Toothless

Oh Happy Day, Heaux Church, recuperation politics, power analysis

Commemorating the onset of a community food drive, with faces painted white and gloved hands stretched overhead, the children’s ministry of Cathedral International Baptist Church mimed the imagery of a fortuitous place as the voice of Cece Winans filled the room with fables of the temporal and hollowed tabernacle. The tabernacle, the biblical underground, long stood as a cloak of covering where the vulnerable lay hidden into obscurity and unfettered by enemies. It was forged as a divine protection, a gift, a rest. Never would I have imagined the spirit of said tabernacle exploited, such nefariousness present years later, only now hidden in plain sight.

November 5th, 2025 at the Public Theatre, the lights go down for Oh Happy Day, a new play-with-music by Jordan E. Cooper with direction by Stevie Walker-Webb and music by Grammy Award-winning Donald Lawrence. The story of Noah’s Ark centers on Keyshawn, a Black queer person reluctant to save their family from looming floods in response to their family’s queerphobia. The show follows their estrangement and ends with tragedy, flood conquering all shuffled towards death. Despite the chorus’ costuming, indicative of Sunday’s best - glitter dresses, hats and fans - shaking tambourines, necessary hooting and hollering, and the play’s reckoning of homophobia’s destruction of Black families, I left writhing with displeasure. Who could find fault while experiencing works of the gospel legend, Donald Lawrence? Me, who grew up listening to his Prayer of Jabez?

In Blackpentecostal Breath, Ashon Crawley argues that:

“[B]lackness is released into the world to disrupt the institutionalization and abstraction of thought [...] the performative practices of Blackpentecostalism constitute a disruptive force, generative for imagining otherwise modes of social organization and mobilization.”

Yet, when the performative practices itself are embedded within institutions, the practice becomes part of a recuperation politic, defanging the once “abolitionist decolonial project that resists the role of the subject.” (Crawley) We are left with gummy gospel aesthetics devoid of revolutionary capacity.

Cooper’s dramatic peak surrounded Keyshawn demolishing their family home - the little material legacy and negotiating power they had - for flood materials in appeasing a godless narration arc; while this mirrors the destruction of queerphobia, it also eerily reflects the contemporary approach to the politic, the reverent, the spirit and yolk of Black artistic liberation. In contemporary artists’ pursuit of individual prestige over collective wholeness, instead of ‘saving us all’ through myopic representational politics, we invoke brain-drain of Black revolutionary thought and organizing capacity, ensuring our liberatory efforts remain toothless.

Toni Cade Bambara crowned Black works pregnant with the destiny to “make the revolution irresistible.” Therein lies an altar call that must be imbued in each work - even, or especially in, works of joy, camp, and surrealism - lest Black works disintegrate into spectacle, “the language of contradiction, where words and meanings must be reappropriated from their debased meanings in contemporary usage, and either restored or reinvented.” (Debord)

This stripping of substance and meaning is nothing new. It is the same fate for famed revolutionaries, from Dr. Martin Luther King and his communist ideals before his State-led martyrdom, to Hellen Keller and Einstein’s socialist publications. Capital bores into the rich tapestry of radicalism until it is spun into fine-but-empty iconographic thread. Even the line between theatre and church has been recently discussed with an NYT article written by Alissa Wilkinson; however, where Wilkinson claims, “the church they love left them, not the other way around,” sources shared will consider that the exact opposite is true for Black artists.

Consider Heaux Church by Brandon Kyle Goodman, presented at ARS NOVA, which followed Goodman’s experiences growing up in the church. With testimony of the queerphobia that ousted them from the community, Brandon offered narrative recovery and reclamation through puppetry, song, and humorously raunchy storytelling. Unfortunately, the use of church aesthetics became a spectacle for the 75.3% white Broadway audience (Broadway League) to engage with, stripped of critical political and cultural resonance. While Heaux Church did speak to sex-positive testimony as collective mental-health praxis, there was an exploitative assumption of Black audience engagement. Black folks in the audience, expertly practiced in Black Listening, coined by Chicago Poet Laureate, avery r. young, inherently took up call and response, testimony, and whooping. Thus, they became a tool of legitimacy for Goodman’s product, flattening Black interiority for analytical spectacle under the gaze of predominantly white audiences.

Without intimacy, Black Listening becomes Shuckin’ and Jivin’. In Ribbin’, Jivin’, and Playin’ the Dozens, Herbert L. Foster writes:

“Shuckin’ and jivin’ is a verbal and physical technique some [B]lacks use to avoid difficulty, to accommodate some authority figure, and in the extreme, to save a life or to save oneself from being beaten physically or psychologically.”

Black communities developed intimacy as a response to shared threat, yielding community-soothing praxis and methodologies of sanity-making in response to dissociative psychological terror. Black American churches, still 86% monoracial spaces per Equal Justice Initiative, can still recall bloody violent histories: 1963 bombings that martyr four little girls and 2015 shootings by white supremacists. Historical programs like Black Panther Party free lunches and garden projects responded to these threats. In The Black Panther Party and the Black Church, Dyson abstracts: “Many a freedom fighter has emerged from the [B]lack church.” There cannot be ahistorical theatrical reinterpretations of Black church spaces without abolition and reparations to those impacted by racial apartheid and domestic terror unleashed pre- and post- Jim Crow.

---

The issue is not with individual Black artists seeking survival, peace, and yes, prestige. Survival necessitates this flattening. Lack of capital, social nets, and structural power force commercially-ambitious Black artists to filter their work through white institutional legibility for necessary investment. Race and Sociology of Art reports inequitable burnout for said artists due to unpaid and invisible labor, never ending microaggressions, and market pressure that influences their funding viability.

Principles of light are similar to principles of recuperation through commercialization efforts. One is that, within commercialization, specificity of story ‘broadens’ for palatability and scale, much like how light broadens for further reach and illumination. However; the effect of the light is diminished and defused; compare the strength of a laser to that of a table lamp. Similarly, a show can broaden but it will be defused.

Light can also be distorted, much like histories, undergrounds, tabernacles, revolutionary art. Distortion in the arts have long been a fabric of Black artmaking spirit - a Trojan Horse to survival and, better yet, liberation. Indigenous African deities venerated as white saints in Vodou and Santeria. West African hymns hidden in Baptist hymns. Freedom routes woven in cornrows. Distortion as survival. Now, the distortion has perverted to appeal to white audiences instead of confusing them for Black safety, despite recent and broadly worsening race relations per Government Accountability Offices. What does the artist, tasked with uplifting American consciousness, do when the resonant words of Stokeley Carmichael ring truer now than ever?

Black Theatremakers’ creed is similar to the journalists’ - to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable - requiring both dialectical-material struggle and clear critique to achieve liberatory goals. In Flexible Personality, Brian Holmes warns that we must “avoid the trap of […]the impasse of a critique so totalizing that it leaves no way out, except through an excessively sophisticated, contemplative, and ultimately elitist aesthetics.” In other words, faith without acts is dead. One space that meets this charge is Judson Memorial Church, plastered with stained-glass imagery of Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler and Cecilia Gentili, coined Judson saints, which coincides with their politics and artmaking. Artist presentations bleed into kitchens exclusively for Black Trans people, community ballrooms, and mutual aid for the poor and hungry - many of whom fill the artmaking class. They, along with the rise of the Black indie producer (USC Annenberg), stand as a foil to the present plight we face in the present theatrical production model.

As a playwright, in BRICKS, I articulate that it is a “privilege to witness Black space, thought, and time.” In Multicultural Education and the Protection of Whiteness, Castagno argues similarly: “multi-cultural” approaches ultimately protect whiteness by neutralizing power analysis, which lead to continued occupation and colonization without necessary reckonings of unearned privilege. Still, despite the ongoing apartheid and genocides, Black/African Americans share their history, culture, and liberation curriculum, which produces qualitative benefits for students from multiple racial backgrounds (PNAS, Bonilla). This offering is beyond a privilege; it’s a miracle - but miracles require respect. Respect of Black spiritual processes, its houses, by-laws, and histories that manufacture them. There needs to be a study, an altar call, an initiation; “in itiare,“ to turn inward. To turn inward to the reality of power inequities, despite the discomfort. Only then does analysis become intimacy.

Updated language to respect artists’ genderqueerness***