“Try/Step/Trip,”  a terrifically rhythmic, unconventional musical that merges rap with step-dancing, was inspired by the court-ordered stay in drug rehab by poet, composer and performer Dahlah Brathwaite after he was arrested when police pulled over his car and found a couple of hallucinogenic mushrooms in his pocket.

This is not a straightforward account of his personal experience. While he performs in the show, Brathwaite is just one of eight cast members, assuming the role of the Conductor, standing off to the side in front of a keyboard, while Tyrese Shawn Avery portrays a version of the character two decades earlier. The other characters at the rehab center get almost equal time. Indeed, they are given names, while Brathwaite’s stand-in is Anonymous,  a nickname the others teasingly assign him because in his first group session, he doesn’t want to give his name, saying “Isn’t this supposed to be anonymous?”

Anonymous does tell us the story of his arrest

This car is marijuana free
I swear it you can search me

But i forgot these mushrooms in my pocket
i was planning on
tripping on a Thursday

Anonymous and Conductor then rap together, echoed after each line by the six other cast members:

Hands behind back

Back up on the way

Put me in the back

Black man, bad day

But we hear all this only after the other characters have told their own stories about confrontations with the police.

Throughout the eighty-five minutes of the show, the characters take turns describing such individual experiences, which also include their struggles to stay off drugs (or their unwillingness to quit them), all while discussing their political beliefs and cultural insights. Samples (Freddy Ramsey Jr.), agrees with Pastor (Dante Rossi) that drugs were introduced to the Black community to destroy it, but he still enjoys them: 
“I don’t think my love for strippers
Interrupts my want for justice

…I don’t think my use of drugs
Contradicts my want for answers
But that’s how the FBI crushed the [Black] panthers

There is talk of racial injustice, but also socioeconomic inequality. Mary (stand-out Jasmine T.R. Gatewood) calls out Anonymous, a college graduate riffing on the phrase I’m black and I’m proud: “You saying I wanna be black because it’s safe now, it’s cool and I’m proud of being cool. When I say I’m black and I’m proud, and Samples says it, we saying.. I’m black and I’m tired. I’m black and police might shoot me, I’m black and my country hates me, AND I’m proud. We saying it like the folks who said it before it wasa jam.”

The Conductor is especially astute in commenting on the complicated role of Black music in Black lives. He implies he violated his probation by hanging out to hear music in “risky” places:

I chose the risk
As if black being
Like black song
Lost its identity
When severed from menace
And danger.
When you’re forced to exist on the margins
It feels like you can’t live without your edge

“Trip/Step/Trip” is so full of such observations and declamations there is little room for a focused linear plot or even in-depth portraits. Few theatergoers will likely object, or perhaps even notice. The great strength of “Try/Step/Trip” are the thrilling moments created when by cast performs Toran Moore’s choreography like a step team from a Black fraternity, with the percussive military-precise movements that  Spike Lee made familiar to the uninitiated in the 1988 movie “School Daze.” This is a show that does wonders with a set of black folding chairs, using them as props, set, percussive instruments, companions in the storytelling, even moments of wonder; at one point, two of the performers are sitting on chairs that are pulled right out from under them; they stay seated as if nothing had happened. 

There is even an effort to reconcile the regimentation of the step dancing with the loose, anti=authoritarian tenor of the character that The Conductor (Brathwaithe?) was twenty years ago, when he spent that time incarcerated in rehab. He has learned since then:

“Burn down the structures but build another one there
We need structure young man
Or we default back into theirs.”

The first line of Brathwaithe’s show is how old the story is that it tells. The Conductor says:

“This tale IS so old
The structure you know:
Black man in search of redemption
Stuck in the system
This tale so old…”

The group responds: “It needs new life!”

And so it gets.

Try/Step/Trip is at ART/NY through January 25 as part of the Under the Radar festival.

(Note: The performers I saw are not all the same as those in the photographs and videos)