'The Hot Wing King'

All right, tell the truth. 

Aren’t hot wings and Buffalo wings the same things?  I mean, really—they’re both made from the usually-discarded part of the bird, the part that mostly ends up in the soup pot; they’re both cooked up crisp and then covered in a spicy sauce; most people like to dip them in another sauce like blue cheese or ranch; and almost everyone who eats them, eats them in a bar or in the living room with a big game like the Super Bowl on TV.

In fact there are so many recipes for both chicken wing snacks—scores, maybe even hundreds—that it’s probably impossible to distinguish hot wings from Buffalo wings.  As far as I can determine, the main difference—if it’s even accurate—is that the basis of the hot sauce for Buffalo wings is cayenne pepper and for hot wings it’s chili peppers.

The only real difference is that Buffalo wings were invented in Buffalo, New York, and hot wings come from down south; Memphis, Tennessee, is the hot-wing capital of the country, in terms of the number of raw wings sold and cooked ones consumed, though whether they were first concocted there is arguable.

Almost inarguable is that Buffalo wings, the ones people dip in the blue cheese sauce, were introduced in 1964 in a bar.  Hot wings, the ones dipped in ranch dressing (though not always), showed up in Memphis around 1990, sold from a food truck (and 1992 in a restaurant).  An annual hot-wing festival in April began in Memphis in 2002; a Buffalo wing festival started in 2001.

But if you press the point of which town really served the first spicy chicken wings—you might well find yourself in a . . . well, heated argument, let’s say.  (If you want to argue whose wings are better . . . well, that’s probably not a real good idea.)

According to the hot-wing chef in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, though, his family recipe for the dish dates back to 1808.  Oh, and he comes from Saint Louis—though I don’t know that he wasn’t born in Memphis, where the play is set.

According to the website This Week in New York, Hall was moved to write The Hot Wing King, her third and last production of her Residency 5 at the Signature Theatre Company, in part because of that annual festival, the Southern Hot Wing Festival, in Memphis, her hometown (about which she writes frequently).  The festival includes a hot-wing cooking competition which is central to the play and initiates the events that unfold.

Hall, 38, a playwright, writer, actress, and social and political activist, was born in Memphis.  According to an interview in Art Works Blog, a website of the National Endowment for the Arts, Hall’s parents told stories around the dinner table, recounting their day at work and playing all the characters, and she credits this practice for her attraction to theater.  “It was like watching one-person shows at the kitchen table.”  As a girl, she staged plays in her family’s living room.

In 1999, she graduated from Craigmont High School in Memphis as the first African-American valedictorian.  After high school, Hall attended New York City’s Columbia University, graduating in 2003 with a major in African-American Studies and Creative Writing.  She was awarded top departmental honors from the university’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS). 

In 2005, she graduated from the American Repertory Theater’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University with a Master of Fine Arts in Acting, and then spent two years as an actress in New York, working on stage and in TV.  She then entered the Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace playwriting program, graduating in 2009.

Hall’s been a book reviewer, journalist (another form of storytelling), and essayist for publications such as the Boston Globe, Essence, Newsweek and the New York Times.  She’s also been a Kennedy Center Playwriting Fellow at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center of Waterford, Connecticut.

She’s probably best known as the author of The Mountaintop, her play about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last night before his assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on 4 April 1968, which premièred in London in 2009 to great critical acclaim.  The Mountaintop opened on Broadway on 13 October 2011, starring Samuel L. Jackson (in his Broadway début) as King and Angela Bassett as a mysterious maid.  Directed by Kenny Leon, it ran 117 regular performances and 24 previews, closing on 22 January 2012.

Hall is also the book-writer, with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins, of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, the current juke-boxer that opened in November at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.  Other work includes Hurt Village (2012; currently in development as a feature film to be Hall’s film-directing début) and Our Lady of Kibeho (2014), Hall’s previous Residency 5 offerings at STC, and Children of Killers (2011). (Signature’s Residency 5 guarantees each playwright three productions of new plays over the course of a five-year residency.)

Hall has very strong socio-political views; race and ethnicity are often elemental to her dramaturgy.  The dramatist tries to represent the African-America community in her plays and promotes or celebrates social change. 

When, while taking an acting class at Columbia, Hall’s  teacher told the class to find plays with characters who looked like them, Hall and her scene partner, another young Southern black woman, searched the university library to no avail.  There were no plays with two black women in the cast, so Hall thought: “I have to write those plays, then.  I have to carry that baton forward and write us into existence because if I don’t who else will?"

In 2017, she was named artistic director of the Hattiloo Theater, an African-American repertory theater in Memphis dedicated to “the diversity of black expression.”  Hall said “she hopes to help bring about ‘a renaissance, a revitalization of the arts in Memphis.’”   Hall’s dedication to her city and her heritage is expressed in a comment she made at the time: “Everything that Memphis is, is represented  in my art.”

Hall’s awards include a Laurence Olivier Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Award, Lark Play Development Center Playwrights of New York (PONY) Fellowship, Kate Neal Kinley Fellowship, two Lecompte du Nouy Prizes from Lincoln Center, Fellowship of Southern Writers Bryan Family Award in Drama, NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellowship, and the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award.  Hall was shortlisted for the London Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award and received the Otis Guernsey New Voices Playwriting Award from the William Inge Theatre Festival.  She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Ron Brown Scholar Program, and the Coca-Cola Scholar Program. 

The world première of The Hot Wing King began performances at the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, the company’s 191-seat proscenium house, on 11 February 2020; the production, directed by Hall’s collaborator, Steven H. Broadnax, III, opened on 1 March.  I caught the 7:30 p.m. performance on Friday, 6 March.  After one extension for the originally announced final performance on 15 March, Hot Wing King was scheduled to close on 22 March, but the coronavirus pandemic caused Signature to cease all performances after 11 March.

In the Memphis house owned by Dwayne (Korey Jackson), a successful hotel manager, Cordell (Toussaint Jeanlouis) is preparing the ingredients for the town’s annual hot-wing contest.  He’s sure he has a good chance of winning the $5,000 prize this year with a new recipe, “Cajun Alfredo with Bourbon-Infused Crumbled Bacon”—especially with the help of his friends Dwayne, Isom (Sheldon Best), and Big Charles (Nicco Annan).  The four African-American men are all gay and Cordell is Dwayne’s housemate and lover.

Two months ago, the forty-ish Cordell left his wife, two sons, and job as a FedEx executive in St.  Louis to move in with Dwayne.  His wife won’t sign the divorce papers and Cordell hasn’t been able to find a job in Memphis and he feels a little like a kept man in Dwayne’s house—not that Dwayne, an eminently reasonable and thoughtful man, has said or done anything to give this impression

Cordell’s team, the New Wing Order, who gather for this occasion every year—Cordell has entered before, but never won—consists of his and Dwayne’s closest friends who treat the occasion as a special event for the four of them.  Isom, in his thirties and the youngest of the group, is an outright flamer, femmy, outrageous, and funny; when Dwayne gives the men special team shirts for the contest, Isom adds glitter to his and cuts the bottom off to reveal his midriff.  (The costumes are the work of Emilio Sosa, who seems to have had the most fun with Isom’s garb.)  During the first scene, sports-loving Big Charles keeps running back to the TV in the living room to check on a game in progress while Cordell is organizing the prep in the kitchen. 

The whole process is almost-organized chaos, and supplies the comedy for Hall’s bifurcated play: half sit-com and half family drama.  The cracks in Dwayne and Cordell’s relationship are a hint of the drama to come, and it gets a boost from the arrival of Dwayne’s former brother-in-law, TJ (Eric B. Robinson, Jr.).  TJ’s a drug-dealer and small-time crook.  He was married to Dwayne’s sister, an emotionally disturbed woman who died while under police restraint and Dwayne feels guilty because he had called the cops when she was having an episode.

TJ’s come by to leave a package of money for his son, sixteen-year-old Everett, known as “EJ” (Cecil Blutcher), who shows up himself asking to stay with his uncle.  Dwayne’s guilt over the death of EJ’s mother, which the boy witnessed, compels him to look on the boy as his responsibility; he wants his nephew to live with him and Cordell—though Cordell has misgivings about the prospect.  EJ’s also a high school basketball star and Cordell, a former Georgetown Hoya b-ball player, tries to bond with his lover’s nephew over a little one-on-one on the backyard court.

The Hot Wing King shifts between the sit-com manicness of the cooking contest, which takes place mostly in the up-left kitchen of Michael Carnahan’s open-walled set, and the melodrama of the extended-family situation, which happens in the rest of the house, including the up-right bedroom, meant to be upstairs, that EJ will occupy, and the down-left back terrace where the basketball hoop is located.  The living room, fittingly at center stage, is neutral territory where scenes from both the cooking comedy and the family drama play out.

The two parts of the play do cross over some, but TJ is pretty much exclusively involved in the family plot, though his son enters the cooking comedy near the end of the play when Dwayne makes him an honorary member of the New Wing Order.  Big Charles and Isom stick mostly to the cooking scenario—Isom takes an action that effects the outcome of the competition, but I won’t reveal it now (though Hall telegraphs it long before its repercussions are seen); only Dwayne and Cordell are really part of both elements of The Hot Wing King. 

This isn’t the kind of play in which any real disaster occurs; the most dramatic thing to happen to Dwayne’s circle is the result of the hot-wing contest (which I also won’t reveal).  In the end, everyone is accommodated, even the criminally-inclined TJ.  What Hall’s writing about isn’t the hot-wing contest or the conflict among Dwayne, TJ, and EJ; the play’s also not about the potential conflict between Dwayne and Cordell (who never actually brings up his concerns to Dwayne). 

In addition to the Memphis hot-wing festival, Hall also drew inspiration for The Hot Wing King from the relationship of her brother and his lover, but the play isn’t really about gay men, black men, or gay black men; neither gayness nor race is an issue: the first is only mentioned a few times more or less in passing and the second not at all.  The Hot Wing King’s about how these guys, who are mostly unrelated to one another, make a family. 

I can’t tell you much detail, at least not cogently, about Katori Hall’s Hot Wing King.  The production, which ran two hours and 20 minutes with one intermission, was well done, and the acting was fine . . . but I couldn’t understand about two-thirds of what anyone was saying!

The problem I had—and I really hate to put this into words—is that they spoke in Southern black colloquialisms, like code.  One reviewer called it “the vibrant dialect of black Memphis,” and, from their laughter, it seemed most of the rest of the audience got the idiom.

It wasn’t a serious drawback for me when two of the men were just talking—then I could understand them fine.  (These scenes had another problem, though it wasn’t about comprehension, but believability.)  When the guys are all together and runnin’ off at the mouth, which they do a lot, it was just all gobbledygook to me.  I couldn’t even distinguish individual words—or even individual speakers!  

I can tell what Hall’s main theme for the play is; that really comes out in the quieter one-on-one scenes.  It’s not a bad point—but I had to sit through all the incomprehensible scenes of code-talk while Hall and her characters make it. 

As I said, however, Broadnax’s production was fine aside from this problem—which, I suppose, was at least partly my failing for not knowing the characters’ vernacular.  (I wasn’t the only spectator with this difficulty.  Michael Sommers of New York Stage Review remarked, “Frankly, some of the deeply Southern-fried lingo escaped my old Eastern Seaboard ears . . . .”)  Perhaps the director could have found a way to accommodate the old, white Northerners like me without sacrificing the veracity—or verisimilitude is maybe a more accurate word—of the characters and milieu, but I’m not convinced he could have. 

I would never say, though, that the actors were anything less than convincing either in their characterizations of the six Memphians or in their use of the local argot.  The cast as a whole, especially the four New Wing Order members, formed a true mini-community, a club to which they all belonged.  Another word for this might be . . . family.

The only times that this sense of closeness and familiarity is strained is when the play waxes serious.  In those moments, Hall wrote the characters dialogue that’s hyper poetic and lofty—the polar opposite of the local patois.  The tonal shift doesn’t quite work smoothly, and as much as the actors worked to make the sober scenes sound like conversation, the dialogue kept coming out as epigraphs. 

(In his New York Times review of Hall’s play, Ben Brantley, who had a complaint similar to mine, quotes one example of this shift in diction.  This is Cordell speaking to Dwayne: “I see why you steady [sic] treat me like a child.  I am.  It’s like I’ve just been pushed out of the womb and I’m getting hit with the cold and the air and the lights and the truth.”)

As in any good ensemble play, all the actors performed at the same level of excellence.  Even in the scenes which I had a hard time understanding, I had no difficulty feeling that the actors understood one another completely, playing off (and with) one another like the close and fond friends they were supposed to be.  The quality of the cast and the work of Broadnax was not in doubt.

Singling out a few for the significance of their roles, either for their function in the plot or the character challenge Hall gave them, I compliment Korey Jackson for making Dwayne the levelheaded stalwart he is.  Jackson makes him unquestionably the pater of this ad hoc familias, keeping everyone on an even keel.  The actor keeps Dwayne outwardly on control, even as he lets us see the turmoil he’s feeling inside.

As his partner, Cordell, Toussaint Jeanlouis conveys his seriousness about making his hot wings, no matter how lightly anyone else may take the task.  He can seem as even-tempered as Dwayne, but he’s far more fragile, and Toussaint lets this out at times then hides it away at others.  As Isom, the most flamboyant character in The Hot Wing King, Sheldon Best plays the hell out of his character; it’s hard to tell who’s having more fun, Best or Isom.  He literally light ups the stage and makes the most of Sosa’s costumes.

Best is also one of the two darlings of reviewers in Broadnax’s production.  The other is Cecil Blutcher, making his Off-Broadway début as the young EJ.  Now, Blutcher is considerably older than EJ, and the extra maturity and self-control shows in the way the actor conveys EJ’s confusion and hurt over the death of his mother and his father’s less-than conscientious parenting and his own wish to go down a different path than TJ.  In Blutcher’s hands, EJ’s outbursts and recriminations still indicate an underlying yearning and even goodness.  The actor’s delivery of a horrifying speech describing his mother’s shooting reveals a lot about EJ and his troubled demeanor.

I’ve already described Michael Carnahan’s set, which comprised four playing areas (in descending order of activity: kitchen, living room, back yard patio, and upstairs bedroom).  One reviewer, Marilyn Stasio of Variety, thought the concept was superfluous, but I (like most of the published reviewers) found it well used and practical in terms of an acting environment, not to mention a fine visual representation of Dwayne’s comfortable, un-showy, middle-class lifestyle.  (The kitchen incidentally, is practical and the men actually cook the sauce on stage—so the Griffin is filled with the aroma of cooking hot-wing sauce.)

Sosa’s costumes did the same thing for the characters: display each one’s personality and way of presenting themselves to the world in an unobtrusive (well, except for Isom’s flashy dress) way.  Alan C. Edwards’s lighting nicely isolates or integrates the different playing areas as needed while still allowing us to be aware that this is a home, not a series of rooms.  (Carnahan’s open walls go a long way to establishing this from preset; though we know there are “walls” there, no room is unconnected from any other.)

I’ve collected a dozen reviews of The Hot Wing King to survey.  Brantley in the Times acknowledged that the play “has its problems” but continued that “this likable but lumpy production . . . is never better than when its all-male ensemble is functioning as an awkward but interdependent unit.”  The characters “have that palpable, physical ease with one another, both contented and irritable, that comes from being part of a family.”  Hall, Brantley contended, “is asking what constitutes a family in a world of fragmentation.”  He added that the core characters are gay “allows Hall to challenge conventional definitions of manhood and fatherhood in black America,” using “the bright, peppy context of a classical sitcom structure to do so.” 

“The balance between social soap opera and buoyant comedy isn’t always gracefully sustained,” reported the Timesman, further noting, “Nor is the script able to comfortably fold its more somber subplots into the running, frantic story of the cooking contest.”  Furthermore, Brantley found, “When characters . . . talk about their deeper feelings, they tend to shift into improbably poetic flights of diction.” 

“What’s refreshing here is the matter-of-fact depiction of black gay characters who may be dissatisfied, to varying degrees, with their own behavior but not, ultimately, because of their sexuality,” asserted the Times reviewer. 

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout, quipping that “Katori Hall’s plays remind me of a sign I once saw over the front door of an unpretentious little restaurant: ‘NOT FANCY, BUT GOOD,’” observed that “there's nothing fancy about the down-to-earth dramaturgy of Ms. Hall's kitchen-sink chronicles of family life in all its varied aspects.” 

All she does—if “all” is the word—is tell stories about ordinary men and women who, as Jack Webb said of the characters in “Dragnet,” sound “as real as a guy pouring a cup of coffee.”  Yet truth gushes out every time they open their mouths, and before you know it, you’re caught up in their lives and fates.

Teachout dubbed Hall “one of the best playwrights we have,” and labeled The Hot Wing King “her finest play yet.”  After describing the situations in Hall’s script, the WSJ review-writer explained that “while ‘The Hot Wing King’ starts off playing the resulting complications for belly laughs, they end up being deeply, darkly serious.” 

Variety’s Stasio warned would-be theatergoers, “Good luck trying to follow the meandering plot of ‘The Hot Wing King,’” which she labels a “good-natured kitchen comedy.”  Stasio asserted, “Director Steve H. Broadnax III gets the best results when he keeps everybody and his uncle squished into the narrow kitchen.” 

The Variety reviewer continued, “Those crowd scenes work so well, you wonder why Hall . . . and her design team even bothered with the superfluous settings of a living room and an upstairs bedroom.  It certainly wasn’t demanded by the loose-limbed plot,” Stasio felt.  “Although it presents itself as a gay sitcom, the ‘sit’ isn’t sturdy enough to sustain the ‘com,’ which actually comes from the extremely likable characters.”

On TheaterScene.com, Julia Polinsky declared, “The play pushes all kinds of buttons and does it well.  Humor, anger, resentment, ambition, family, love, commitment: it’s all there, alternating between hilarious and searing.”  Polinsky reported that Hall “has written The Hot Wing King in a rapid-fire, delicious-sounding vernacular, which helps the play feel completely natural.”  The playwright “knows how to make you care as deeply about these men as Cordell cares about his wings,” felt the review-writer.  “Which is particularly interesting, because the basic story is pretty well-worn.”  Polinsky made some pertinent observations:

Lacking the milieu of gay African-American men, The Hot Wing King could be almost tedious—yawn, again?  The wayward teenage son looking for redemption?  The couple that’s uncomfortable with one person’s sacrifice and the other’s controlling behavior?  The friends, one warmhearted and wise, the other giddy and silly?  Sorry, but what’s new?  Been there, done that; let’s move on.  But Hall’s vivid characterizations and superb language, coupled with outstanding performances and terrific direction from Steve H. Broadnax III, makes The Hot Wing King feel fresh and new.  Not to mention, the knockout scenic design . . . and costumes that effortlessly create character . . . make it all work.  Really well.  Really, really well.

The reviewer concluded with the admonition: “Those tears in your eyes at The Hot Wing King?  They might be from the heat of some Suicide Flats, or from the heart of this tale of ambition, love, family, and Pili-Pili powder.” 

Labeling The Hot Wing King a “delectable new play,” James Wilson on Talkin’ Broadway remarked: “It is not uncommon for a theater production to appeal to the visual and aural senses, but it is rare that a show gets people talking about the enticing smells.”  Wilson quickly added, “To its credit, The Hot Wing King has abundant pleasures beyond its attention to aromatic detail.  Hall,” he reported, “artfully mixes a heaping dose of comedy, a dollop of sentimentality, and a dash of social commentary to create a rich and satisfying theater experience.” 

The TB reviewer lamented that the play “sometimes drifts into broad and formulaic situation-comedy mode, but the actors skillfully inject the characters . . . with complex humanity.”  He caviled a bit that, “[r]unning nearly two and a half hours, the play arrives a little overdone,” backing off, however, because “[t]here are a lot of laughs.”  Compared to other recent black-themed plays, Wilson asserted, “Hall’s The Hot Wing King does not push the boundaries of theatrical form and style in ways that other shows have, but it is certainly a viable contender.”  He concluded, “In its unabashed treatment of sexuality, masculinity and race, it is a play to be applauded and savored.”

On TheaterScene.net (not affiliated with the above-cited TheaterScene.com), Darryl Reilly labeled Hall’s play “uplifting” and said it’s “where comedy and drama deftly converge.”  He proclaimed it a “rewarding contemporary work.”  The reviewer praised “Hall’s gorgeous dialogue” as “a compendium of punchy lingo, colloquialisms and everyday realism,” and found, “Her command of structure is impeccable as the events unfold with force, suspense and insight.” 

Reilly labeled Broadnax’s staging “sharp,” Carnahan’s set design “artful,” Edwards’s lighting “adroit,” sound designers Luqman Brown and Robert Kaplowitz’s effects “sparkling,” and Sosa’s costumes “stylish.”  In conclusion, he affirmed, “The Hot Wing King’s accomplished depth continues to substantiate Hall’s preeminence as a leading playwright.”

The Hot Wing King “is a moderately heartwarming, sometimes amusing, occasionally clichéd dramedy with sitcom overtones,” declared Samuel L. Leiter on his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side.  “Performed under Steve H. Broadnax III’s buoyant direction, with raucous energy,” Leiter complained, “Balancing sitcom business and darker issues is a precarious endeavor that the play doesn’t always master.”  The “jokes and bickering” that dominate the first part of the play until “[e]ventually, more serious personal matters intrude” forces “a tonal shift.” 

The work of the design team, Leiter wrote, “go far to making The Hot Wing King tasty, although not quite enough to sustain a two hour and 20 minute meal.”  The actors “definitely make The Hot Wing King a sweet-tasting, if not particularly hot, concoction that many will enjoy,” but Leiter, like me, warned that “many listeners . . . will find themselves depending more on the expressive acting than the words spoken to follow along closely.” 

Zachary Stewart characterized The Hot Wing King as “a sensitive portrait of black masculinity, and the tension that can arise between fathers and sons when they don't see eye-to-eye,” on TheaterMania.  “The linguistic richness of The Hot Wing King makes it particularly delicious to hear,” affirmed Stewart. 

Through clever wordplay, shameless vowel substitution, and ’90s pop music references, these men have developed a vernacular that feels central to their identities as individuals and cohesion as a community. 

“Steve H. Broadnax III has directed a snappy production that seamlessly slides back and forth over the border between comedy and drama,” reported the TM reviewer.  Stewart praised Carnahan’s set, but he declared Sosa’s costumes “brilliant.”  The reviewer’s final comment was: “But as both a comedy and a drama, The Hot Wing King is quite filling, and will leave you with a satisfying aftertaste days later.”

On New York Theatre Guide, Stanford Friedman called Hall’s play “a tasty new work” that “comes in three flavors.” 

As directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, it is a classic buddy comedy with friends and lovers involved in bouts of physical tomfoolery and good-natured ribbing.  It is also a honey-glazed drama seasoned with uncertainty and dipped in guilt.  And it is a hot take on sons and fathers, biological and otherwise, in black America . . . .

“Saucy.  Spicy.  One hardly needs to be an experienced theater critic for these adjectives to pop into one’s head during the prolonged opening section of Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King.”  So asserted Brian Scott Lipton at the top of his Theater Pizzazz review—and then added, “The other word that popped into my critical head, however, was ‘surprising.’” 

Hall . . . is usually a writer of substance, so I didn’t expect her to simply pen an extended sitcom.  And Hall doesn’t disappoint.  The play suddenly makes a sharp tonal turn, and while the laughs don’t completely disappear, much of the next two hours is devoted to a dramatic and stunningly realistic exploration of several different kinds of male relationships.

The TP review-writer concluded: “Like a good hot wing, the play ends up having not just fire, but remarkable depth and flavor, all of which is brought out to perfection by an incredibly talented cast under Steve H. Broadnax III’s assured direction.”

Melissa Rose Bernardo, in the first of two notices for New York Stage Review, revealed, “It sounds hard to believe given the title, but The Hot Wing King is, at its core, not really a play about hot wings.”  Bernardo explained that “the wing-ding is really just a pretext . . . to bring together this group of men.”  The source of the drama?  Bernardo affirmed that “there’s no recipe, and there are no step-by-step instructions, for Dwayne and Cordell’s relationship.  Like the rest of us, they’ll just have to wing it.”

In NYSR review number two, Michael Sommers labeled the play “[f]requently a laugh out loud new comedy,” then explained, “On its occasionally serious side, the good-natured play considers a couple of issues that probably confront many an adult male relationship today.”  Sommers pronounced the première “smart and sassy” and called Hall “ever-astonishing.”  The second NYSR reviewer pointed out that Hall “develops the likable story” by “cunningly entwin[ing] thoughtful matters with some fairly broad comedy.” 

“A playful though ultimately sincere dramedy with an upbeat viewpoint, dynamic characters, and a happy ending,” reported Sommers, “The Hot Wing King is agreeably performed by a company of tiptop actors who appear highly natural and easy in their intimate interactions.”  The review-writer praised Sosa’s costumes and found that Broadnax “has done quite a capable job in guiding his company through the play’s changing emotional subtleties.”  He concluded that the play, which he found “sweet” and “relatively easygoing,” “delivers a worthy American story for today that is composed, produced, and performed with considerable intelligence and charm.”

*  *  *  *

DUE TO THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC, THE HOT WING KING  ENDED ITS RUN AT THE SIGNATURE THEATRE COMPANY ON 11 MARCH 2020

'Jumpers for Goalposts'

The final play in my series at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre was Tom Wells’s Jumpers for Goalposts, a U.S. première.  I caught the official opening performance in Studio’s Metheny Theatre, the matinee on Sunday, 17 May; the play started previews on 13 May and is scheduled to close on 21 June.  This was not only a play I didn’t know, but a playwright whose name I’d never heard before as well.  It was a delightful introduction to the work of an artist from whom I think we will hear more in the near future because he has an interesting and striking approach to theater and an eye and ear for human behavior which he portrays with a rare sensitivity.

Wells is a Britisher, born in East Yorkshire in 1985.  The son of a farmer, Wells won admission to Oxford University and graduated with a degree in English.  He returned to Yorkshire to study playwriting at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds; the company would début his first play, Me, As a Penguin, in 2009.  Though he’d wanted to be a writer, Wells wasn’t considering playwriting—but the WYP program was free, so, the young dramatist now says, “It was a happy accident that I got there and loved it.”  

Like Jumpers for Goalposts and many of his other plays, Penguin is set in the fishing town of Hull, a port city of a quarter million inhabitants where Wells grew up.  (“It’s about what happens when you’re outside your comfort zone,” said Wells in an interview five years ago.  “Obviously there’s a penguin involved . . . .”)  The WYP production toured Britain and ended up on the stage of London’s Arcola Theatre in 2010.  His next work, The Kitchen Sink, premièred at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2011, and was a break-out hit, garnering Wells the 2011 Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright and the 2012 George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright.  Jumpers for Goalposts premièred at the Watford Palace Theatre in London in 2013, a co-production of the Watford, London’s Paines Plough Theatre Company, and the Hull Truck Theatre, then toured Britain in 2013 (stopping in Hull) and ended with a well-received run at the Bush in 2014.  Other plays by Tom Wells include Notes for First Time Astronauts (2009), About a Goth (2009), Spacewang (2011), and Cosmic (2013).  (Wells has also written for TV and radio.)  From what I have been able to discern, none of his work has been staged in the U.S. until now—but I predict that Studio’s Jumpers won’t be Wells’s last stateside outing.  He’s far too interesting to expire on a stage in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.  (As I write these words, no reviews of the U.S. preem of Jumpers have been published.  I guess we’ll see if I’m right about his critical reception in a day or two.)

All of Wells’s scripts include at least one gay character.  (Jumpers has four—out of five.)  His plays, however, aren’t “gay” plays the way that descriptor usually signifies.  He’s gay and uses his experience of growing up and living as a gay man in Northern England as the material out of which he crafts his plays.  The plot and the dialogue reference gay events and topics—Jumpers’ story is about a gay pub soccer league, for instance—but what the play’s about is friendship, reaching out, looking for love, trust, and helping each other out.  It just happens that the people working all this out are mostly gay; but the issues are universal.  As David Muse, Studio’s artistic director, explains, Wells “writes a straightforward story with characters who happen to be gay, presenting their lives as varied, mainstream, and normal.  And he waits for a world where that act doesn’t feel so surprising.”  In other words, what Wells is doing is writing about ideas important to him (and, I believe, most of the rest of us) in a medium with which he’s intimately familiar.  Like any good, serious writer.  (Tennessee Williams wrote plays on important themes set in the American South; Neil Simon wrote his plays populated by Jews from New York; Marsha Norman and Wendy Wasserstein wrote about women; David Henry Hwang’s plays are mostly about Chinese-Americans.  ‘Write what you know,’ right?)

Muse says that Wells’s effort “to turn the assumptions of the ‘gay play’ on its head” is the second of the writer’s “two quietly subversive” intentions.  “The first,” writes Muse, is “upending the notion . . . that drama is conflict.”  The Studio head observes that Wells “is driven to write honestly about his experience of life, which seems to him to involve conflicted people trying to do right by each other far more frequently than people in direct conflict.”  ( I guess you could argue that the dramatist’s “conflict” is internal instead of external.)  Comparing Wells’s dramaturgy to that of Studio favorite Annie Baker, Muse concludes that the playwright “has a gift for making art out of the everyday.” 

Since I haven’t seen or read any of Wells’s other plays (some of his texts are published in British editions that are available at U.S. libraries and through Barnes & Noble or Amazon), I have to take Muse’s word that all of Wells’s work exhibits these characteristics.  I can attest to the fact that Jumpers does, and though some may find the writer’s dramaturgy sentimental or soft-hearted, I found the play charming and touching.  The characters are all likeable, even endearing, though hardly high-achievers, and I wanted them to succeed—if not at soccer, at least in their other, small (or, perhaps, not-so-small), personal desires.  (In tandem with Wells’s writing, of course, this effect is tremendously aided by the quality of the performances and the astuteness of Matt Torney’s direction.  I’ll get to these successes shortly.)

The 100-minute, intermissionless Jumpers for Goalposts, as I’ve already hinted, is set in the locker room of a public playing field in Hull where the five teammates of Barely Athletic, the pub soccer (they call it football, of course—silly Brits) team which makes up the cast, change after the five-a-side league games.  This is hardly World Cup soccer; it’s one step above pick-up or sand-lot games, and Barely Athletic easily measures up to its (intentionally) sarcastic name.  (A word about the title here: in street soccer, the popular equivalent I gather of stickball in New York City, the field is whatever empty space the players can find and the equipment is whatever they can improvise.  Often the goal is marked off with bits of clothing, such as jumpers, the common British word for sweaters or sweatshirts.  “Jumpers for goalposts” is a colloquial name for this kind of soccer game and is the title of a series of video games and at least one book on the sport, published in 2011, that has nothing to do with the play.)  Barely Athletic have the ignominious rep of losing all their games, so when 30-ish Viv is kicked off the Lesbian Rovers for being bossy, she appoints herself player-coach of Barely Athletic, a team made up principally of patrons of the pub she owns.  There’s 20-something Danny, her assistant coach who is trying to become a youth-soccer coach; Beardy Geoff, a stocky (and, I guess obviously, bearded) Falstaffian street busker, in his later 20’s; Viv’s widowed brother-in-law, Joe, turning 40 and the team’s token straight guy; and the new boy, 19-year-old Luke, an almost painfully shy library worker who still lives at home and dutifully returns after each game for dinner with the folks even as his new teammates gather at the pub. 

The five each have slightly different motives for wanting to be on the team.  Only Viv (Kimberly Gilbert) actually sees it as a sports outlet: she wants to beat the lesbians and hopes Barely Athletic will be her means—though she gets her coaching ideas from a Soccer Coaching for Dummies manual.  The others want to be part of the team for social purposes, the comradery and friendship: Danny (Zdenko Martin) has a crush on young Luke and wants Barely Athletic to be proof of his skill for the sports center’s manager.  Joe (Michael Glenn) is still grieving the loss of his wife and the team is a way to keep from sitting at home alone in despair.  Geoff (Jonathan Judge-Russo), unattached, isn’t beyond some serious flirting with members of the opposition; he’s also Danny’s best friend and confidant—for Danny has a secret which only Geoff knows.  Luke (Liam Forde), who has no friends of his own and confides the insignificant details of his ordinary life to his diary, was attracted to Danny the first time the older boy came into the library to hang a recruitment poster.  That’s just a nutshell summary, of course.  Wells’s characters and situation have a few quirks and curlicues I won’t disclose that prevent Jumpers from being simplistic or predictable.  Even the ending, which is a little pat and neat, isn’t inevitable—though the nature of the play suggests that it’ll be happy-ish or at least bitter-sweet.  Just as there are speed bumps along the way to the final scene, however, we can predict there’ll be more to come after the play’s over. 

Each scene of Jumpers begins as the lights come up on the thrust stage of the 200-seat Metheny with an unseen radio announcer (the voice of James Alexander Gordon, Scottish radio broadcaster famous for reading the soccer scores on BBC Radio) reeling off the scores of the matches played that Sunday.  (The sound design is by Kenny Neal.)  The five players file into the changing room and banter as they change out of their soccer uniforms and back into street clothes.  This is how we meet them; the backstories and exposition is excellently handled by Wells—even Danny’s secret comes out naturally.  Viv launches into her performance notes—but remarkably without recriminations or scolding.  Losing, in Wells’s world, is okay, as long as you try your hardest and take your best shot—even if it’s at the other team’s goal!   (Viv does try to get Beardy to lose his childish knit hat, his “good-luck” charm—not that it’s really working!—but he resists, revealing that he wears it to hide the scar on his forehead from a recent gay-bashing he suffered.)  As the play unfolds, and we learn more bits about each player, they actually manage to win one game (against Tranny United—Get it?  Like Manchester United—a team that played in leopard-print skirts and high heels on a muddy field!) and tie another.  The rest, Barely Athletic loses, so Viv doesn’t beat the lesbian team this season—but there’s always next year! 

The single set, a bare-bones changing room with a shower off-stage up left, designed with spot-on look by Studio’s house designer, Debra Booth, is the world of this play.  The five characters may have outside lives—the pub, their jobs, their homes—but this is where the people we get to know live.  The cast dwells here as if they’d been coming to this place for years, amid the left-overs of other teams, the dirt they track in from the field (which Danny sweeps up as the rest of the team filter out), the first-aid box on the wall, the folding chars stacked against a wall.  Shared with other players in other leagues, this is still their universe when we see them, and Michael Giannitti’s lighting brings the whole place to drab, harsh—but familiar—life as the players file in after the match.  The same’s true of Kathleen Geldard’s sports-kit costumes.  These folks live in them, for all their lack of athletic prowess, they’re as comfortable in the gear as they are in their own skins.  (Halfway through the play, Viv brings in new jerseys personalized for each team member: “Coach Viv,” “Assistant Coach Danny,” and even “Token Straight Joe.”  They’re all comfortable with who they are to one another.  This is not a fish-out-of-water play: these people are perfectly content with who and where they are.)

Torney’s staging is natural and straightforward, nothing fancy or showy; some of the actors even sit with their backs to us on occasion.  He’s created with his actors a sense that these five are comfortable with one another and with their surroundings—this is everyday life for them.  The movement, though minimal in the confined quarters of the locker room, is plenty for keeping the play from seeming static—horseplay, an occasional bit of practice (they try to make a goalie of Joe), changing, sweeping up, and so on.  The life on stage seems neither practiced nor gratuitous.  The play’s emotional life, too, is naturally modulated—no histrionic highs or depression lows.  As Studio dramaturg Adrien-Alice Hansel puts it, “The conflicts and triumphs are modest but potent—exactly life-sized,” and Torney’s company conveys this on stage superbly.

With the help of dialect coach Gary Logan, Torney’s cast masters the Yorkshire accent consistently and (to my ear) accurately enough to be convincing.  (My companions did mention that they sometimes had trouble understanding the dialect, and I did, too, but that didn’t detract from the point of the play, which doesn’t depend on foreknowledge of the Yorkshire idiom or British soccer culture.  The things that do matter come through loud and clear, trust me.)  Torney’s major directorial achievement, though, is to have melded the five actors, who don’t seem to have ever worked together or at Studio or for Torney before, into a perfect ensemble.  For 100 minutes, I had no trouble believing that these folks are buds.  Individual stage characters are the creations of the actor, guided, certainly, by the director—but a real acting ensemble is the accomplishment of the director.  It starts with the casting, but it’s not easy to manage.  Jumpers doesn’t work on stage if the five actors aren’t a team—just like Barely Athletic are supposed to be on the soccer field (. . . er, football pitch).

Creating the ensemble may have been Torney’s job, but those individual character portrayals are well seen-to as well.  (This is an actors’ play—the cast and their work must carry the production.)  I’m not familiar with any of this cast’s work, even the D.C.-area vets in the company, but they all give exemplary performances.  No one falls back on stereotypes or clichés—not that Wells’s writing leads in that direction anyway—and no one shies away from committing to the characters’ more unappealing traits.  Gilbert’s Viv, for instance, is bossy, but she’s no bitch dyke with a brush cut.  In fact, Gilbert plays her as almost maternal—a little brusque around the edges, but if Barely Athletic were the Lost Boys, Gilbert’s Viv would be Wendy.  If Wendy were a lesbian, that is. 

Though young Luke is the obvious shy guy in the bunch, Martin plays Danny with almost equal diffidence.  While Luke’s timidity comes from lack of worldly experience, Martin’s Danny is just a gentle person.  His awkwardness when he reveals his secret to Luke makes palpable Danny’s reluctance to tell his new friend what we can also see he knows he must.  Martin’s disappointment at the way Luke takes the news is almost too intense to watch (even though we can guess that a reversal must be coming).  If Martin could pass for a healthy young athlete, though, Forde is the classic geek—tall, gangly, skinny, beanpole-straight.  He could be a goalpost!  He absolutely looks like the kind of awkward kid who’d have trouble constantly trying to push on a “pull” door.  But Forde makes Luke so endearing, so in need of peer companionship, that his welcome into the group is self-justifying.  Of course, Forde’s portrayal of the long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs makes Luke’s quiet return to the locker room after a breach all the more powerful. 

If Viv is the mom in this ad hoc surrogate family, and Luke and Danny the little brothers, Judge-Russo’s Beardy is the older brother; though not always wise or even reliable—no Wally Cleaver or David Nelson, this big bro—his Beardy’s innately protective and present.  Judge-Russo’s a bear of a guy, roly-poly with a big, round face, but he’s a teddy, not a grizzly.  His Beardy is just as needy as any of the others, and as vulnerable, but he keeps putting himself out there, even when it’s not so advisable.  Beardy’s a busker, a street entertainer, but Judge-Russo (who has some operas on his résumé) doesn’t present him as someone who sings or plays his (hot pink) guitar like a pro—yet his aim throughout the play is to select and perform a song in the audition for a Pride celebration coming up.  (In the last scene, Beardy decides on a pop cover of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel that’s become a soccer anthem in the U.K.  Now there’s Wells’s message for this play.)

That leaves Joe—not a father figure despite being older than his mates, but more like the concerned uncle (he is Mom’s brother-in-law after all).  Glenn’s portrayal is a sad sack, as much in need of the team’s support as they might be in need of his.  His (lack of) facial expressions remind me some of Buster Keaton, “The Great Stone Face.”  Indeed, Glenn infuses Joe with some of Keaton’s warmth and sympathy.  Even though Joe’s the only straight member of the team and despite his total lack of athletic ability—less even perhaps than any of the rest (the scene in which Danny and Beardy try to teach Joe to be a goalie is priceless)—Glenn makes him an integral part of the group, a member in as good standing as Danny or Beardy, as welcome as newcomer Luke and leadership-usurper Viv.    

We don’t know what will become of Luke and Danny’s nascent relationship.  We never learn if Danny gets his job at the sports center.  We don’t know if Beardy even makes the audition, much less secures a spot on the program or gets the career boost he hopes for.  We’ll never hear if Barely Athletic ever beats the Lesbian Rovers (Viv turns over head-coaching to Danny at the end of Jumpers) or even wins another game.  But we can be sure that, as long as these five are together, they won’t ever walk alone.  And that’s what Tom Wells wants us to know.  I know some people who’ll see that as sappy.  That’s okay.  I’m a sap.

Now it’s time to see if any of the published critics agree with me or not and if, as I predicted, Tom Wells and Jumpers for Goalposts get their own career boosts on this side of the Atlantic.  So, starting with the Washington Post, Nelson Pressley, describing the play as “sweet and feather-light,” writes that “there’s a bashfulness to this tender play that makes you want to put your arm around it.”  “Wells’s script is decidedly offbeat,” Pressley continues: “You may be hard-pressed to name a recent play as ginger as this.”  The Postman sums up, “For a locker-room play, it’s astoundingly decent,” but he warns that all the characters’ lives are “gravely complicated” and the play “deepens” as it unfolds and that “the touching performances and graceful writing add up.”  (I cheated a bit: the Post published its notice on the morning before I wrote this part of the report.  I already knew that Pressley generally agrees with me.) 

In Metro Weekly, Washington’s LGBT magazine, Doug Rule also calls the play “touching” and “tender” (a trend, I think we’ll find) and “is as winsome as they come.”  Rule praises the quality of the cast Torney assembled to impart Wells’s “quietly powerful and eventually surprising tale.”  The Metro man, however, notes that Jumpers “tackles some big issues and aspects of modern-day life . . . in a remarkably realistic, restrained way.”  A “tart-but-tender romantic comedy” is how Chris Klimek characterizes Jumpers in Washington City Paper, but he quibbles that the play “would be even stronger if it ended 10 minutes earlier,” ultimately forgiving Wells because the acting is so good in the late scene he thinks we don’t need.

On DC Theatre Scene, Steven McKnight, noting that “Wells has the rare ability to find humor in ordinary people and here he mines the comedy in the real-life difficulties of his characters with wit and affection,” reports that Jumpers for Goalposts demonstrates “heartwarming humor and charm.”  McKnight does find that some of Jumpers’ “more serious turns feel a little forced or obvious” and that the plot “is wrapped up a bit too neatly,” but he adds that Torney’s direction “manages to minimize these difficulties.”  April Forrer dubs Studio’s staging of Jumpers for Goalposts “a hands-down terrific production of a charming script” on MD Theatre Guide, declaring, “Each character is completely lovable and layered in distinct ways, so getting to know each one is a joy.”  In the end, Forrer proclaims, “This play is a gem.”  Jumpers is “a sweet, side-splittingly funny, and subversive romantic comedy,” writes John Stoltenberg of DCMetroTheaterArts, in a production “that will knock your sweat socks off.”  Wells, says Stoltenberg, has “a wholly original angle of vision that, besides being laugh-out-loud hilarious, is heartwarming and liberating,” and dubs Jumpers “an incandescent comedy.” 

TheaterMania’s Barbara Mackay affirms that Wells has written such a “sensitive, intelligent” play that it manages “to reveal intense heartache and joy “ in Studio’s “excellent American premiere.”  The playwright “writes with a light touch,” says Mackay, “drawing his characters with a great deal of humor and an equal amount of serious emotion, without making them sound maudlin.”  While on Broadway World, Heather Nadolny describes Jumpers as “heartfelt, well balanced and does not try too hard,” and finds that in a theater where plays are overwritten and underdeveloped, “this one is a winner.”  Each of the familiar characters, Nadolny says, “connects with audience” and Wells’s “heartstring-tugging moments are balanced with hilarious jokes, quips and physical comedy.”  The Studio production, Nadolny reports, provides “romance, wit and empa[t]hy” and she emphatically advises, “See it, and enjoy.”

'Choir Boy' (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.)

Once again I made the trip downtown in Washington to see a show at the Studio Theatre here.  This was the matinee performance of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy on Sunday, 11 January 2015, presented in the Studio’s 225-seat Metheny Theatre at the company’s Northwest 14th Street home in the Logan Circle neighborhood. 

Directed at Studio by Kent Gash, the founding director of the New Studio on Broadway of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, the 100-minute Choir Boy was commissioned by New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club.  It premièred at London’s Royal Court Theatre in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in September 2012 and then had its U.S. début at MTC in July 2013.  McCraney’s play went on to performances at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta (September-October 2013), the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. (September-October 2014), and GableStage in Coral Gables, Florida, in January 2015; Choir Boy will be presented at Mill Valley, California’s Marin Theatre Company in June and the Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis in June and July.  The intermissionless one-act opened at Studio on 7 January and is scheduled to close on 22 February.  [The production was subsequently extended until 1 March 2015.]  

McCraney was born in 1980 in Miami, where he attended the New World School of the Arts High School.  He went on to the Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago where he got a BFA in acting.  He graduated from the Yale School of Drama’s playwriting program in 2007 with the Cole Porter Playwriting Award.  He acted with the Steppenwolf Theater Ensemble in Chicago and the Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Illinois.  McCraney’s also worked with Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Etienne of the Bouffes du Nord in Paris.  For his writing, the 34-year-old artist has received the first Paula Vogel Playwriting Award (2007), London’s Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright (2008), the New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award for The Brothers Size (2009), the Steinberg Playwright Award (2009), the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize  (2013), and the MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius” grant; 2013), among other honors.  From 2009 to 2011, McCraney was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s International Playwright in Residence; he was the Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University in 2009 and currently holds a seven-year residency at the New Dramatist Center in New York.

Among McCraney’s other plays are The Brother/Sister Plays trilogy: The Brothers Size (Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, New York, 2006), In The Red and Brown Water (Young Vic Theatre, London, 2008), Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet (Public Theater, 2009); The Breach (Southern Rep Theatre, New Orleans, 2007); Wig Out! (Vineyard Theater, New York, 2008); American Trade (Hampstead Theatre, London, 2011); Head of Passes (Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago, 2013).  Studio artistic director David Muse characterizes the “beating heart of” McCraney’s work as “language,”  asserting of the playwright’s prose, “On the page, it looks like verse.  To the ear, it sounds like music,” and Lauren Halvorsen, Studio’s dramaturg, writes, “His work is characterized by rich emotional landscapes and lyrical, character-driven language.”  According to Muse, McCraney’s plays focus on “the recurring theme of fitting in.  Of brotherhood and its challenges,” and Halvorsen observes that Choir Boy explores the “friction between upholding tradition and speaking your truth.” 

A coming-of-age story about responding to human differences and to bullying by multidimensional characters who’re bonded by the Gospel music they sing together and the common humanity we all share, Choir Boy, set in the present, depicts a year in the lives of a group of African-American students at the fictional Charles R. Drew Preparatory School for Boys, a historically black boarding school somewhere in the South, as they struggle with questions of identity and sexuality.  Pharus Jonathan Young is a bright, devoted, and enthusiastic Drew student.  At the end of his junior year, his pride in singing the school anthem at the graduation ceremony on the eve of the school’s 50th anniversary is marred by the anti-gay slurs hissed at him from the auditorium by one of his schoolmates, causing the young student-singer to stop in mid-performance.

Pharus doesn’t speak of his sexuality—the school is essentially in denial that homosexuality might actually exist at Drew—but as the character’s portrayed somewhat effeminately, he’s not really hiding it, either.  (Concerned about the image set by the school’s choir “lead,” Headmaster Marrow warns Pharus about “your wrist.”  The student responds disingenuously that it’s just a wrist, “a joint on my arm!”)  The action begins when he refuses to divulge the name of the boy who taunted him, insisting on behaving “as a Drew man should.”  Even under threat of expulsion, Pharus maintains that this would be a breach of the student’s honor code.

But Pharus also knows that he can exact his own private revenge.  Gospel music at Drew is a tradition nearly as old as the school itself—the play, as its title intimates, is larded with gospel singing—and that tradition is embodied in its choir, where Pharus, as Drew’s best singer, can stand out and be different without fear.  And as lead of the choir his senior year, he has the authority to decide who can and cannot sing.  At the choir’s first meeting of the new school year, after a few pointed comments from the boy he believes humiliated him, Robert “Bobby” Marrow III, nephew of the headmaster, Pharus flares into righteous mode and kicks Bobby out of the gospel group.  “Choir Boy isn’t autobiographical,” David Muse observes, “but coming from an exceptionally talented gay writer who grew up in the South, it is clearly a deeply personal work.”

I haven’t really sorted Choir Boy out yet—maybe by the end of this report I’ll have some kind of handle on it—but my initial reaction left me unimpressed.   Studio has presented three other of McCraney’s plays, The Brother/Sister Plays in 2008, 2010, and 2011, and the dramatist has a slew of awards and prizes, but I’m underwhelmed by the dramaturgy I saw here, so I’m either missing something (always a possibility) or he’s not as good as his rep.

Choir Boy’s set in the present, but contends with what I’d say is a retro issue, by now even in the black community: a gay student among the elite.  (My companions thought the play might have been set in an earlier decade to account for this attitude; the program doesn’t state the setting.)  Furthermore, I found the whole thing contrived, set up, and artificial, including, in a rare instance for Studio, the performances. There are two adults in the cast, and they’re damn near caricatures; the headmaster is almost a cartoon and I’m not sure if he’s written as one or if Marty Austin Lamar played him that way (under Kent Gash’s guidance, of course).  McCraney says of Choir Boy, “The play itself is asking us to see that all of these young men are complex, are full human beings, are, as a donor said the other night, ‘as complex as the 13.8 billion years of stardust that make us up.’”  His point, he explains, is that “the moment we look at any individual human as just simple plain what we think or have been told they are, we then stop allowing their humanity” and then Gash echoes this declaration: “There’s a line in the play: ‘We are fearfully and marvelously made.’  Well, that’s true.  And we are many things.  And the play is demanding that we reckon with that, and acknowledge it and embrace it.”  The problem I had, though, is that I didn’t actually see that on the stage. 

I also had the feeling that, first, McCraney’d written the play around the idea of using gospel music as a motif—there’s considerable singing, which doesn’t seem to have much to do with the plot or the themes—so that the music came first and the drama came second, and, further, that Gash had assembled the cast on the basis of their singing voices over their acting abilities—singers who could act, not actors who could sing.  

Now, I should confess that I’m not a fan of gospel music.  I can appreciate the vocal harmonies, but the songs themselves don’t move me.  One reason may be, of course, that they’re Christian religious songs, so I just don’t connect with them.  As little as I feel the music contributes to the drama, there’s a lot of it in Choir Boy, so I was at a distinct disadvantage from the get-go.  I’ll have to work out what any of this—the music in the play and my response or lack of response to it—means in terms of my assessment.  Again, maybe that’ll develop as I write.

The Studio’s production of Choir Boy is staged in what for all intents and purposes is an amphitheater, giving it the kind of atmosphere of an operating theater or an old-time lecture hall.  Jason Sherwood’s set is composed of a circular floor of multi-hued parquet, half-encircled by a dark-paneled wall with five open doorframes.  (In a couple of scenes, the doorways serve as shower stalls, with working spray heads in what one of my grad school teachers would call “Gee-Whizz Realism.”)  Above the doorways is a row of picture frames, but the images in them shift as the scenes change from one school space to another, and some of the wall décor changes as well.  (The pictures in the frames help establish the time as the present: I’m pretty sure, my questionable eyesight notwithstanding, that in several scenes Barak Obama is depicted.  Another set of photos seems to be a display of civil rights heroes, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy.)  Otherwise, the only scenery that’s shifted are set pieces rolled or carried on by the actors—the beds of Pharus and his roommate’s dorm room, the benches of the choir’s practice room; many of the scenes have no other scenery than the constructed unit, as on an Elizabethan stage.  All in all, it was a perfectly serviceable set which evoked a general sense of a traditional prep school trying to hark back to the Eatons and Harrows of legend (and I went to one of those kinds of schools in this country, too) while allowing the spectators enough leeway to add our own details and specifics to make McCraney and Gash’s Drew Prep an “Everyschool” (well, okay—an “Every Prep School”).  Of course, when the boys get to singing, the little circular stage works excellently as a performance space, even if the scene is supposed to be a rehearsal or a class.  (The boys also sing in the showers at one point, putting them each in an alcove up stage, arrayed in a semi-circle like a peculiar kind of choral group.)

Dawn Chiang’s lighting and Kathleen Geldard’s costumes both add to the atmosphere of a tradition-bound institution.  The play’s dress requirements are, needless to say, restricted by the Drew uniform, a blue blazer (the group’s star ball-player wears a Drew letter jacket), chinos, white dress shirt, and orange-and-gold striped tie.  The boys’ shoes and hairdos are the only individualized aspects of their appearances, while the adults might as well be wearing uniforms, too, since they both had on suits—Headmaster Marrow’s was a three-piece, of course.  Like their behavior, individuality and non-conformity in dress is not encouraged among the boys at Drew—though Pharus is the only student whose shoes aren’t black.  He alone wears tan bucks—not showy, but they do stand out.  (Bobby wears black running shoes with blue soles—his self-assertion, I suppose.)

I still don’t know if the complaints I have with the production style are the fault of McCraney’s script or Gash’s direction, but I’ve already said I found Studio’s Choir Boy contrived and artificial.  The formality of the setting may also have encouraged the kind of brittle, almost presentational performance style the cast employed, and since I don’t know either McCraney’s other plays or the previous productions of Choir Boy, I don’t really know if that’s common to the writer’s work or this play, or if it’s a construct of this director and this cast.  Lamar’s headmaster was so bombastic and officious that I hardly believed he was a real person.  He over-enunciated his words as if the vocabulary was all new to him, a man out of his rhetorical depth even though he’d been in his post for at least three years.  Marrow’s described in the Studio casting notice as “Shrewd operator when it comes to school politics.  Man with heart who leads with tough love,” but that’s not the figure I saw Lamar project. 

The other grown-up is Mr. Pendleton, a former history master at Drew who comes out of retirement to teach a special course and oversee the choir.  Pendleton, played by Alan Wade, is white and 60 or 70 years old, but he’s supposed to be a fervent teacher with a surprising passion about the ’60s civil rights movement (he marched with King, Marrow tells the boys) which leads to one shining moment of genuine anger when the boys start tossing the label “Nigger” at one another.  But Wade’s portrayal (and/or McCraney’s writing) makes him a doddering, slightly addled old white man among the young African Americans, trying too hard and failing.  What passes for wisdom and a Socratic attempt to encourage critical, out-of-the-box thinking only sounds like pedagogical pap.  I don’t know Wade’s work (or Lamar’s, either), so I don’t know if this is his usual kind of performance, or if he’s been miscast or misdirected, but if not for that single stand-out moment, I’d have said the character was meant to be a bad comic stereotype.

McCraney was successful, at least, in differentiating the five young students, and the actors did carve out distinct characters for them.  What I can’t say, though, is that the boys were unique or exceptional figures, more than the students in any prep school drama on screen or stage.  The fact that they’re all gospel singers comes off more as an artificial distinction, like the writers and artists at the school in the movie Words and Pictures (about which I wrote on ROT on 25 July and 16 September 2014), though in that case the writing and drawing were central to the plot.  The singing in Choir Boy seems like an add-on—and a justification for the play’s title.  Given that the students were written with so little beyond stock character traits, the actors weren’t especially motivated to rise above clichéd performances.  Even Pharus’s supposed intelligence comes off in Jelani Alladin’s portrayal as adolescent pedantry rather than real smarts.  He’s no Holden Caulfield and the other students—Eric Lockley’s Junior Davis (the naïve sidekick), Jaysen Wright’s Anthony Justin “AJ” James (the open-hearted jock), Keith Antone’s Robert “Bobby” Marrow III (the angry and privileged—and homophobic—alpha male), and Jonathan Burke’s David Heard (the sensitive would-be pastor—and closeted homosexual)—fare no better.  They don’t give dishonest performances by any means, but they never rise above the expected and stereotypical.  Even the big “surprise” at the end isn’t such a surprise—one of my companions said afterwards that she saw it coming early on in the play.  If they weren’t black and gospel singers, they could be the kids in Dead Poets Society or Tea and Sympathy (how’s that for a retro reference!), and the performances don’t rise above the familiar roles McCraney seems to have written. 

The a cappella singing is superb—which is why I feel the actors were cast for their singing talent over their acting talent—even if I never saw the thematic or dramatic purpose in the gospel music.  That shower scene, which Chiang’s lighting makes looks like it’s set in a chapel, is technically marvelous: a lot of people sing in the shower, but these guys do it in five-part harmony!  (The song is “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and the musical direction for Choir Boy is by Darius Smith.)  But what’s its point?  If gospel music is supposed to have been a thematic underpinning to whatever McCraney wants to say with Choir Boy, it didn’t communicate to me.  Granted, I’m ignorant about this musical tradition, but if the lyrics are supposed to enhance the play’s ideas and points, I didn’t hear it.  There’s a whole scene devoted to a discussion of the Negro spiritual which told me a few factoids of which I wasn’t aware, but it’s part of what I described above as Pharus’s pedantry; it didn’t reveal anything about the boys, the school, or the issues with which they’re dealing.  The cast—even Headmaster Marrow takes a turn vocalizing—executed the gospel singing well, but it never elucidated the stuff of the play for me. 

I may be a minority of one in my opinion about Choir Boy.  In the Washington Post, for instance, Celia Wren declares that “‘Choir Boy’ sings a stirring tune” with gospel songs that “open further windows onto the tangled sweep of American history and civics.”  She calls the Studio production “sturdy and often powerful” that “deals with themes of major social import.”  “Gash and his team have given the work a handsome realization,” asserts Wren.  “From start to finish, this play will have you anticipating what’s next while wondering, ‘Who’s the b[a]d guy?’” asserts Washington Informer’s D. Kevin McNeir.  “If one exists at all.”

“[T]he real power of” Choir Boy, writes Doug Rule in MetroWeekly, “is in McCraney’s subtle, graceful and evocative style of storytelling” for which Gash “has corralled a strong group of young singing actors.”  Thus the play reveals “a few tear-inducing moments” as well as “plenty of gentle laughs, through clever wordplay and a few choice cultural critiques.”  “Choir Boy looks like a big hit, and it deserves to be,” declares Washington City Paper’s Chris Klimek.  In Washington Life Magazine, Chuck Conconi reports, “Kent Gash’s smooth and understated direction allows the intensity and poignancy of McCraney’s complex script” that demonstrates “the pessimistic truth that . . . tradition can uplift, but it can also constrain.”

On MD Theatre Guide, Tina Ghandchilar recommends, “If you’re in the mood to see a play filled with some hearty gospel soulful a cappella music, Choir Boy is the show to see.”  “Director Kent Gash builds a fascinating world dense with thorny intersections of race, class, and sexuality that are sometimes funny, sometimes uncomfortable,” writes Michael Poandl of DCMetroTheaterArts, staging a play that’s “about forgiveness, and to this end there are moments that are extremely moving.”  The DCMTA reviewer found the Studio production “a thought-provoking, entertaining, and cathartic experience.”  On DC Theatre Scene, Jennifer Clements insists that “if you see one show at Studio Theatre in 2015, let it be Choir Boy.”  Having been less than satisfied by McCraney’s earlier offerings at Studio, Clements, the most enthusiastic reviewer among the local web writers, pronounces that “this powerhouse of a show is the type of journey that reverberates long after you leave the theatre,” describing the play as “nothing short of kaleidoscopic” and “a reminder of the intrinsic potency of theatre.”  She declares in the end, “It parts our lips into smiles, it shatters our hearts to dust, and begs us to look more closely at our fellow man.  This daring play should be required theatregoing for anyone who believes in the transformative power of the stage.”

In the New York-based cyber press, Jennifer Perry of Broadway World finds that “a strong ensemble cast brings [Choir Boy] to life . . . in an excellent way,” writing that “McCraney's powerful, plot-driven play is engaging to say the least.^”  Perry characterizes McCraney’s dialogue as “like poetry ‘with a purpose,’” emphasizing that the playwright’s use of language “sets the play apart from other popular offerings that deal with similar subject matter,” though she complains that “Choir Boy treads . . . into after-school special, predictable territory.”  Of the acting, the BWW reviewer says that the cast “uses McCraney’s powerful language to establish an emotional arch worthy of attention no matter whether one identifies with the characters’ plights or not.”  On Talkin’ Broadway, Susan Berlin calls McCraney’s play with music “riveting,” even though she observes that it’s “less a propulsive story than a series of vignettes.”  In the performances, Berlin adds that director Gash “has created an ensemble of performers who work as a unit while each actor manages to maintain his individuality.”  A “taut, well-written play,” writes Barbara Mackay of TheaterMania, which “unfolds through a series of short scenes,” and in which the “most interesting thing about these five men is the way they come together when singing.”  “McCraney's writing,” observes Mackay, “is colorful and often poetic” and “Kent Gash keeps the action flowing quickly and smoothly.”  The TM review-writer concludes, “McCraney is a young playwright to watch.”