In theater, there aren’t many things as enthralling as the unmistakable sound of reality. It startles to you to alertness and makes your ears perk up as if you’ve just heard an air raid siren. It’s the writing of course that ignites this response, which then leaves it to actors to blow life into words that will ultimately bring a story, especially a formidably good one, to blinding technicolor life. Jordan E. Cooper, who looks like a kid and writes like a sniper, is a master at setting words on fire to tell fresh and vivid stories about lives that have been overlooked, perhaps suppressed or simply “incidentalized”.
Cooper, who lives in Brooklyn and by now has wrapped up his studies for a BFA at The New School for Drama, captured the theater world’s attention with his “what if” play Ain’t No Mo’ at the Public Theater last year. What if America struck a deal with Black people in the US. We give you a one-way ticket to Africa and you don’t come back. Because Black folks are so over dealing with the “land of the free and home of the brave”, every Black person in the country accepts and takes the same flight to the Motherland. Overseeing boarding is but a single check-in agent, Peaches, played explosively by the playwright, Mr. Cooper.
Outrageous, visionary, hilarious, soul rattling and mind expanding, Ain’t No Mo’ is simply a taste of what Cooper is capable of. Another clue came when he blew the roof off Central Park’s Delacorte Theater during its Queer and Now forum; also last year. His five-minute speech; equal parts manifesto, declaration and celebration of identity, spun like a brilliant dervish of pride and power. His is the kind of talent that cannot be contained. Not even by a pandemic.
Mama Got a Cough is his latest theatrical expression tailor made for a Zoom stitched world. And what a welcome look at the unexpected it is. Five brothers and sisters need to check in on Mom; correction, Mama, who’s probably got…“it”. She’s holed up in her apartment, sick and saddled with a troubling cough, in a part of town where few white people know anything about. Her children, scattered across the city, are living their own very adult lives. Even though the youngest, Maleek (DeWayne Perkins), looks like he should be carded if he even thinks about ordering anything that might get a buzz goin’.
Through its fantastic cast, we get a sparkling glimpse of what love looks like in a family that on the evening news might come off as an inconsequential slice of a hackneyed monolith. Instead we get the delectably entertaining Danielle Brooks playing Kasey, the very well-meaning older sister with a slight, or maybe not so slight, weakness for wine and other libations.
Like all families, everybody knows everybody else’s secrets, aka, business. In this one though, when you get called out, the love doesn’t get snuffed out. If anything, their shared intimate knowledge of one another seems to function as emotional superglue. Even though Ashley (Brittany Enge), on this Zoom connection, is clearly at a home other than her own when all of mankind should be isolating, the others chide her but let it ride because they really have no choice. Worse still, Maleek appears to be at a straight up party, or as he prefers to call it, a “quaranturna”, where they don’t check your bag, they check your temperature. Nor does the pandemic seem to have had any affect in slowing Jamel’s (Marcel Spears) habit of changing girlfriends every three months.
Despite the choices each of them is making, their concern about the health of their mother has them rallying and it’s the language and expression of their worry that’s so irresistible. Mama (Juanita Jennings) may be worried herself but she’s going to be the one who sets the parameters of how she stays in or goes out of this world. Each of the actors is stunning in this 15-minute wonder of contemporary comic drama, but Jennings easily pulls off magnificent.
For mature audiences
Mama Got a Cough
