Review: Supernatural takes center stage in the ‘Tank Stranger’ world premiere at True Colors

There are plays that ask audiences to look back, and then there is Tank Stranger, which insists that looking back is the only way forward. 

The world premiere of James Ijames’ Afrofuturistic folktale — helmed with care by True Colors Theatre Artistic Director Jamil Jude alongside dramaturg Jonathan McCrory — brings a unique blend of family mythology, root work, ancestral veneration, suspense and surrealism to the Southwest Arts Center stage.

It tells the story of the Stranger Family and all of its spiritual intricacies. At the center is Tank Stranger, played by Justen Ross, who captures the curiosity, innocence and unguarded optimism of a boy standing on the edge of manhood. On his 18th birthday, Tank awaits his estranged mother, wishing for her to teach him the family song. Then the dead start showing up, carrying old wounds, unfinished business and truths that refuse to stay buried. They also remind him of the gifts he inherited.

Generations of Strangers, including his great-grandmother, great-grandfather and “Crazy Aunt Mary,” move through Tank as the boundaries between past and present begin to loosen. Ross’ ability to slip between Tank and the ancestors is one of the production’s most compelling feats. The cast is a shining group of familiar faces from film and TV. Tank, along with his adoring Aunt Vonn, played by Candy McLellan, his no-nonsense Aunt Sephine played by Schelle Purcell and his free-spirited, if avoidant, mother Dovie, (Kron Moore) cross generations without treating the spirit realm as separate from daily life. Instead, it is simply part of the family’s conversations and rituals.

The play leans into the supernatural with confidence, also folding humor into a story that wrestles with grief, abandonment and long-held family secrets.

Ijames allows the family’s elders and ancestors to be complicated. These are not polished saints dispensing perfect wisdom from beyond the grave. They made mistakes. They carried the limits of their eras. They hurt one another. They survived in the only ways they knew how. The play sees them whole, making room for grace and understanding without erasing the harm they caused.

That complexity makes Tank Stranger a natural final-year offering for True Colors’ three-year “Blackness Is Not a Monolith” exploration. Jude described the theater company’s guiding theme as telling “a multiplicity of stories” that do not have to be only “Black and Christian and what people expect from us.”

The same spirit extends through The Drinking Gourd, the True Colors-led consortium of six Black theaters that includes National Black Theatre in New York; Hattiloo Theatre in Memphis; Ensemble Theatre in Houston; Karamu House in Cleveland; The Hansberry Project in Seattle; and True Colors in Atlanta. These theaters co-commission, co-develop and rotate new works by Black playwrights, giving the plays life in multiple communities while strengthening the institutions and economies that sustain them. As Jude said, there is “so much synergy” in Black theaters working together to get new plays onstage, helping to create a new Black canon.

Tank Stranger loses some momentum in the second act, with pacing that lags in a few scenes. And it turns a bit hasty when the characters seem to easily accept, rather than examine, one of the story’s biggest revelations. But the production sweetly finds its way home by the closing number, a resounding and tear-inducing celebration of a loving family returning to one another, remembering their song and embracing what they once tried to leave behind.

Where and When 

Tank Stranger, produced by True Colors Theatre, is on stage at the Southwest Arts Center through October 4. Tickets start at $25 and depend on seating. 915 New Hope Road. 

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Angela Oliver is a proud native of old Atlanta who grew up in the West End. A Western Kentucky University journalism and Black studies grad, daily news survivor and member of Delta Sigma Theta, she works in the grassroots nonprofit world while daydreaming about seeing her scripts come alive on the big screen.