Tear Down This Wall: Cold War Choir Practice

The most striking thing about Cold War Choir Practice is its texture. Ro Reddick’s Reagan-era caper-cum-bildungsroman, which had its premiere at last year’s Summerworks and recently took home the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, is a heightened, slippery creature. Its own self-description, “a new play with music,” while accurate, doesn’t quite feel precise enough — is it a spy story in three-part harmony? A surrealist operetta with scenes? The craftsmanship is prodigious: Reddick also wrote the music that twines through the play, sinuous and often sweetly sinister as sung by the titular choir, who are both players in the story and our guides through the increasingly fantastical action. These, we get the feeling, are the kind of weird sisters who can walk through walls, fourth or otherwise.

Played by the sly-eyed musical powerhouse Grace McLean, a winsome Nina Ross (who makes their own pop music as Softee), and the great Suzzy Roche, the choir adds its own set of real-world resonances to the show, already a layered, winking, porous affair under Knud Adams’s sleek and slick direction. On the wide, shallow stage of MCC’s Newman Mills Theater, he and his designers paint the play red. Red carpet, red neon, red tinsel Christmas trees (it’s 1987, and we’re in Syracuse, New York, at holiday time); red light soaks the stage as the choir warbles in complementary red ensembles. There can be a whisper-fine line between feature and bug, and in its persistent thickness and archness of atmosphere, Cold War Choir Practice slides right up to that boundary and perches there. We’re always entertained, frequently laughing — at the same time, as in certain Wes Anderson movies, there’s something in the extra-stylish surface that keeps deeper feelings at bay.

Still, Reddick’s story has a good heart — and a watchful, precocious one in the shape of its 10-year-old protagonist, Meek (Alana Raquel Bowers, a thirtyish adult playing “kid” smartly and not too cutely). Meek lives with her dad, Smooch (Will Cobbs), a former Black Panther who now runs a roller rink, and her not-to-be-trifled-with grandma, Puddin (Lizan Mitchell). She’s a good kid who helps shovel the neighbor’s sidewalk and sings with the local chapter of the Seedlings of Peace choir despite its dubious politics (“The farmer and the businessman / prosper in the West,” begins one song), because, perceptive as she is, she longs to do something to meet the moment. Meek might be more hopeful than faithful when her patriotically batty choir leader (Ellen Winter) proclaims that “the voice of a child can stop a nuclear attack,” but she still likes the idea of singing for peace — and, just for good measure, she’s also building a fallout shelter in her dad’s office at the rink.

Will Meek inherit the earth? And what kind of earth will these warring empires have made of it? Beneath the twists and tumbles of its plot, Reddick’s play is concerned with the people and communities that never profit when power seeks to increase itself — children, poor folks, Black folks. “You got a lotta songs about a little Soviet child, and a little this and that child,” Smooch says to the kids in his daughter’s choir (along with the cast’s three shapeshifting choristers, the audience is, in this moment, addressed as the Seedlings of Peace). “And I think you need a song or two about a little Black child, ’cause we at war now too, okay. We got the FBI bombin’ folks — we got the pigs out in the our neighborhoods … And you think I ain’t notice Meek the only one of us up in this little choir? Psshhh.”

As far as Smooch is concerned, the conflict brought by this particular Yuletide is mundane if maddening in nature: His estranged older brother Clay (Andy Lucien) — a climber in the Republican party who’s recently given a traitorous interview describing his family as “hooked on welfare” — has just shown up, carting his white, well-coiffed wife, Virgie (Crystal Finn, with eyes like a haunted tunnel ride), whom he claims is “just tired” and needs a rest while he hurries back to D.C. to tend to a top-priority treaty negotiation with Gorbachev. Clay (as in “feet of”) and Smooch play out an upstairs storyline fueled by recognizable fraternal hurt and resentment — but downstairs, things get weird. Virgie, it turns out, is on the run from a crazy, espionage-laced wellness cult. Meanwhile, Meek has been contacted by Russian agents through the Speak & Spell she received in the mail from her “Soviet pen pal.” Various players want to get their hands on some top-secret papers Clay has stowed away in Smooch’s office safe, and eventually, Virgie and Puddin will end up tied to a chair attempting to defuse a bomb.

There’s something appealing in Reddick’s division of narrative registers, which reverses the customs of the ’80s action-comedies one can sense in the play’s DNA: The men have to work out their feelings in the ‘realistic’ half of the story while the women — young, middle-aged, and old — go on the wild, all-but-unbelievable adventure. Virgie is pursued, in some of the play’s funniest moments, by a slithering cultist in shiny green gloves who purrs like a deadly kitty and moves like an Animaniac. McLean is clearly reveling in the part’s slinky menace, contorting herself against walls (cartoon-spy code for you can’t see me) and shimmying underneath the invisible door of an imaginary bathroom stall. Ross, meanwhile, exudes suspiciously ingenuous charisma as the heavily accented voice coming out of Meek’s Speak & Spell. “I am your friend, Meeksnaya…” the machine croons. “I am deep in the bosom of the Ural Mountains … There are horses and flowing rivers. Each day I wear warm sweaters and eat sweet cakes and sing at the top of the mountain.”

Even as individual moments of Cold War Choir Practice continued to charm me, I kept wondering what exactly was preventing me from getting swept up all the way. Part of my stuckness, I think, sprung from Afsoon Pajoufar’s set, which situates the whole play inside the architecture of the roller rink. With its large curving wooden wall, its red carpet and ceiling full of recessed lights, the space is somehow too stately for the show. For one thing, we know the reality of Smooch, Puddin, and Meek’s circumstances is grittier than this — shouldn’t there be tracks worn in the floor and gum on the railings, or at least places where Smooch has worked hard to chip the gum away? But more important still than this aesthetic dissonance is the lack, in Pajoufar’s set, of any liminal space. There’s no black, no emptiness, no sense of external expanse or mystery: Reddick depicts a family whose daily efforts at care and survival are threatened by enigmatic, violent forces trickling down from the clash of nation states. On the stage at MCC, Meek’s story feels too sealed, too tidily walled in.

“No one has to die, no one has to die,” sings the choir, embodying the most prestigious chapter of the Seedlings of Peace, live on PBS in a concert at the United Nations. “Milkshake for a Soviet and I!” The song is called “Milkshake for Peace.” Its performers smile beneficently as they imagine, in perfect harmony, “a Soviet friend” with whom they can share a treat. For now, they’ve been told, it’s just a fantasy, a wistful dream. “They don’t have milkshakes in the Soviet Union,” says a parent character before the song begins. “You can only get that in America, where we’re free. Maybe someday it will be different…”

Despite its foibles, there’s much to recommend Cold War Choir Practice, perhaps especially in a moment where American foolishness, arrogance, and brutality — so many of their current manifestations so directly traceable to Meek’s moment — feel so staggeringly hard to bear. Meek would be almost 50 today. What would she make of the world she inherited? Maybe someday it will be different.

Cold War Choir Practice is at MCC Theater through March 29.

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