After a receiving rave reviews from audiences, Baltimore Center Stage’s Oh Happy Day! is getting an extended run through Oct. 20. I’ve attended twice now—both performances received standing ovations—and it’s the most urgent theater production I’ve seen in years.
Oh Happy Day! is the latest collaboration between playwright-actor Jordan E. Cooper and BCS’s new artistic director, Stevie Walker-Webb, whom Cooper calls his “story doula.” Their last project was Ain’t No Mo’, a surprise critical hit that earned six Tony nominations in 2022, including Best Play and Best Director.
The play unfolds over one afternoon at a Johnson family cookout in Laurel, Mississippi. God tells Keyshawn, played by Cooper, that he can save himself only by saving his estranged family from an impending flood. Keyshawn, who is gay, was kicked out of the house by his father years ago. The tension revolves around his ability (or lack thereof) to forgive the people who hurt him the most, and to maintain his strained faith. Grammy Award winner Donald Lawrence scores the show with original Gospel music.
In ways that will push some theatergoers out of their comfort zones, the production involves a certain amount of call-and-response—an expectation that’s set before the show even begins. The set is not concealed by a curtain, so when the audience enters the theater, in effect we enter the Johnsons’ yard. Local Mississippi radio station GAWD is playing Parliament Funkadelic, and if you’re not dancing in your seat at least a little, you’re probably dead.
“This theater is a church, and we want you to treat it as such,” the radio DJ announces, inviting the audience to sing, clap, and generally let loose. Which we do. People cheer, they “amen” and “mm-hmm” as they raise hands in prayer.
This is exactly what Cooper is hoping for. “To be honest, I feel like the American theater can get very stifled,” Cooper said in an interview after a recent matinee. “The way to make the theater alive is to make the people alive with it. Which is basically what Shakespeare’s time was. When they were doing those shows, it was for community to interact, not for people to just sit and be spectators. That’s really what I’m trying to bring back.”
Also fundamental to Cooper’s work—and certainly part of what makes it so vibrant—is a refusal to tamp down Black culture for the comfort of white audiences.
“I always say white folks are not invited to the cookout, but we’ll leave the door open,” he explained in a 2022 Vulture interview. “You can come in, and you can grab some food, get you a drink, and have a good time…[but] I wanted to write as if there were none there.”
But Cooper’s not preaching to the metaphorical choir, either. No matter who you are, “You’re here to interact with people who don’t always look like you, think like you, move like you,” he said in our interview. For example, he wasn’t sure church folks would embrace the show, even with its Christian message.
“Some people get offended,” he said. “They want to see giraffes and elephants walk across the stage with an ark, not talk about family trauma, or people who have to do sex work, or who are addicted to drugs, or who went to prison for murder. But what the play really is about is beyond religion. It’s about the idea of seeing goodness in the world.”
If Oh Happy Day! were a movie, it would earn an “R” rating. (I spent much of one performance fighting the urge to cover the ears of the seven-year-old girl in front of me, whose family clearly missed the website’s content warnings, likely expecting a much tamer version of the Bible story than they got.)
But for the adults in the room, even the Church-going ones who came in unprepared for sausage-eating jokes, the show is resonating.
“I’m not really one for profanity, but you can see past some things when the story is strong enough, and in the end, it really was,” audience member Nicole Watford said after the show. “I thought it was amazing.”
Oh Happy Day! will close this Sunday, Oct. 20, and it will be going out in style. Following its final Thursday-night performance on Oct. 17, BCS is hosting a tribute to recently deceased soul singer and family reunion stalwart Frankie Beverly. DJ No ID will be spinning in the lobby and Walker-Webb will lead the electric slide—with all encouraged to join in.