Most of the reviews for Cold War Choir Practice devote most of their word count to laying out its multi-pronged plot which includes Soviet spies, former Black Panthers, Regan-era conservatives, the dangers of wellness cults, the joys of roller skating and the comforts of choral singing. I’m going to skip all that. In part because I’m still trying to figure out how all those things hang together—and how I feel about this show, which opened this week at MCC Theater after a brief run in Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival last year.
I should be an ideal candidate for this play because when I was in grade school I—like its 10-year-old main character Meek—was a little back girl who thought I could resolve the major geopolitical conflict of the day. I wrote a letter to then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev telling him that I thought both American kids and Russian kids wanted peace between our two countries so that we could grow up without the fear that they were going to bomb one another—and us—into oblivion. My mother, probably worried about McCarthyism-like repercussions, made me tear up the letter.
But nowadays there seems to be a growing interest in that midcentury period in which young people in the U.S. and Russia were trying to sort out the future. The Paul Thomas Anderson film “One Battle After Another,” a frontrunner to win the Best Picture Oscar this weekend, looks back affectionately at American radicals from the '60s like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. Lauren Yee’s Mother Russia, which is currently running at the Signature Center, imagines what might have happened to young Russians when the Cold War ended. Meanwhile Choir Practice wrestles with the side effects of all those changes.
Each of these fictional representations wraps itself in absurdist humor and I’m not sure what to make of that or what to take away from them in our current not-much-to-laugh-about times. Choir Practice’s playwright Ro Reddick seems to flirt with the idea that whatever happens, the best that regular folks can hope for is to negotiate some wiggle room for their loved ones and to find something to watch on TV. Which strikes me as cold comfort.
That’s not to say that there aren’t things to enjoy in Reddick’s play, which just won the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for this year’s best play by a female identifying playwright (click here to read an interview with her). Or that there aren’t similar pleasures to be found in the supple staging by Knud Adams.
Additionally, as the title hints, there are lots of songs in this show, which bills itself as a play with music. And all of them are composed by Reddick. They’re tuneful, clever and sprightly performed largely by a trio headed by the always amusing Grace McLean.
The rest of the cast is good too, particularly Alana Raquel Bowers, as convincing as an adult can be as Meek; Will Cobbs as her passionate ex-Panther dad who runs the neighborhood skating rink; Lizan Mitchell, having a great time as Meek’s no-nonsense granny; and Crystal Finn, a hoot as the zombied-out white wife of Meek’s conservative uncle. Most of their actions are over-the-top cartoonish but the actors commit to them as though they’re performing Chekhov.
Like the movie “One Battle After Another,” Choir Practice ends with a sliver of hope that the next generation really will figure out a way to save the world. Fingers crossed that they do.
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