“Ain’t no mo tears to be shed. Ain’t no mo marches to be led.”
In Ain’t No Mo, Jordan E Cooper’s absurdist Broadway debut, Black people are offered the chance to escape to Africa after the presidency of Barack Obama brings little respite.
While cutting and humorous, Ain’t No Mo’s momentum slackens. Cooper’s world is filled with far-reaching images and themes that sometimes lack payoff.
Cooper’s romp opens with a hysterical, interactive eulogy (performed by Marchánt Davis). The pastor declares that this is a funeral for Black people’s “right to complain” following the inauguration of a Black person to America’s highest office. Cooper is, of course, tapping into white liberal fantasies about Obama’s legacy: that having a melanated commander-in-chief would alleviate racism. But, as witnessed, little has changed for the show’s Black characters.
Thus, an opportunity is born. A final flight is willing to take all Black people back to Africa – Dakar, Senegal, to be exact. Through several uproarious scenes, Cooper introduces characters grappling with the decision to escape: a group of boojie Blacks who don’t think they need the getaway, reality TV stars (Crystal Lucas-Perry, Ebony Marshall-Oliver, and Fedna Jacque) including a “transracial” contestant (Shannon Matesky), and others. A flight attendant named Peaches (played by Cooper) guides all awaiting passengers with a soft but shoving hand. Cooper is a rarity, punching open spaces of Black joy and community alongside the play’s solemn themes.
“All my life I’ve had to fight,” squawks a Rachel Dolezel-esque character (a line from the Color Purple, an “if you know, you know” moment). Such double entendres capture a literal meaning, but induce extra delight for those with enough cultural acuity to understand.
Cooper’s pen is fierce, skating through inside jokes, melodic monologues and gut punches among its multiple characters. With Steve Walker-Webb’s direction, all of Aint No Mo’s cast embraces the balancing act with ease and spitting humor, elevated further by masterful costume and wig design (Emilio Sosa and Mia N Neal, respectively).
As Peaches, Cooper is stunning as he infuses equal measures of levity and grit. A monologue about the pointed difficulty of being queer in the Black community is aching, directly followed by sharp, riotous one-liners. Crystal Lucas-Perry and Ebony Marshall-Oliver are equally affecting. Both demonstrate a crafted ability to take on the wide swings of their many characters, capturing humor, anger, pain and more.
But pacing remains a consistent problem in Ain’t No Mo. Cooper seeks to cover an ocean of complexities within the Black community: classism, the prison industrial complex and other pains. Cooper’s lyricism and humor help tease us through this odyssey. But some vignettes sink under the weight of platitudes. The show’s framing is fumbled by the drawn-out homegoing for the “right to complain” versus an initial focus on the impending flight to Africa. Peaches’ introduction comes quite late, despite her crucial and poignant role.
Cooper’s choices around violent imagery are provocative, but unneeded, revealing little besides an underlined point about Black suffering. In one scene, a Black woman who was held captive for decades is later lynched on stage. She screams in agony, frothing at the mouth as the noose tightens. Such an image gives little, in metaphor or in story. A Black woman was lynched on stage – for what?
The temporal nature of Ain’t No Mo weakens its more transcendent meaning. Yet another discussion of Rachel Dolezal (and other Trojan horses like her) or the Obama presidency feels dated, better suited for when Ain’t No Mo first premiered in 2019. Since then, Black people across the globe have observed with a disappointing familiarity that no amount of Black death can turn the tides of white supremacy. Allyship, as observed in the summer of 2020, wears thin. Eyes glaze over. Well-meaning white people turn out to be … not very well-meaning (shocker).
It’s perplexing. On one end, Ain’t No Mo reaches higher planes, especially in its final moments around ownership and protection of Black culture. But the show’s attempted commentary on topics like Dolezal or Obama are edified footnotes for white people, commitments to explain and to argue the disposability of Black life that so many of us already know.
This article was amended on 6 December 2022. It was originally stated that the show first premiered in 2016 but it was 2019
