Jordan E. Cooper, who delivered a satirical wake-up call to the theater world with his extended sketch comedy Ain’t No Mo’, is back with a new play. Oh Happy Day!, which is billed as a “saucy reimagining of Noah’s Ark,” is in some ways more conventional in its structure. But only just. Cooper is not one to introduce us to a fractured Black family in a rural Mississippi backyard and just stay there. Instead, he introduces to a Greek chorus of heavenly muses/intermediaries dubbed the Divines, played with Tiffany Mann, Sheléa Melody McDonald, and Latrice Pace with rafter-shaking vocal pipes and take-no-foolishness sass. (“No relation to Loretta Devine,” one of them quips.) They kick off the show with a rousing original gospel tune, by Grammy nominee Donald Lawrence, and return for both song and narrative buttressing throughout the play. (Music director Daniel Rudin leads a six-piece off-stage band.)
Cooper also stars as an updated Noah, who also bears a close resemblance to Job and the Prodigal Son of the New Testament. He’s a queer hustler named Keyshawn who’s commanded by that trio of Divines to return home and make peace with the family that rejected him years ago. What’s more, he’s arriving not long after publicly posting an online video that has brought further shame on his relatives — and an abrupt end to his father Lewis’ job as a caretaker and deacon at the local church. Needless to say, Lewis (Brian D. Coats) is none too welcoming, demanding an immediate apology that an embittered Keyshawn is reluctant to give. His sister, Niecy (Tamika Lawrence, a spitfire torn between two strong-willed men), and her teenage son, Kevin (Donovan Louis Bazemore, doing his best with an afterthought of a character), are more receptive but puzzled by his arrival. That confusion turns to incomprehension when he talks about a coming storm and the need to find a boat when the weather forecast insists that the area’s months-long drought should continue unabated.
Oh Happy Day! borrows heavily from a number of sources. In one sense, this is a kitchen-sink drama that ladles out generations of family trauma and secrets — drug addiction, sex work, murder, prison time, homophobia, and religious hypocrisy. It also borrows from the ancient Greeks as well as the gospel plays like the ones that made Tyler Perry famous and even the Bible dramatizations you might see performed in a basement church hall.
Cooper is a good deal saucier than Perry (who also starred in many of his early plays from the Black Circuit), with a fondness for cursing, the liberal use of the N-word, and a frank discussion of sexuality that would make many a choir member blush. He’s also earnest, arguably too much so, in his attempt to reconcile his feelings about God and religion as a gay Black man in a 21st-century America where a divine presence can be hard to discern amid all the suffering and turmoil. “I just gotta know why? Why you put me through all this?” he exhorts with a genuine sense of anger and confusion. Cooper the playwright has also written the meatiest role for himself, and he delivers the good with a performance that brims with anguish, hurt, longing, and a rage that is never far from the surface.
Interestingly, Cooper allows God to respond — and presents the deity as a series of familiar faces as members of Keyshawn’s family suddenly take on new guises. (Qween Jean’s costumes as well as the lighting by Adam Honoré and Shannon Clarke underscore the changes.) These scenes play out as comedic-philosophic exchanges that might be familiar to college students in their dorm rooms contemplating life’s big questions in the wee hours of the morning. Why doesn’t God stop suffering or intervene directly in our lives? In response, Cooper’s God tends to resort to cryptic aphorisms: “The Gazelle gets mad when a lion eats their child, but I didn’t make that happen, I just made the wild. The lion chose it’s own dinner.”
The philosophizing can drag a bit, and the metaphors sometimes verge on being as tortured as the pitiful souls in the hell they’re all hoping to avoid. But director Stevie Walker-Webb masterfully orchestrates the delicate shifts in tone from edge comedy to tense family drama to religious theorizing — though the talented cast tends to default to shouting when conflict resurfaces. The emotions are raw, so in one sense it feels appropriate for characters to crank up the volume. But there’s a bit too much of it over the course of two-plus hours, particularly since Cooper overloads the second act with multiple big reveals and reversals in a compressed timeframe. It’s hard to persuade people to listen to the better angels of their nature amid the din of vituperative argument.
Oh Happy Day! is messy, in the same way that life can be messy. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s raw, and ultimately uplifting — thanks in no small measure to Lawrence’s soulful songs of encouragement and praise. Like church, theater often asks a simple question: “Can I get a witness?” And Cooper’s fascinating but flawed new show asks us to be present and to recognize the human frailty and the possibility of redemption in all of those around us. ★★★☆☆
OH HAPPY DAY!
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through November 2 for $109 to $185
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