamond, depicted the life of Marcenia Lyle Stone [1921-96], who became the first woman to play in a men’s baseball league when she took the field for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues [25 April 1953].
Football and boxing, too: “Lombardi” [Circle in the Square Theatre (Broadway), 21 October 2010-22 May 2011], a biographical play based on the life of the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi [1913-70], ran on Broadway in 2010, and 2014 brought a stage adaptation of “Rocky” [Winter Garden Theatre (Broadway), 13 March-17 August 2014], the famous 1976 underdog boxing film, to Broadway.
But for the moment, it is basketball that is having a renaissance in theater. Or to put it in basketball terms, playwrights who take on the sport currently have the hot hand.
[Sopan
Deb is a basketball writer and a contributor to the Culture section of the New York Times. Before
joining the Times, he covered Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential
campaign for CBS News.]
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“REVIEW: IN FLEX,
FRIENDSHIP FOULS CONSUME
by Hayley Levitt
[Hayley Levitt’s review of FLEX was posted on the website TheaterMania on 20 July 2023.]
Candrice Jones’s nostalgic play about teenage hope and ambition makes its New York premiere at Lincoln Center Theater.
It’s 1998 in Plainnole, Arkansas, the WNBA has just entered the zeitgeist, and the members of the Lady Train high school basketball team have gone to extreme measures to keep their starting lineup (and hopeful futures) intact: No sex until they bring home the state championship.
It’s a very Lysistrata opening to Candrice Jones’s sports-centric play Flex — now at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater — but the comparisons end there. For one thing, the celibacy pact has been breached before the show even begins (the cycle of senior athletes in provincial Plainnole being sidelined by unwanted pregnancy can’t be so easily broken). And more importantly, the pact has nothing to do with boys. Sure, it’s the boys who get these talented young Black women pregnant, but the players’ loyalties are to one another and their ambitions are their own.
The internal struggle between loyalty and ambition is the central conflict for Starra, played with unshakable confidence and remarkable athleticism by Erica Matthews. She’s the star(ra) of the Lady Train, but her supremacy is threatened by Sidney (an amusingly brash performance by Tamera Tomakili), a California transplant who is presumed glamorous upon arrival— and not entirely unfairly, considering that her Division 1 college scouts have followed her to the boonies of Arkansas.
It’s an opportunity Starra (whose late mother also lost out on recruitment opportunities) would do just about anything to have herself. And she takes anything shockingly far, much to the chagrin of her other teammates — particularly her sweet-natured and extremely religious cousin Cherise (a hilarious Ciara Monique whose performance resists trite archetypes). It’s a move so outrageous, it almost overshadows the other central story line: the collective pursuit of an abortion for their teammate April (an excellent Brittany Bellizeare), which, in between horrific conversations about sexual trauma and the dearth of access to healthcare in the South (Jones’s version of 1998 is looking 2023 dead in the face), turns into a charming road trip comedy (Renita Lewis, as the queer-coded Donna, delivers some of the show’s best deadpan comedy from the driver’s seat of set designer Matt Saunders’s jigsaw puzzle of a car).
Flex trades in the same camaraderie and female friendship that made A League of Their Own a beacon for every female athlete, with doses of teen drama and ’90s nostalgia to lock in the allegiance of every elder millennial (costume designer Mika Eubanks’s vests, baggy button-ups, and bucket hats are spot-on). In stories like these, characters are the key to success, and characters are clearly Jones’s strength as a writer. For each of these girls, the stakes feel high and authentic to this slice of American life — but director Lileana Blain-Cruz maintains a levity throughout that all but ensures a classic happy ending at a championship game where life lessons coalesce into a poetic expression of teamwork. [For the novices in sports-ball vernacular, the Flex offense demands a lot of passing and takes players out of their traditional roles. You can see where this metaphor is headed.]
Flex certainly invites comparison to Sarah DeLappe’s successful ensemble play, The Wolves, which followed the complex politics of a girls’ soccer team. However, where The Wolves buried tension and darkness beneath a shell of inane chatter, Flex wears its drama on its sleeve and cushions it all in the safety of a traditional story arc. There’s also the added buffer of Coach Francine (Christiana Clark, mastering a coach’s cadence of tough love), who, despite her unfair blanket rule against playing pregnant girls, takes on the uncomplicated persona of “stable adult” — the kind of cozy character perhaps better suited for a television miniseries than a play that aims for complexity.
The most tension-generating part of Flex is the actual basketball that Blain-Cruz has her cast play onstage (Saunders turns the Newhouse Theater into a fully functional basketball court). Plot points depend on actors hitting shots — particularly Matthews, who incredibly sinks a three-pointer to button one of her Act 1 monologues (if you were wondering, The Wolves had zero soccer-ing). It’s one of the riskiest moves I’ve ever seen attempted in live theater and the payoff is an entire audience holding its collective breath and celebrating the ecstasy of victory. With that kind of pressure, even an expected ending gets an infusion of suspense.
[Hayley Levitt is a New
York-based theater journalist with experience in Broadway and Off-Broadway
criticism, interviews and profiles, feature writing, and reporting for both
camera and print.]
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