What play? Warm on the Coolin’ Board by Shepsu Aakhu, directed by Marie Cisco, presented by MPAACT.
What is it about? A lot of times with MPAACT, what a play is “about” has a lot to do with you actually being in the space watching and listening to it. With Aakhu’s plays especially, there is a sense that a play’s meaning has as much to do with the story as it does with you sitting in the dark, spinning your own wheels as the play slowly wraps itself around your heart. I would recommend that you let it. As one character tells his little brother, “Some shit gotta hurt to be remembered.”
Okay, cool…but what is it about? A lot. But okay, it’s about Day and his brother Brian, two brothers from Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood. After Brian goes on academic probation from college, he returns home to help his brother strip an abandoned Roseland home of scrap metal to sell, much to Day’s disappointment. Meanwhile, spiritual beings navigate a crisis in the spirit realm when Alsip’s Burr Oak Cemetery is disturbed (by way of the 2009 scandal, recounted in the play through audio clips).
That was a surprising twist. Yeah, it is pretty cool. I hesitate to go into more detail as I’d prefer you see it.
Okay, so how does it look and sound? Lovely. It is a credit to director Marie Cisco and her team of designers that even though Warm is staged in a fairly small black box, there is no hesitation to express the expansiveness of Aakhu’s vision. Jessica Kuehnau Wardell takes advantage of the small space and her set suggests two primary locales (a cement stoop in Roseland and a coolin’ board in an unnamed spiritual plane) almost solely by their physical texture. Evelyn Danner’s costumes are slick, particularly for Brian whose entire arc can be traced through the clothes he wears. The atmosphere is enhanced by Jared Gooding’s (literally) heavenly lighting design. As always with MPAACT, the live music and sound design (from Shawn Wallace and The Souls of Black Folk, respectively) intertwine to create a sonic soundscape that, combined with Aakhu’s poetic language, help serve to get your intellect out of the way so the play can get at the gutsier, heartier parts of you.
Why would it want to do that? Because this is a huge-ass play with a lot on its mind. At first, the play’s dual storylines (Day and Brian stripping a house in Roseland for scrap on one side, a man named Carter being introduced to the spirit world on the other) seem curiously mismatched. As the play draws toward its conclusion, they intertwine unexpectedly with the Burr Oak Cemetery scandal, and by the end, it all seems so of a piece you wonder why the threads ever seemed separate. Like August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, Warm on the Coolin’ Board grapples with complex questions of identity and rootedness. Unlike that play, Warm… seems less beholden to western theater traditions. The spirituality and narrative structure here pay little lip-service to audience expectation, which is not to say the action here is any way alienating. Rather, Aakhu invites you to something that feels a lot like an idealized version of a church service: the flowing liturgy engages you somewhere past the words; the momentum and shape of the thing are inescapable and transcendently beautiful.
Transcendently beautiful? Holy cow! I know! It kind of sneaks up on you, too. The entire cast here is excellent, so it would be unfair to single anyone out. So I’ll single everyone out: Darren Jones is hilarious and warm. His slightly baffled Carter makes an excellent foil for the spiritual goings-on of the play and he can get a laugh without saying a word. Brian Keys’ Brian is a young and brash kid, which is easy to stereotype. Fortunately, Keys finds the exact right blend of confidence and uncertainty and is one of the few actors in the world (so far as I’ve seen) who can play drunk and stoned without being a ham. As Day, Brian’s brother, Andre Teamer has a lot to carry (his character is one of the few who seems to have a conscious foot in our world as well as the spiritual one) and his quiet ache is almost too much to bear, for him and for us. As Penelope, a spirit, Deanna Reed-Foster is basically perfect. Her voice and her charisma, the pain she feels at disconnection are palpable and captivating. As the ancient Nailah, Medina Perine exudes mystery and power beyond her apparent years. Last but not least, Krystal Metcalfe and Olivia Charles, credited as Ensemble, bring musicality and two of the most charming smiles I’ve witnessed all year to what are essentially silent roles.
You have said so much, but I feel like I still have no idea what this play is about. I know, I think you should really just go see it. There’s a lot going on here. Most interesting to me (and like I said, you have a lot of room to think for yourself here) were the work’s concerns with the lifecycles of bodies, cities, and spirits. Are they all part of the same exchange? How should we mourn when one or all of them come to an end? When they come into conflict, which one should take precedence? Juxtaposing the stripping of Burr Oak Cemetery against the stripping of a house (in a neighborhood, like so many in America, that is predominantly Black and crumbling and almost empty) forces interesting questions: which is America’s greatest disgrace, the way we treat our cities, the way we treat our citizens, or the way we treat our dead? And here’s the best part: when you see it, you’ll probably have an entirely different set of concerns. My companion found herself moved to tears at the end by the relationship of mothers to sons and despite my insistence, didn’t find herself thinking about Detroit at all.
Sounds heady. It is, and funny and tragic and hopeful. It’s a play that asks you to sit still, listen, and open your heart. At one point in the play, Day hands his brother Brian a hundred bucks. “You need me to loan it or give it?” he asks. “Give it,” his brother responds. “Then I give it.” That’s what they’re doing here. Don’t miss it.
