The Tony-nominated playwright Jordan E. Cooper has already upended Broadway. Will Baltimore be next?
“Oh Happy Day!,” the 29-year-old playwright’s first show since his maiden effort tossed the equivalent of a cherry bomb onto the Great White Way, makes its world premiere Sept. 27 at Center Stage.
And it will be the second time in two years that Baltimore is receiving national attention for shows that are being built and created in Charm City.
Cooper’s Biblical based play with music has already made it on the radar of of New York theater insiders — just as last year’s Broadway revival of “The Wiz” did when it launched its national tryout from the Hippodrome Theatre. (“The Wiz” may have been a critical misfire, but it was a commercial success, racking up weekly sales in the millions during its 6-month limited Broadway run.)
After “Oh Happy Day!” leaves Baltimore, it is scheduled to open in the 2025-26 season at New York’s prestigious Public Theatre. Cooper and Center Stage artistic director Stevie Walker-Webb said they are in preliminary talks with producers about a possible Broadway run.
Later this season, Center Stage will host yet another high-profile premiere — the debut of “Mad Men” creator and Baltimore native Matthew Weiner’s play about presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth.
That’s three big-bang shows back to back — and it’s generating a level of interest nationally in Baltimore theater that the city hasn’t enjoyed since the 1970s and 1980s when it was among a handful of “tryout towns” in which producers worked out kinks in shows before the casts bowed on Broadway.
“We have everything we need to change the face of American theater right here in Baltimore,” said Walker-Webb, who has worked with Cooper for more than a decade after the two met at Manhattan’s New School.
“For the first play of my first season,” he said, “I wanted to pick a play by my favorite playwright that I think audiences will love.”
“Oh Happy Day!” is a black comedy that updates and relocates the biblical stories of Noah’s Ark and the prodigal son to modern-day Mississippi. A play with music, the show includes a score composed by gospel recording luminary Donald Lawrence.
The playwright himself will perform the lead role of Keyshawn, a drug-addicted gay prostitute who has become estranged from his church-going family. He returns to his hometown with a seemingly impossible mission — to warn the people he loves of an impending, world-ending flood and to convince them to board the boat he will build in the backyard from scratch.
Commenting on the action are the three Divines, supernatural gospel singers who function as a kind of Greek chorus and represent the voice of the community; the trio will include vocalist Latrice Pace of the Anointed Pace Sisters, sometimes referred to as “The First Family of Gospel.”
When Cooper was a teen, he said he struggled with suicidal thoughts that resulted from growing up gay in a blue-collar. deeply religious Texas family.
“This is the play I ran away from for a long time,” he said.
“I’m a church boy, and my parents didn’t understand why I would add one more thing on top of being Black that would make my life difficult. As long as I can remember, I’ve struggled with how to love a God who you’re told hates you, how to love a church that side-eyes you.”
He paused for a moment, then continued: “This play is re-opening wounds that I thought were gone.”
Broadway breakout, TV standout
The mix of over-the-top farce and anger is one of Cooper’s hallmarks as a playwright. While the satire can be searing, it is driven by a deep love for the same institutions he is lampooning.
For example, Cooper’s breakout show, “Ain’t No Mo'” was set in an airport boarding lounge and was based on the premise that the U.S. has decided to solve its race problem by buying every Black person in America a one-way ticket to Africa.
Skeptics predicted that Cooper’s satire was too edgy for Broadway, and early signs seemed to indicate that the pundits were right. Ticket sales lagged, and “Ain’t No Mo'” was scheduled to close just two weeks after its Broadway debut.
But Cooper launched a social media campaign to save his show. The resulting outpouring of support bought one more week on stage, a slew of largely positive reviews from national publications and six Tony nominations — including one for the show’s director, Walker-Webb.
But even before “Ain’t No Mo'” introduced the 29-year-old Cooper to theater geeks, a television audience already was familiar with the writer’s uniquely fearless brand of humor.
In 2021, he created “The Ms. Pat Show,” the Emmy-nominated TV series which just completed its fourth season on BET. Cooper still writes the show, which is based on the life story of its star, Patricia “Ms. Pat” Williams, a convicted felon from the streets of Atlanta turned reluctant suburban mother.
The caustic sitcom is filmed before a live audience, and the show’s fans included the late television pioneer Norman Lear (“All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons.”)
“I wanted to challenge the conventions of the genre by creating an R-rated family sitcom,” Cooper said.
“People are afraid of the truth, so you mix it with humor. I wanted to write an episode about molestation, and have the audience fall over laughing. I wanted to find the comedy from having an abortion while you’re married and not telling your husband.”
Tho gospel according to Jordan Cooper
Given Cooper’s propensity for skewering sacred cows, it is perhaps not surprising that religion takes its share of jabs in “Oh Happy Day!”
But Cooper differentiates in the play between the church — a manmade institution characterized by human flaws — and his characters’ faith, which “Oh Happy Day!” celebrates.
It’s why Lawrence agreed to write three songs for “Oh Happy Day!” The composer, known for such Christian gospel hits as “Encourage Yourself” and “The Blessing of Abraham,” has collaborated with such famous folk as Mary J. Blige and Stephanie Mills. It’s fair to say he has his pick of projects.
But Lawrence attended a workshop of “Oh Happy Day!” last summer in New York, and he liked what he saw.
He thought Cooper’s play was honest. It might occasionally be profane, but it was scriptural and spiritual at its very core.
“Religion and God are not always the same thing,” Lawrence said. “They work hand in hand sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. Jordan’s writing might sometimes make us uncomfortable, but it’s really about the message for me.”
The play’s message, Cooper thinks, can be summed up in two words: Moses stuttered.
“God uses the people whom everyone else would throw away,” he said.
“Writing plays takes all of me, but it is my sound. We’re all instruments, and this is my song to play.”
If You Go
“Oh Happy Day!” runs Sept. 19 through Oct. 13 at Baltimore Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St. Tickets cost $25-$74 and can be bought at centerstage.org or by calling 410-332-0033.
