As his hit play 'Ain't No Mo'' lands on Broadway, 27-year-old playwright and star, Jordan E. Cooper, is giving his uproarious vision of America new wings.
satirizes contemporary Black culture through a series of vignettes, spanning the boisterously comic and the shatteringly dramatic . Yet, as the wise-cracking airport agent Peaches—a pink-haired equivalent to the main character in George C. Wolfe’s 1987 play’—Cooper is the audience’s main interlocutor, drawing attention to the play’s central conceit.
“This is my favorite play in the American canon, period,” says director Stevie Walker-Webb, who first met Cooper as a master’s student at the New School, where Cooper received his BFA, ofto me that I didn’t have to do any reaching to understand the language, or the message of it. And then he makes fun of everybody. He makes fun of every single person. Nobody gets off in this play.”
In a sense, Cooper’s Broadway debut has been a long time coming. Yes, he is all of 27 , but by his own estimation, he has been writing plays since he was a six-year-old growing up in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Hurst, Texas. “I was the kid at basketball practice reading,” he recalls with a laugh. “All I knew, really, was that I enjoyed telling stories. At seven o’clock, when my mom and dad got off work, I would be like, ‘All right, sit down. I’m about to put on a show.
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