Ro Reddick’s play with original music promises a light, knowing comedy about a Black girl and her family in Syracuse, New York in 1987, but swerves into a dark cloak-and-dagger tale of the Cold War, ending up more a low-budget imitation of a spy movie than a realistic reflection of American life in the 1980s. This is a surprise and a disappointment, because so much of “Cold War Choir Practice” is so good, not least its first-rate cast led by Alana Raquel Bowers, an adult who is completely convincing as ten-year-old Meek.
Meek lives with her father Smooch (Will Cobbs) and her grandmother Puddin (Lizan Mitchell) in the rundown Roll-a-Rama Skating Rink that Smooch spent his life savings to buy and now struggles to keep going. It’s Christmas time and Meek has her list ready, although she knows there is no money for any of it. She wants a Pound Puppy stuffed animal, a Speak & Spell language-learning device and a nuclear radiation detector for the fallout shelter she’s building in the basement.
Meek’s fear of nuclear war seems stoked by her having joined the Seedlings of Peace Children’s Choir, where the choir leader (Ellen Winter) talks to them about the number of nuclear warheads the Soviets have, but she believes “the voice of a child can stop a nuclear attack.” That’s why she has her choir preparing songs of friendship and peace for a concert that will last twenty-eight minutes, because it takes 30 minutes for an intercontinental ballistic missile to reach the U.S. from the Soviet Union so that gives two minutes for the children to seek shelter.
An actual three-member adult choir (Grace McLean, Suzzy Roche and Nina Ross) delightfully harmonizes in more than a dozen musical numbers that Reddick has composed. Some are charming pastiche, some lightly satirize the era: In “Milkshake for Peace,’ (which Meek’s family watches on PBS), an American child offers her milkshake to a Soviet child who is deprived of such treats in her country, and together they sing:
No one has to die, no one has to die
Milkshake for a Soviet
A Soviet and I – don’t die
No one has to die
The choir leader also arranges for Meek to have a Soviet pen pal.
“Dear Soviet Pen Pal,” Meek writes. “War is imminent. How are you today? … A kid from choir said I don’t have to worry about getting bombed in my neighborhood because only Black people live there and they always bomb important people first.”
Indeed, Meek’s father scoffs at her nuclear anxiety. “I don’t know why you worried ‘bout them Russians. The FBI just bombed a bunch of Black folks in Philly.” (a reference to the 1985 bombing of the Black advocacy group MOVE.) Smooch, a former member of the Black Panther party, bought the skating rink not as an investment but to restore what had been a long-time fixture in the community. His older brother Clay (Andy Lucien), once also a member of the party, is now a Republican working for the Reagan administration, a cause of tension between the two brothers. Among the strength of the play is this sophisticated awareness of the politics of being Black in America in the 1980s.
There is some savvy as well about Cold War politics in this play, which is set in the days leading up to President Ronald Reagan’s meeting with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, to sign a nuclear treaty, and includes some direct quotes from Reagan speeches.
But “Cold War Choir Practice” undermines its insights by imposing an over-the-top plot involving espionage. Clay is Reagan’s Deputy National Security Advisor and has important documents about the forthcoming treaties in his briefcase. Meek’s Soviet pen pal gives her a gift of a Speak & Spell, which enables a Soviet agent to recruit her to get ahold of those papers. At the same time, Wellspring, a human potential organization, ie cult (clearly inspired by the actual 1980s group Lifespring) has recruited Clay’s wife Virgie (Crystal Finn) to get those papers too. Wellspring, a front founded by an arms manufacturer, wants those papers in order to help sabotage the nuclear arms negotiations. The Soviets want them to make sure Reagan is on the up-and-up. The scenes of villainy and danger feel lifted from “Mission: Impossible” (the old TV series, not the movies.)
Reddick, co-winner of this year’s Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, writes in an author’s note that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and articles speculating about whether the United States had entered a new Cold War got her thinking about her involvement thirty years ago in a children’s chorus called “Peace Child,” which included in its repertoire Song for a Russian Child. Four years later, with Trump’s invasion of Iran, we’ve certainly entered a new era, but it’s not clear what it is, nor how relevant are the waning days of the Cold War (1947-1991). It’s always a challenge to avoid oversimplifying the complicated contours of a historical moment, and the cartoonish secret agent aspects of “Cold War Choir Practice” seem more a product of that era’s paranoia than a comment on it.
Luckily, Reddick, director Knud Adams and the rest of the creative team stick to history in some small but satisfying ways – the way the ensemble skates on the roller rink (guided by Baye and Asa’s movement direction), albeit without skates; that Speak & Spell (an actual handheld electronic educational toy introduced by Texas Instruments in 1978), and, above all, the cinnamon-flavored jawbreakers invented in 1954 that Meek gobbles up from the neighborhood candy shop – the Atomic Fireballs.
Cold War Choir Practice is at MCC through March 29
