Review: “Flex” is a slam-dunk in relatable characters but still misses a few shots

There are flickers of brilliance on the court with Candrice Jones’ real-life tale of adolescent hoops, humor and heartache among five Black teenage girls in rural ’90s Arkansas. Yet, in the world premiere of Flex, at Theatrical Outfit through October 2, there are still a few missed shots and out-of-bounds passes amid the clever footwork and alley-oops of Jones’ poetic writing.

The show follows the intersecting storylines of friends and teammates on the Plainnoles’ Lady Train: Starra, Sidney, Cherise, Donna and April. Cherise (an ebullient India Tyree) is the spiritual seeker of the group who’s also in a budding romance with quiet and determined Donna (Whitney Nelson). Then there’s Sidney (played with a perfect mixture of confident and obnoxious by Kenisha Johnson), a transplant from California who is seemingly poised to get recruited first out of the gate. And finally, there’s April (Aminah Williams), who is pregnant and struggling with what to do about it.

Though it’s an ensemble piece, the protagonist is Starra (Hailey Elizabeth), who has her sights set on righting the missteps of her mother, a former high-school basketball star. It helps that Elizabeth has been involved in various readings of the play throughout its journey, which gives her a dexterity in this nervous, emotionally fraught role. Starra isn’t just hungry for success; she’s starving to the point that she’s willing to sabotage her teammates. “Everyone plays a little dirty,” she says in one soliloquy, pointing out that cheating isn’t a foul unless there’s a referee there to catch it.

Like her characters in Flex, Candrice Jones hails from small-town Arkansas and played basketball throughout college. Because her writing originates in that place of personal affection and first-hand experience, each character comes to life with authenticity and depth. That’s the play’s true strength: the characters, their complexities and how each actor renders nuances.

All members of the ensemble get their moment to shine. Andrea Gooden’s Coach Francine Pace injects energy and authority each time she strides onto stage. Johnson shows some fine comedy chops during one scene, when Sidney recounts the titillating details from a scandalous magazine story. And, as the character in the most dire situation, Williams plays April’s increasing helplessness in impossible circumstances with an electric desperation that gives the play its highest stakes. Her teammates want to help but have no way to understand what she’s going through, which all bubbles over in a pivotal car ride to Mississippi.

Other highlights are the lighting and projection design by Bradley Bergeron, which serve up splashes of bright color on the walls and evoke the recognizable palette of the era. And each scene gets support from a sweet throwback soundtrack — recognizable nostalgic jams pipe in by Des’ree and TLC, among others.

The play is weakest, unfortunately, in two integral ways. The first is the conundrum of how to present sports onstage. The very moments when basketball feats should dazzle, they instead falter. This is most apparent during the climactic Big Championship, when we should at least have the impression that the teammates are giving their all. Instead, on the night I attended, there was an awkward 5 to 10 minutes where the actors — who, to be fair, were likely not cast because of their hooping prowess — just kept missing shot after shot, even unencumbered free-throws and layups. This unfamiliarity with the game was so glaring that it made some members of the audience laugh nervously.

More effective were the moments when they symbolically moved in line like a choreographed dance, which is what I wish director Patdro Harris, who comes from an extensive dance background, had leaned into throughout.

To be fair, I attended one of the final nights of previews ahead of opening night, when the play was still being reworked and revised, so these issues may be finessed by the time you read this.

The final critique is of the too-neat presentation of April’s sudden and somewhat inexplicable change of heart regarding whether to get an abortion. Granted, the play was developed at the 2020 Humana Festival of New American Plays, two years before the Supreme Court overturned the 50-year-old protections of Roe v. Wade. But still, it’s tough to watch a young woman suddenly decide — like on so many TV shows and after-school specials — that she “just can’t go through with it,” when we live in a world where abortion is now illegal in Arkansas, even in incest or rape cases.

Let that sink in: Pregnant people in the 1990s had more rights over what to do with their bodies than they do now. And that lends itself to more scrutiny regarding the messages we get fed about unwanted pregnancies and access to reproductive care.

One final note: The story takes place across the backdrop of the Women’s National Basketball Association’s early years. Amazingly, it wasn’t until 1997 that the league held its inaugural season with eight teams. Since then, they’ve added a few, including our own Atlanta Dream. But none of that WNBA backdrop is explored — even as it is more relevant than ever in the face of Brittney Griner’s wrongful detainment in Russia, which threw a spotlight on the immense disparities in pay for female players in the United States.

From Hoop Dreams to Love and Basketball to White Men Can’t Jump, basketball has long served as a vessel for telling a wide range of stories with arguably more versatility than the pantheon of baseball and football stories. But for whatever reason, we have yet to get A League of Their Own treatment for the WNBA.

So maybe it’s time to correct that? Jones leaves us with enough intriguing questions and open-ended possibilities for these vividly realized characters that it would be nice to witness a follow-up. It’s high time for a full-court press into the backstories of these incredible athletes, who too often have to blaze trails without a spotlight on their achievements.

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Alexis Hauk is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She has written and edited for numerous newspapers, alt-weeklies, trade publications and national magazines including Time, The Atlantic, Mental Floss, Uproxx and Washingtonian. An Atlanta native, Alexis has also lived in Boston, Washington D.C., New York City and Los Angeles. By day, she works in health communications. By night, she enjoys covering the arts and being Batman.