Review: A Divine Flood Threatens a Mississippi Family in Oh Happy Day!

What would you do with your life if you had a chance to live it again? Would you try to make peace with loved ones who’d done you wrong, or would you spiral into the same old dysfunctional fights? That’s the question prodigal son Keyshawn faces in Oh Happy Day!, now running at the Public Theater under the direction of Stevie Walker-Webb.

Written by Jordan E. Cooper, who also plays Keyshawn, this wobbly family drama (with music) adds a supernatural element to the equation: What if your eternal soul depended on you making amends?

And also, you have to build a boat.

It’s a lot to ask of anyone, including this Southern Black, queer sex worker who was just shot dead and then suddenly finds himself alive at his estranged father’s birthday barbecue in Laurel, Mississippi (Luciana Stecconi designed the backyard BBQ scenery and Easter egg blue house).

It’s also a lot for an audience to swallow. But, fantastical as the premise is, I was willing to suspend disbelief for the author of Ain’t No Mo’, Cooper’s hilariously inventive play that became a critical darling on and off Broadway several years ago. But Oh Happy Day!, like its depiction of God, is nothing if not demanding.

Maybe a little messy, too. Keyshawn, sporting spangles and a generous amount of bling (costumes by Qween Jean), is told by the Almighty that there’s going to be a flood of biblical proportions in Laurel that will probably drown his family: alcoholic father Lewis (Brian D. Coats, assuming the role from Keith Randolph Smith), caretaking sister Niecy (Tamika Lawrence), and her thumb-twiddling son Kevin (a reliably funny Donovan Louis Bazemore).

Keyshawn has the power to save them. Like a modern-day Noah, all he has to do, says God (played by various cast members), is build a boat and get the family to board it (the number 735 above the door of the family’s house directs us to the requisite passage in Genesis). How do you get this angry menagerie on a boat, though, when everyone is already being pulled under by old grudges?

To Cooper’s credit, Oh Happy Day! puts a unique spin on the classic son-versus-dad chestnut, giving us not one but two shouting matches with two fathers. In the play’s first half, Job-like Keyshawn rails against a supposedly heavenly protector who never seemed to be there for him, even when he was being groomed for sex by the church’s pastor. Act 2 gives us the more predictable knockdown, drag-out battle between Keyshawn and his earthly dad, who gradually seems willing to accept at least some responsibility for his son’s resentful sense of abandonment.

But unlike Ain’t No Mo’, the comedy comes only in dribs and drabs, like when Lawrence, as God, cheekily twerks on a lawn chair. Seeming to sense this general lack of fun amid the heavy issues of drug and sexual abuse, religious hypocrisy, and, yes, murder, Cooper has added the singing “Divines,” a chorus-like trio comprising Holy (Tiffany Mann), Mighty (Sheléa Melody McDonald), and Glory (Latrice Pace) to buoy our spirits with Donald Lawrence’s gospel-infused songs. With gorgeous voices (too often made unintelligible by Taylor J. Williams’s rough sound design), they soften the show’s sharp edges and break up the tension with comedic asides (under Adam Honoré and Shannon Clarke’s lighting, they are literally the highlight of the show).

With music here and shouting there, Oh Happy Day! suffers most from not knowing what it wants to be. Yelling families often make for good drama, but they don’t always make for good theater. And Cooper follows a general trend on American stages these days that encourages playwrights to leave audiences with a good banger or a hopeful message to get them out the door. Sure, we all need hope these days, but we also need thoughtful plays that stun us with uncomfortable ideas, rather than spoon-feeding us musical pablum at the end.

Interestingly enough, Cooper did end Ain’t No Mo’ on an uncomfortable note, and maybe that’s one of the reasons it didn’t find an audience. Oh Happy Day!, sadly, will probably not find one, either.