Ain't No Mo' Broadway Reviews

It’s a delight to have Jordan E. Cooper kick down the door of Broadway in heels and storm onstage with something as raucous as Ain’t No Mo’. The show’s whirligig satire seems to gain momentum by sending up its very environs, a series of sketches built around a recurring conceit wherein Cooper, in drag as a flight attendant named Peaches, desperately tries to coordinate the onboarding for a government-funded flight taking Black Americans back to Africa. It’s a show that’s bawdy and bold and uninterested in seeming respectable, but it’s also fascinated by respectability, the question of who might leave or stay on that flight, who might embrace their Blackness and who might try to bury it. Cooper sees you there in the audience thinking he might’ve buttoned up his ideas for the Belasco Theatre, and he cackles in defiance.

On Broadway the word new is relative. According to the Tony Awards, a new play can be one that had its world premiere Off Broadway or elsewhere around the world a year, two or three ago. According to that definition, “Ain’t No Mo’” is not only the most audacious new play to open on Broadway in 2022. It is also the best new play to open on Broadway this year.

“Ain’t No Mo’,” an over-the-top satire that aims to tickle, shock and draw blood, imagines an America in which all Black people are being flown to Africa. But it’s not a direct flight. There are stops at a Black church, an abortion clinic, a TV studio, a mansion, a prison, and finally, at African American Airlines, Gate 1619 (the date of the first Black slaves in the New World.) The gate agent is named Peaches; she is wearing a red pantsuit uniform and flowing pink tresses, and is portrayed by Jordan E. Cooper, who at 27 is making his Broadway debut as both actor and playwright.