Ro Reddick’s absurdist historical drama Cold War Choir Practice was inspired by her experience growing up in Syracuse, New York, as one of the only Black members of a Reagan-era children’s choir that sang about the threat of nuclear annihilation and the hope that children’s voices might lead to a thaw in the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union. Alana Raquel Bowers, playing a stand-in for the playwright here named Meek, brings an earnest sincerity to the role of a girl who genuinely fears for the possibility of mutually assured destruction. She stocks the basement “bomb shelter” of her family roller rink with emergency supplies, puts a nuclear radiation detector on her wish list for Santa, and creates lovely harmonies with her fellow choir members (played by Grace McLean, Nina Ross, and Suzzy Roche under the direction of a beret-topped Ellen Winter).
The presence of Roche, who harmonized with her two sisters in the ’80s group the Roches, is an added bonus. Reddick’s original songs have a sweet sisterly choral quality, with a lyrical undercurrent that wavers between Up With People optimism (“I’m just a child who stands before you / My only power is to sing my song”) and doomsday alarmism (“No one has to die, no one has to die”). Meek takes her work as a junior ambassador for peace seriously, an idea that gets amplified when Reddick steers the plot into a thriller with nefarious actors plotting to get their hands on classified papers in the briefcase of her uncle, Clay (Andy Lucien), a senior White House adviser on security issues who’s helping to negotiate a nuclear arms deal with Mikhail Gorbachev.
The principal targets of recruitment seem to be unwitting innocents like Meek and Clay’s emotionally fragile wife, Virgie (Crystal Finn), who appears to have been brainwashed by a cultlike women’s group with a hidden agenda. All this spycraft is played mostly for laughs, suggesting less the deadly real-world betrayal of double agents like Aldrich Ames and more the cartoonish schemes of Boris and Natasha. (There’s even a ticking bomb attached to a bundle of dynamite sticks.)
Reddick also layers in family conflict with a political bent. Meek’s dad is a former Black Panther who resents his brother, not just because of the success he’s found away from home but because he got ahead by becoming a Republican who publicly distanced himself from a family that he tells the press was “hooked on welfare.” That comment even riles the boys’ feisty and still spry mother (Lizan Mitchell), threatening to tamp down her natural instinct toward peace-making among her squabbling sons.
Director Knud Adams does an admirable job trying to calibrate between the wild swings in tone and seriousness, leaning on the choir to smooth some of the more rugged transitions. They consistently draw our attention away from the absurdities of the plot and the hurried attempts to ground the characters in a kind of reality. Plus, their red-hued outfits (designed by Brenda Abbandandolo) simultaneously call to mind the multiple threads of the story. They read as church choir, red communist comrades, or Christmas carolers, depending on the moment.
Reddick, who just won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for this play, has a singular talent for blending high and low elements. Cold War Choir Practice is entertaining but overstuffed, like a pelmeni that’s bursting out of its noodley casing. ★★★☆☆
COLD WAR CHOIR PRACTICE
MCC Theater, Off Broadway
Running time:1 hour, 35 minutes (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through March 29 for $35 to $125
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