Review: Under the Radar 2024: Inua Ellams’s Search Party

Inua Ellams comes onstage and welcomes us with a cheerful greeting, as though he’s just invited us into his living room for a chat. In a way that’s what his new show Search Party, running at the Clark Studio Theater at Lincoln Center, is — a friendly conversation between him and the audience. He tells us at the top that this is not “a theater show” in the ordinary scripted sense; instead, we’re going to be “building it together.” But how?

Carrying an iPad, which we learn is packed with just about all his writings (poems, plays, essays, diary entries, and so on), he asks the audience for a word. “Fascism,” one audience member shouts. “We’re going there already,” Ellams laughs, before agreeing to the word and poking it into his iPad. The word comes up in a few different writings, one of which, a longer essay called “My White Best Friend,” he reads to us in full.

I’ll admit to a bit of skepticism going in about how effective a show like this could be, but after Ellams finished this autobiographical piece about a youthful romance and a young woman who broke his heart, I was hooked. A Nigerian-born British writer, Ellams shares his rich personal history (as an immigrant, a self-described “dweeb,” a reluctant citizen of a racist culture) with humor and an occasional a spark of anger (his contentious relationship with his adopted country of England surfaces in a conversation sparked by another word from the audience: “existentialism”).

Thankfully, not all the suggestions were such heady words. “Beans” someone said, and after tapping the word in, Ellams recited a poem that chronicles the 2020 pandemic year in the form of newspaper headlines, which more than once refer to a former US president as the Jester. Open and honest to a fault, Ellams is unambiguous when it comes to his feelings about political leaders in this country and his own. His conflicted reaction to his recent appointment as a Member of Order of the British Empire, a topic that came up in the one-hour show’s Q&A portion, made for particularly animated discussion.

My curiosity about Search Party came from seeing Ellams’s play The Half-God of Rainfall, a provocative hybrid of modern and ancient mythologies that ran last year at New York Theatre Workshop. Like his theatrical work, Search Party shows Ellams’s versatility and fearlessness as an artist who’s willing to take risks, especially in a show like this, which by its nature will never be the same twice. “Wizard” was another word offered that in context seemed appropriate to his wordsmithery, followed by “hope,” which yielded the poem “For the Fighters and Lovers.” It’s hard to imagine hearing any of these words the same way again.