For Christmas 1987, Meek knows exactly what she wants from Santa Claus. All three items should fit easily on the sleigh: a stuffed animal, a Speak & Spell for language-learning and a nuclear radiation detector. You know, to keep inside the fallout shelter she’s building in the basement.
At 10 years old, alert to the world, Meek is anxious about the Cold War and hoping to help stop it — or at least protect herself and her family, should Soviet missiles ever be aimed at Syracuse, N.Y. But she is also just a little kid, inquisitive and dreamy, with an “E.T.” sweatshirt and a taste for Atomic Fireballs from the neighborhood candy shop.
Played by Alana Raquel Bowers, an adult deftly channeling tweendom, Meek is the winsome protagonist of “Cold War Choir Practice,” a brainy new comedy by Ro Reddick that’s infused with choral music and spiked with espionage. Directed by Knud Adams, and featuring a jewel-studded cast, the play finishes this year’s edition of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival on a high.
That’s true even with the whole extra set of reverberations that the show abruptly acquired after the U.S. strike on Iran on Saturday — world peace being one of Meek’s consuming priorities. In a children’s choir, she sings of de-escalation (sample lyric: “No one has to die”) and gets matched with a pen pal from the U.S.S.R.
“Dear Soviet Pen Pal,” Meek writes, brightly. “War is imminent. How are you today? Did you know the voice of a child has the power to stop a nuclear attack?”
“Cold War Choir Practice” takes place mostly in Syracuse, where Meek’s father, Smooch (Will Cobbs), a former Black Panther, owns a roller rink. But the play unfolds in the days leading up to President Ronald Reagan’s meeting with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, to sign a nuclear treaty.
When Smooch’s brother, Clay (Andy Lucien), a deputy national security adviser, makes an emergency visit from Washington, the family is drawn into a high-stakes intrigue surrounding the contents of his briefcase — and the apparent cult membership of Virgie (Mallory Portnoy), his mysteriously unwell wife. Puddin (a fabulously funny Lizan Mitchell), the brothers’ sharp-eyed mother, has zero patience for whatever is going on with her “spooky-looking” daughter-in-law.
With a heightened tone and what turns out to be a magical Speak & Spell, this is a play about power, needless destruction and how the wealth of a nation is spent. It’s also about loyalty, betrayal and the emotional appeal of belonging for people who are in some way solitary: like Meek, the only Black child in her choir, and like her uncle, surrounded by white faces at the White House.
Produced with Page 73 at the Wild Project in Manhattan’s East Village, the production is much aided by the protean skills of its crackerjack choir (Nina Grollman, Grace McLean and Suzzy Roche). They wear bold red, signaling Christmas, Republicans, Soviets, Atomic Fireballs. (Costumes are by Brenda Abbandandolo, music direction by Ellen Winter.)
The show feels hamstrung, though — not so much by the tiny stage as by Afsoon Pajoufar’s handsome, curve-walled set. Constricting rather than accommodating, it works against evoking era or milieu and makes it difficult to keep track of which space the characters are inhabiting when. One of the show’s most delightful comic moments comes when McLean, as an unnerving cloak-and-dagger villain, peers under an invisible bathroom stall door, then (I’m not going to tell you why) crawls inside: perfect mime. So it’s not that the play needs more literal design, but more flexibility for imagination to take hold.
Still, the production is highly entertaining, even if the present breaks through. At the performance I saw, the phrase “America, where we’re free” got a big, sardonic laugh.
There is also this follow-the-money reminder, from Puddin, about the encouragement of entrenched antipathies: “Mutually assured destruction is a gold mine.”
The more things change?
Cold War Choir Practice
Through July 1 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
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