Ain't No Mo'

Closing notices have been posted for Jordan E. Cooper's wonderful Ain't No Mo', which is a  shame: the show, which only opened on Broadway three weeks ago, richly deserves to connect with audiences. I hope ticket sales pick up as a result of attempts on the part of the company to keep it alive. 

This season has been particularly rough-going for lesser-known properties, which struggle to find spectators even in good times. It's especially hard right now, given a muted holiday season in which tourism remains down and infections from Covid (along with a number of other dangerous ailments) remain up. Still, if you're in the mood for a heady, high-energy satire that lets everyone in on the joke even as it centers on the joys and trials of Black life in contemporary America, put on a high-quality mask and get your butt into a seat at the Belasco for a swift, deeply rewarding 90 minutes that, if you're like me, will leave you wishing for more. 

Ain't No Mo' is essentially a series of sketches held loosely together with an overarching conceit: the US government is offering all members of the African diaspora free one-way tickets back. Black people are free to stay in the US if they want, but the show regularly implies that such a choice isn't going to be especially safe or wise. That such a premise can be taken as both ridiculously funny and deeply painful results in dichotomies that are mined brilliantly and fluidly throughout the show: Ain't No Mo' is frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious, until all of a sudden it's unbearably sad. Don't worry: you'll be laughing again in a minute, even if you're wiping away tears as you do. 

A sketch show is inevitably going to suffer some inconsistencies, but even during Ain't's occasional lulls, I found myself all-in. The breakneck speed--not only of many of the sketches, but also of some of the more impressive monologues--helps a lot. So does the extraordinary ensemble, which includes the playwright in drag as a harried new employee at an airport check-in counter responsible for sending Black Americans off on the last flight out of the US. The rest of the cast is consistently on point, and so committed that I found myself occasionally wondering if there were uncredited ringers turning up on stage for star turns. Nope: it's just that the cast of six disappears so deeply into some of their characters that they're virtually and thrillingly unrecognizable when they pop up later as someone else. 

I'm pretty cleareyed about the fact that a lot of shows simply don't last for deeply unfair reasons: Broadway is a business, and business is not kind, so a lot of really good shit fails while a lot of not-at-all-good shit thrives. But if any show deserves an audience right now, it's this one: it's generous, hilarious, challenging and cathartic, and I appreciated it very, very much. I hope it stays alive for longer than the three weeks it's run so far--and I hope you get to see it, too.