Dealing with the Raw Deal: IBTC's "Ain't No Mo' satirically touts black self-deportation

"Ain't No Mo" trumpets a loss both wished-for and dreaded among America's black population. So the rhetoric in these eight comic sketches is coruscating and loaded with irony. A production of Jerome E. Cooper's play by the revived Indianapolis Black Theater Company was guaranteed to ruffle feathers and excite laughter, probably both appalled and free-flowing.

Peaches holds forth, inviting the ticketed self-deported.

The show opened Thursday night at the District Theatre. It held two deceptively opposite theatrical strategies in balance: laser like focus in every scene and a rhetorical breadth that challenged the actors individually and the director in matters of staging. So its critique of this country and contemporary black culture shone in lengthy but sharply honed detail. 

The theme of loss links it all, because the premise is that black Americans have been offered free flights to Africa with a time limit intended to persuade them to act now and consider the benefits of reversing the diaspora. Daren J. Fleming plays a flamboyant airline gate agent named Peaches, a drag queen heartily projecting the irony that governs the show. White supremacy gets the victory again, maybe. Peaches is the snide gatekeeper. Enemy of slavery though he was, even Abraham Lincoln was in favor of black repatriation after emancipation. 

What parts of American identity must be abandoned to pursue a quest for authentic freedom in the old homeland? Peaches can't seem to drag that Western Hemisphere heritage with her and make the last flight. In the context of "Ain't No Mo"'s message, that hardly counts as a spoiler. 

Peaches' climactic soliloquy, cried out and almost unintelligible because of her wig's falling over her anguished face, firmed up in my mind reminders of a some cultural representations of both the focused and scattershot versions of the ancient yearning for freedom. 

The cultural allusions are florid and manifold, and it's up to the audience to catch as many as

"The Real Baby Mamas of the South Side" goes unreal. .

possible. They are in other sketches too, including fervent solo speeches at an abortion clinic, on the set of a "View"-style talk show, and in a prisoner-release scene. (I caught Sidney Poitier's "They call me Mr. Tibbs" line, but certainly missed many others.) In another scene, a  missing black servant, rattling chains like Marley's ghost, emerges from the basement to interrupt a dicty family's dinner party and makes it confront the limitations of black upward mobility. 

All such allusiveness and symbolism evokes the phantasmagoria, the plague of ghostly images, that seems to populate the African-American imagination, evoking for me the rich imagery of the energetic Harlem bard, Melvin B. Tolson (1898-1966). In "Mu," he writes: "In the ostinato / of stamping feet and clapping hands, / the Promethean bard of Lenox Avenue became a / lost loose-leaf / as memory vignetted Rabelaisian I's of the Boogie-Woogie Dynasty / in barrel houses, at rent parties, / on riverboats, at wakes,"  and those ranting lines precede a lengthy namedropping list. 

Similar outpourings, modernized for the Obama era, bulk large in Cooper's script, which is a topical response to the effect of Obama's two terms and the onset of Trump's first one. 

Individualism struggles for assertion in the glaring light of stereotypes, both imposed by the system and generated in black experience, such as the funeral for "Brother Right to Complain" that opens the show, memorializing the moment when Obama was elected to his first term in 2008. Praise for what that must mean, raised to the ecstatic level conventionally focused on Jesus in the black church, ricochets around the set, ruffling the sensibilities of both black and white theatergoers (I'm sure), with cries of "Obama is my nigga!" 

The cast, each carrying the designation of "Passenger" plus a number, 1 through 5, thus launches into the show with a blunt dynamic energy that never sags for 100 minutes: Besides the already mentioned Daren Fleming, they are Chandra, Reno Moore, Clarissa Todd, Cara Wilson, and Avery Elise. They readily transform themselves into characters suited to each varied scene, boosted by the apt costume designs of Anthony Sirk and Caitlin Evelyn Davey. Some inspired video designs by CeAira Waymon punctuate the action at crucial points.

Director Jamaal McCray elicits from his cast a relentless commitment to reflecting the glare of the playwright's vision. The illumination has a symbolic precursor in the unforgettable opening pages of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," in which the narrator lives in the hyperbrilliance of stolen electric light, determined to override white society's habit of rendering him invisible. He can be seen only when he immerses himself in action outside his  overlit room. "Ain't No Mo'" underlines that necessity in its own terms, even if it might pose the wrenching alternative of self-exile. 

[Photo credit: IBTC, The District Theatre]