Moreno at InterAct
Faux-radicalism in a football four-hander
Moreno
by Pravin Wilkins
directed by Seth Rozin and J Paul Nicholas
at InterAct Theatre Company through November 24
Not Recommended, with redeeming qualities
Moreno begins forced and ends predictably after plot turns that make little sense for the characters’ inner lives. Though generally well-acted, the staging is often lackluster. It is a well-timed production, as acknowledged in InterAct’s press copy, as we’re living the farcical replay of the 2016 election-cum-football season during which the play is set, but the play is tonally uneven and not especially interesting nor insightful. As a four-hander, it strains to capture the internal dynamics of an entire NFL team, with broadly drawn characters that feel more like types than like people.
This production is the US premiere, following a debut two years ago in London, and Wilkins is now a Philadelphia playwright and a member of PlayPenn Foundry cohort.
After a recorded curtain speech delivered by a sports radio announcer (a clever touch),1 Frank Jimenez enters the locker room of the NFL “Copperheads” as Luis Moreno, Mexican-American star running back earning a record salary on a one-year contract. Music blaring (there’s often slippage between whether music is diegetic or not, with a portable speaker in Moreno’s locker), he throws dollar bills around. With this extravagant entrance, he makes quick friends and enemies out of the three other characters in a rather forced sequence: friends with Cre’von Garcon (Abdul Sesay), a second year pro with a strong Creole identity, Ezekiel Williams (Charvez Grant), defensive captain with over a decade on the team, who tells Moreno to pick up the bills, and quarterback Danny Lombardo (Gabriel W. Elmore) tells Moreno that the only thing that matters to him is winning. Lombardo suspects Moreno has a bum knee and is only in it for the quick payout, that he couldn’t get a contract longer than a year because of his nagging injury.
These opening scenes and characters are broadly drawn, and I found myself wondering how much of Moreno was meant to be comic and how much was meant to be serious. There’s a tonal inconsistency, with lots of jokes getting thrown around, most of which I didn’t find funny. I thought these worked least for Grant’s Williams, who is going through a bit of an identity crisis as he mourns the recent death of his “former Black Panther” mother, and is constantly making somewhat obscure left-wing references and quips, including one about Standing Rock and one about Obama, both of which are thrown-away lines and the latter which doesn’t really make sense if his character is meant to be the radical he’s otherwise portrayed as.
When Lombardo later gets deeper into it with Moreno, and the running back reveals that he’s “betting his career” on this season, Lombardo pivots so quickly to supporting Moreno that it’s not even clear that he’s sincere, especially after he delivers, in complete seriousness, what I thought was the funniest line in the play, the cliche: “that’s not my business… but what you do on the field is.”
The completely symmetrical set by Dahlia Al-Habieli, composed of pairs of football lockers, complete with recessed lighting, on either side with an opening between them upstage center which serves as the main entrance and exit through the play, serves as football field and sidelines, though most of the scenes are in the locker room. Overhead tube-like lightning is perpendicular to the house, while three metal benches are downstage, parallel to the house, and the floor is carpeted in green turf painted with forced perspective lines that would converge at an imaginary point somewhere not far past upstage center.
Lights by Lindsay Alayne Stevens are fine in most scenes, but also often have a commitment to keeping the stage seemingly fully lit while the scene is played in only one corner of it, which, along with the set’s symmetry (and practical lighting), can make for unfocused scenes. Rozin and Nicholas’s staging rarely makes for artful pictures, often lacking literal depth. The few scenes with more dynamic staging, with more depth and detail, are much more effective than the rest. Montage-like sequences in each act are a bit of fun, using blackouts to advance the action from one game to the next through the season as the Copperheads rack up wins and head towards the championship. These cut between the four teammates in different celebratory group poses and actions. But I didn’t find any of these compositions especially interesting.
In one scene I wondered why the actors were changing, but not hanging up their jackets on the hangers in the locker. It turned out to be because of how the transition into the next scene was managed, but its sloppy business. Somewhat inexplicably, as the play is short and has no significant set change, and it readily advances time with it’s montages, there is a 15 minute intermission that bumps the running time up to two hours. I think the play would be tighter without the interval, further driving the characters towards the reckless actions of its conclusion.
Grant’s and Elmore’s performances, as two very different kinds of serious footballers, with attitudes afforded to them by the color of their skin—one embedded in the Black radical tradition, the other very white-bread with no interests besides winning football, respectively—were the highlight of the show. I was confused, though, by an out-of-place rather retro casual outfit (costumes by Millie Hiibel) that Elmore wore in one scene; a costume piece to telegraph him as conservative or old fashioned, but everything else about the character tells us what we need to know. Jimenez was fine, but has the trouble of playing a generally unlikable character, and while I thought Sesay’s characterization was solid, his vocal presence didn’t measure up to the rest of the cast.
The plot develops along predictable lines, as word of Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest spreads among the team and Williams decides to join in. When asked about this at press conferences, Moreno ignores it, setting up later conflict with Williams.
Along the way, there are too many moments where I found myself wondering where everyone else in the organization was. An NFL team is dozens of players, coaches, and so many more support staff, plus the players’ agents and families and union—and these people are barely ever even referenced, let alone appearing by proxy in messages or phone calls—though reporters appears as voiceovers—to the point where their absence is felt, puncturing the play’s realism.
SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT
The only meaningful exceptions to this rule are a discussion of getting other team members on their side in the latter parts of the second act, and Moreno’s mother. Moreno learns she has been the victim of an anti-immigrant hate crime—the restaurant where she works is vandalized with “build the wall” while she’s there—and Moreno takes off, missing a game to go console his mom. When he does return, he joins Williams in taking a knee, then goes off about white supremacy and not feeling welcome in the US at the postgame press conference. This pisses Lombardo off because his absence cost them a victory, and pisses Williams off because Moreno has, after first ignoring them, made the Black-led protest about him. This elides the fact that Kaepernick consistently spoke not only of police violence against Black people, but of oppression of people of color writ large,2 and it’s a curious and telling move by Wilkins to have the Copperheads’ resident Black radical put up a wall between Black and Chicano precisely at the moment when these two are actually most in solidarity. The starkness of Williams’s reaction further doesn’t pass the smell test, neither as a team leader nor as an activist: he should be far more understanding of his teammate’s headspace while also welcoming him into the movement.
Despite being scolded, Moreno is somehow humbled, truly and utterly transformed and has totally abandoned his priors. A couple scenes later, having sold off a handful of luxury cars, he brings Williams several million dollar checks made out to organizations like the NAACP. This is not only not a believable pivot, it’s also not interesting, there’s no grappling, neither internal nor external, where Moreno attempts to reconcile the contradiction that he’s living. This, in turn, leads Moreno and Williams to plot a protest together. They plan to walkout at the conference championship, for the vague reason that it’s “big” and therefore can’t be ignored (Williams says the problem with Kaepernick’s protest is that people are no longer paying attention to it, which is also why he was mad at Moreno). While working towards executing this plan, it is revealed that Moreno’s character hasn’t totally changed, in that he’s still ruthless, blackmailing Lombardo to keep him from alerting management to the walkout, which in turn ruins his relationship with Garcon. The protagonist of the play is an asshole, but now he’s an asshole who cares about something besides money—this would work better as a farce.
It makes no sense for Williams, whose mother “broke Assata (Shakur) out” (something he says as if it’s a real secret, in which case, why does he say it at all? And why would the secrecy matter if she’s dead?), and who has supposedly internalized many of her lessons, to agree to a wildcat strike action just to score a newscycle’s coverage. Indeed, there should be no better teacher of practical lessons about organizing than Williams’s mother, and especially this particular lesson, who as a veteran of the Black Liberation Army’s high profile actions, would have learned the hard way that headline-grabbing, high-risk, high-profile actions alone do little-to-nothing to advance the cause. That he would do so at the potential sacrifice of his own platform, leaving himself in a far worse strategic position, suggests that Wilkins is out of his depth.
After the players' action inevitably fails (here I’m unsure if Rozin and Nicholas or Wilkins want us to believe, along with the two characters driving it, that it could be a success), the play ends with the teams championship hopes dashed and Moreno and Williams out on their asses. They sit downstage center, lights low, bonding over nips and a joint. Surprised and disappointed that not a single player joined them, the two players curse the man, and then wonder, out loud, wait, what if they are out there meeting and conspiring against them?3 This is neat and tidy, in a way that is probably just right for left-of-center audiences to have their worldview affirmed. But a careful reading of the play is that such an action was bound to fail, not because the system is rigged, as the play seems to want us to believe, but because it was taken on carelessly, without any appropriate forethought and organizing.
There are no new insights here, with some debates from eight years ago re-hashed.4 Instead, Moreno insists that grandstanding political action could be an effective means of change, even when its characters should know better.
Visible within Moreno are the contours of a much more interesting play, one where Luis Moreno’s initial driving values aren’t instantly and neatly eclipsed, but rather sit in tension with his newly awakened ones; one where Williams has learned something from his militant mother besides sloganeering; a play that recognizes that even if Moreno and Williams could have pulled off their action, it still wouldn’t have changed anything.
A Good Play
The Comeuppance by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, one of the finest American playwrights working today, enters previews tomorrow at the Wilma and opens Friday, November 21. A co-production with Woolly Mammoth, it received good reviews there earlier this season (including from The Washington Post’s new critic, Naveen Kumar), as did the world premiere production in New York last year.
Post-Election Notes
I want to share some writing I’ve found useful these last two weeks. First, Gabriel Winant with an election post-mortem in Dissent:
Trump has remade the Americans, and to defeat Trumpism requires nothing less than the left doing the same. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to think the Democrats are capable of accomplishing this, although the possibilities of doing it by any other means are equally obscure.
And Ed Zitron, in his newsletter, on the how the media has bent over backwards to give the increasingly-shitty tech industry glowing coverage tech industry
We — users of products — are at war with the products we’re using and the people that make them. And right now, we’re losing.
If you find yourself struggling with despair, whether you are a young organizer or just young at organizing, please read Mariame Kaba (whose book Let This Radicalize You is currently available as a free download, along with 9 other titles, from Haymarket Press. AK Press is also offering up six ebooks.
And one note from me. There’s been a lot of advice the last weeks about what you can do, and the word “organize” comes up a lot. “You're gonna talk to more people at work, at the post office... figure out who seems cool, and figure out who needs help,” as labor and metal journalist, Kim Kelly, proscribes.
This is, of course, the beginning: organizing takes talking to people, and the years ahead—the crises in which we’re already enmeshed in, in fact—are going to require stronger social bonds and the breaking down of our little alienated bubbles. But you may have also seen people telling you things like community gardening and hanging out is “organizing.” These are good things to do. You should be out in your community. Community gardening,5 reading groups, and so on can be part of organizing, but these activities are not inherently organizing nor political action. Organizing, in the strictest definition, is the difficult business of changing minds and, often, moving people to action. So I want to encourage you, dear reader, to pay attention to how you can politically activate whatever it is you feel compelled and able to do.
And a word of advice on this from Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s via Bluesky thread:
another curmudgeonly thread for the many of you who will be entering organizing spaces.
all other things being equal, when confronted with one team of people recruiting you to Be a Thing and another team recruiting you to Do a Thing, please give serious thought to joining the second.
So go Do A Thing. Action is a great counter to despair.
And get your flu and COVID shots. And don’t rake your leaves—the bugs needs those.
I failed to take a note on who; several sports media personalities are thanked in the program. There are a handful of press conference scenes, and I surmise that the others have provided the voice overs of journalists there.
The Black Lives Matter movement as a whole has been intersectional from its early days.
This is not a terrible proxy for Kaepernick’s actual trajectory, as he accused the NFL of colluding to keep him out, but it’s notable that, unlike in Moreno, it didn’t take any escalation for the 49ers to release him from his contract.
I can imagine this being much more interesting to a London audience, who didn’t live through these discourses and for whom American football is novel.
There is much more that can be said about the role both food sovereignty and repair of the natural world have to play in unfucking the world