Choir Boy

The ingredients to this 2012 play by Moonlight screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney feel familiar. Elite American high school, scholarship choir boys, one gay and bullied. A floppy-haired ‘think-outside-the-box’ teacher in the vein of The History Boys’ Hector or Dead Poets’ Society’s Keating.

But in unfolding vignettes, arguments, sung spirituals and choral scenes – directed tenderly by Nancy Medina and Tatenda Shamiso in a production which ran in Bristol in 2023 – it becomes clear how McCraney is lulling us into familiar territory in order to then drift in his own direction.

This is a story about how hard it is to be gay in high school, but main character Pharus is happily out and unashamed. The structures around him are trying to squeeze him back into the closet: ‘Tighten up’, is the headmaster’s gentle but dumb advice. ‘Keep them guessing – at least so they can’t ask’. Pharus has no desire to keep them guessing.

Playing him, Terique Jarrett is so entertaining, with a loose physicality and a tendency to turn everything into a joke, partly a defence mechanism, but also just bursting with music and fun and refusing to let others make him feel unhappy. His adversary is Rabi Kondé’s Bobby, nephew of the headmaster, and envious of Pharus’s self-possession, whose homophobia causes the friction of the play.

The other three could do with being more rounded; too often they’re backup singers rather than soloists, though they each get a moment to show themselves, especially Freddie MacBruce’s AJ, Pharus’s straight roommate who quietly and repeatedly defends him.  

McCraney moves us from a low-stakes setup – in which Bobby forces Pharus to stop singing for a moment during a graduation ceremony by calling him a racial and homophobic slur – to something bigger, with debates about the history of spirituals. He makes his young characters all so wary, so defensive, made to be that way by the strictures of their school.

Though the show starts with a softly sung school song which repeats the refrain trust and obey, McCraney then spins out a series of scenes between students who refuse to do either. They argue with each other, push the boundaries of the heavy expectations their cult-like school and its scholarship conditions impose on them. And Medina and Shamiso handle brilliantly the strange moments when, in the middle of scraps and discord, one of the choir boys starts up a prayer or spiritual and they all unite in tender harmonies.

If elite American high schools are really like this, it’s not just queer communities and Black communities who should be frightened. McCraney makes Charles R Drew Prep School terrifyingly cult-like. Students take an oath never to snitch, they shout mechanical responses to trigger words, they clench their fists and long for their 30 minutes’ phone time in which they can call home.

No wonder, then, these teens want so desperately to fight about liberation and freedom in their classes, which you can read as being about the individual students and, of course, entire communities.

But plot twists fly out of nowhere towards the end, turning this into melodrama rather than mood piece. The play works better when it’s distorting the frame it’s put itself in rather than conforming to it.

Although at times underpowered both as a play and a production, McCraney is skilful in showing us a group of Black teens under constant pressure. All of them are fighting to justify their place, proving themselves to family, to teachers, to themselves and - the torrid undercurrent here - to society.