Jordan E. Cooper is not experiencing the usual sophomore slump — certainly not at the Public Theater, where his newest play had its world premiere Wednesday.
“Ain’t No Mo’,” his first play at the Public, is a wild sketch comedy about an America where Blacks are being sent to Africa after the end of the Obama presidency. At the Public and in the play’s subsequent transfer to Broadway, Cooper played the drag queen flight agent named Peaches.
In “Oh Happy Day!” Cooper plays a slightly weightier role — that of Noah, as in Noah’s Ark. He’s not called Noah but rather Keyshawn, who is a young gay sex worker who has been thrown out of his home for obvious reasons. But what has really upset his father (Brian D. Coats) is Keyshawn’s posting of a sex video wherein he’s shown servicing the local pastor, who had been his father’s boss until that man of God fired him for obvious reasons.
As for how this story has anything to do with the Bible, that’s the part where God warns of a devastating flood and tells Noah/Keyshawn to build a boat. The Old Testament makes this task seem simple. It is anything but in “Oh Happy Day!,” in part, because the only wood Keyshawn has to work must be taken from his father’s house, which is also home to Keyshawn’s sister (Tamika Lawrence) and her son (Donovan Louis Bazemore). The very mutable scenic design is Luciana Stecconi.
For Cooper, “Oh Happy Day!” is not so much a step forward from “Ain’t No Mo’” as it is a step sideways. It shows that he can also write a full two-act 130-minute family drama. Not that this playwright has abandoned his irreverent comic streak. God takes many forms in “Oh Happy Day!” and the ones that can be written about in this review are the fiercely attired (costumes by Qween Jean) girl group that features Holy Divine (Tiffany Mann), Mighty Divine (Shelea Melody McDonald) and Glory Divine (Latrice Pace). They sing so many great gospel-inspired songs, by Donald Lawrence, that “Oh Happy Day!” at moments turns into a rollicking musical.
That shift back and forth between a musical and a family barbeque-pit drama proves a little unsettled in the first act. No sooner have the Divines wowed us at the top of the show than the story shifts a tad awkwardly to an extended argument between Keyshawn and his sister and father. For more than a moment, it appears as if Cooper, the playwright, has gone completely Eugene O’Neill on us. Regardless, this scene contains one of the play’s funniest lines. It comes when the sister asks how anyone can charge money for sex and Keyshawn answers that he can’t imagine doing such nasty stuff for free. He’s one jaded teenager.
This quibble about tone in the first act of “Oh Happy Day!” might be more my problem than the play’s. In the second act, the back and forth between the earth and the heavens is far more balanced. It could be the violent shifts of tone take some getting used to. No one else writes plays with quite this angry fury.
Stevie Walker-Webb directs and the performances he gets from Bazemore, Coats and Lawrence are phenomenal, since all of them are double cast in a most fantastical way. As the young sex worker who must build the boat from the wood of his father’s house so that this family that has disowned him can be saved, Cooper is not double cast. In “Ain’t No Mo,’” he presented a dazzling Peaches, the flight agent. As Keyshawn in “Oh Happy Day!” he’s equally big but not as naunced in his flips between hating his father and wanting to obey God’s orders. Cooper the playwright has given Cooper the actor more big speeches than the latter can deliver with the needed wide range of colors and notes.
