On Friday, December 16th at 8:00pm, two days before Ain’t No Mo’ was to close on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, I saw it a second time.
I’m unable to tell it all in this review because there’s so much extraordinary talent, emotion, truth, blatant, funny and dramatic, that one MUST SEE to understand what is shared about this fearless play.
First of all, the inimitable Playwright, JORDAN E. COOPER, lives in each character he has created. I know from one playwright to another. At one moment responding to a call to action from the stage, I got carried away, forgot I was in theatre, and was about to run to the front of the stage until I was restrained. That ability to foment that kind of response from the audience is genius. The play is alive and that’s all we really need to say. At the end when Peaches goes through what she goes through (not giving it away), I was overwhelmed with every distraught, unconscious feeling of loss, but I started clapping. Somebody told my personal story.
There are multiple themes in Ain’t No Mo’ and one of them is a contemporary Marcus Garvey, Back-to-Africa movement. Black people jump up and decide: “We tired of this shit and we gawn.” It’s also a mourning and wakeup call regarding desired change that never happened for Black people after Barack Obama became our first Black President.
Controversial and eventually reverberating around the world, Cooper proclaims that Black folks own the exclusive right to use the word, “nigger, nigga, niggah,” and all the variations...at will. This exclusive right MUST be defended since some folks want to demand and dictate when we can use it. How dare they try to covertly appropriate the use of our word claiming we can’t use it; it’s racist! It is ours, exclusively to use!
Ain’t No Mo’ celebrates the myriad ways Black folks have cultivated and retained our culture, all of it, from Africa to Harlem to the deep South, incarceration and the murders of our people and more all imbued in one character named Black. Oh, I told you it’s too much to tell…that’s why you got to go see it NOW.
Belasco Theatre, Ain’t No Mo’. https://aintnomobway.com/
I’m unable to tell it all in this review because there’s so much extraordinary talent, emotion, truth, blatant, funny and dramatic, that one MUST SEE to understand what is shared about this fearless play.
First of all, the inimitable Playwright, JORDAN E. COOPER, lives in each character he has created. I know from one playwright to another. At one moment responding to a call to action from the stage, I got carried away, forgot I was in theatre, and was about to run to the front of the stage until I was restrained. That ability to foment that kind of response from the audience is genius. The play is alive and that’s all we really need to say. At the end when Peaches goes through what she goes through (not giving it away), I was overwhelmed with every distraught, unconscious feeling of loss, but I started clapping. Somebody told my personal story.
There are multiple themes in Ain’t No Mo’ and one of them is a contemporary Marcus Garvey, Back-to-Africa movement. Black people jump up and decide: “We tired of this shit and we gawn.” It’s also a mourning and wakeup call regarding desired change that never happened for Black people after Barack Obama became our first Black President.
Controversial and eventually reverberating around the world, Cooper proclaims that Black folks own the exclusive right to use the word, “nigger, nigga, niggah,” and all the variations...at will. This exclusive right MUST be defended since some folks want to demand and dictate when we can use it. How dare they try to covertly appropriate the use of our word claiming we can’t use it; it’s racist! It is ours, exclusively to use!
Ain’t No Mo’ celebrates the myriad ways Black folks have cultivated and retained our culture, all of it, from Africa to Harlem to the deep South, incarceration and the murders of our people and more all imbued in one character named Black. Oh, I told you it’s too much to tell…that’s why you got to go see it NOW.
Belasco Theatre, Ain’t No Mo’. https://aintnomobway.com/
