Candrice Jones’ play FLEX got its Canadian premiere on Wednesday at Crow’s Theatre in a co-production with Obsidian Theatre.  It’s the late 1990s in small town Arkansas.  The creation of the WNBA has provided another reason for young women (especially African American women) to try for one of the few escape routes from life in a town where the main employer is a prison.  In the prison-industrial complex it’s a sports scholarship or the military.

So for the girls of the Lady Train; the local high school basketball team, getting to the state finals is a potential out.  For the two stars, being scouted by a D1 college means everything.  But it also means rivalry between the two; Sidney Brown; a recent transplant from Oakland (which to Plano, AR seems like an exotic Nirvana) and Starra Jones; the team captain whose mother was once a star in her own right but has been killed on military service.  There’s the Southern small town attitude to religion and abortion in play too as one of the team gets pregnant triggering traumatic memories for team coach Francine Pace.  And there’s a shocking betrayal that unfolds slowly during the first act and leads to a major confrontation in the second.

So how does one stage this?  The answer is with a lot of energetic basketball, some typical teenage girl scenes and quite a lot of humour.  What works especially well is that we only see the five girls and their coach.  The rest of the world is reported, rather than shown, which really focusses us on the key interactions.  The scenes succeed each other rather briskly.  It’s one of the aspects of Mumbi Tindyebwa Oto’s pacy and high energy direction.  The girls discuss sex a lot; not especially surprising as (in theory at least) they are abstaining until after the finals (and this in a world where most girls have been knocked up before they leave school).  There’s humour here too.  Even if it’s the classic putting a condom on a cucumber thing.  There’s also a touchingly naive approach to religion.  Apparently in whatever church holds sway in this community you can be a minister and baptise people while still in high school and so there’s another source of tension between pious “minister” Cherise Howard and her conventionally, but loosely, religious team mates.

Then there’s the basketball.  This production has a basketball coach and both the training drills and the match action feel authentic.  I’m no basketball expert but I have played competitive team sports and everything from the must-get-it-perfect training drills to that combination of exhaustion and adrenaline in the last minutes of a tight game feels as I remember.  There’s also a surprising level of skill on display.  It’s all brought together by very clever designs; set (Ken Mackenzie), lighting (Raha Javanfar) costume (Ming Wong) and sound (Thomas Ryder Payner).  The markings of the court are mirrored on the back wall and elements light up, flash and so on at key moments.  It’s very dramatic.

The acting is excellent.  Jasmine Case, as Sidney, and Shauna Thompson, as Starra, really convincingly portray their journey from team mates and friendly rivals to something close to hatred.  It’s powerful stuff.  Trinity Lloyd is touchingly naive as Cherise and Jewell Bowry manages the complex emotional journey of the pregnant April Jenkins with considerable skill.  Asha James plays Donna Cunningham; that player who isn’t the best player on the team but tries hard (and is a terrible driver) with quite a lot of humour.  Sophia Walker, as the coach, presents, as she should, as the “adult in the room” but in a sincere and sensitive way.

There really is a lot going on in this play and it rolls out in some surprising, even shocking, ways.  Given how much is going on it’s impressive that the directing and the acting keeps driving it forward so that it doesn’t drag at all.  It’s greatly helped by stagecraft of very high quality but then we’ve come to expect that from Crow’s.  I’m not always a huge fan of linear, narrative theatre but this piece worked for me and I found it quite emotionally affecting.

FLEX plays at Crow’s Theatre until May 18th.

Photo credits: Roya Delsol (first image) and Elana Emer (the rest).