Theater review by Adam Feldman
Christmas is just around the corner, and Meek (Alana Raquel Bowers), a 10-year-old Black girl in 1987, has a modest wish list for Santa: “I want a Pound Puppy, a Speak + Spell, and a nuclear radiation detector.” None of these is likely to be provided by her financially strapped single father, Smooch (Will Cobbs), a former Black Panther who owns a roller rink in the south side of Syracuse, New York. But through her participation in a children’s choir called the Seedlings of Peace, Meek has started writing to a Soviet stranger. (“War is imminent. How are you today? Did you know the voice of a child has the power to stop a nuclear attack?”) And her pen pal in the Urals soon sends Meek a very special Speak + Spell: one that not only teaches her the Russian translations of useful terms like “revolution” and “armageddon” and “government official,” but also recruits her into a scheme that may affect upcoming disarmament talks between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Spasibo, comrade!
Cold War Choir Practice | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova
That’s just a taste of the mayhem wrought by the playwright and composer Ro Reddick in Cold War Choir Practice, an offbeat dark comedy that may be set in the 1980s but whose genre-fluid blend of surrealist humor, satirical songs and looming menace recalls the 1970s plays of John Guare. Reddick’s brand of ridiculous, though, adds a current of racial conflict, as reflected in the tense relationship between Smooch and his older brother, Clay (Andy Lucien), a national security advisor in the Reagan Administration with a briefcase full of top-secret papers. It isn’t just the Soviets who want to get inside his briefs; a competing American faction is also on the case, operating through a cult that has ensnared Clay’s perpetually frazzled and dehydrated wife, Virgie (played by Crystal Finn with a comic desperation worthy of Mink Stole).
Cold War Choir Practice | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova
Spiritedly directed by Knud Adams, Cold War Choir Practice had a brief run in the Summerworks festival last year, and its encore engagement at MCC Theater features nearly all of that production’s cast. That includes Lizan Mitchell as the delicious Pudding, Meek’s perceptive grandmother, and three highly gifted singer-actors—Grace McLean, Suzzy Roche and Nina Ross—as members of the Choir, filling roles from children to spies. (The smilingly threatening McLean has some particularly funny espionage business.) Musical director Ellen Winter is also on hand as the Choir Leader, who doubles as a roller-skate dispenser.
Cold War Choir Practice | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova
The story’s timeline is not always intelligible—or, for that matter, possible—and Afsoon Pajoufar’s attractively curved Roll-a-Rama set, which employs mirrors very cleverly at one exit, doesn’t do much to define the play’s various physical spaces. But clarity is not exactly the goal. Reddick is not aiming for realism; a bomb in the climatic sequence is just bundled red sticks of dynamite, Looney Tunes style. But throughout the wackiness, Cold War Choir Practice sustains an underlying tension between the public relations of Reaganism—“The farmer and the business man prosper in the west,” sing the Seedlings of Peace, “The farmer prospers when his business can progress / The harvest of prosperity trickles down like rain on leaves”—and the realities on the ground for people like Smooch. (His suggested lyrics for the choir: “We want freedom. We want employment. We want education.”) And Adams’s ensemble cast, working in tandem, makes the whole experience as sweet and spicy as the Atomic Fireballs that are, appropriately enough, Meek’s favorite kind of candy. The company performs with mutually assured distinction.
Cold War Choir Practice. MCC Theater (Off Broadway). By Ro Reddick. Directed by Knud Adams. With Alana Raquel Bowers, Crystal Finn, Lizan Mitchell, Will Cobbs, Andy Lucien, Grace McLean, Suzzy Roche, Nina Ross, Ellen Winter. Running time: 1hr 40mins. No intermission.
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Cold War Choir Practice | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova
