“Ain’t No Mo’ is bumpy. It’s also thrilling, bewildering, campy, shrewd, mortifying, scary, devastating and deep...What Cooper has attempted, and director Walker-Webb has brought close to fruition, is nothing less than a spiritual portrait of black American life right now...The best parts of 'Ain’t No Mo’ master a complicated trick: pulling wrenching drama out of a party hat of borrowed theatrical attitudes."
Read more

“Cooper’s rowdy, wily 'Ain’t No Mo’ is a satire that works...Balancing explosive playfulness with focused attack, fierce lament with equally fierce celebration...Though ‘Ain’t No Mo’ never drags, the play is strongest when Cooper keeps a vivifying dose of humor in the mix...At its best and wildest, ‘Ain’t No Mo’ spirals into the kind of absurdism that feels like a mirror up to nature: It’s dead funny, but it’s no joke.”
Read more

"Throws lots of ideas into its rambunctious mix, and not all of them land...There's a lack of discipline that sometimes prevents the evening from being as impactful...Dense, colloquialism-packed verbiage is delivered at such a fast pace that much of it is lost...But there's no denying that this new playwright has lots of important things to say and a fresh, original way of saying them. Walker-Webb's energetic staging adds to the excitement, as do the absolutely terrific performances.”
Read more

“Hilarious and heartbreaking...By laying such an extreme premise within a slightly fantastical world, Cooper allows for one of the most nuanced and illuminating dissections of African-American identity I've seen on a stage...As Cooper so beautifully lays out, black identity in America is one big inscrutable web of dichotomies and contradictions that only gets more knotted the longer we fail to acknowledge how it came to be."
Read more

"Stylistically, it is all over the place, a hodgepodge that mixes stark indictments and self-congratulatory excoriations with the lowest of camp...'Ain't No Mo's' weaknesses include a taste for overkill, a preference for righteous rage over wit, and a tendency to speak so loudly and so fast that it becomes positively tongue-tied...This isn't satire -- it's provocation mixed with self-indulgence, two qualities that cancel each other out."
Read more

"Hotter than a billy goat with a blow torch and at least ten times as funny, sad, hopeful, scary, and absurd, sometimes all at once...A jaw-dropping thrill ride...Both the playwright and director take a no-holds-barred approach...frequently threatening to send everything careening out of control yet somehow managing to keep it all on track...An awesome evening...with every line of dialog and every performance by the altogether exquisite cast contributing immeasurably."
Read more

“Though funny—with a somber underpinning—from start to finish, Cooper isn’t entirely kidding about his radical ‘Ain’t No Mo’ proposal...Cooper’s characters can be rib-tickling in their vulgarities, but while he’s tickling ribs, he’s also punching guts...He does have a knack for getting laughs while hitting home. So his intentions couldn’t be clearer. Far from questioning the country’s racist fabric, he demonstrates varying ways in which racism persists.”
Read more

“A show so beyond woke that you may lose sleep pondering the many sharply pointed facets of blackness raised by this prickly 90-minute series of short plays...Similar to ‘The Colored Museum’ only in its revue-like format and aim to be satirical...Walker-Webb stages everything sharply and briskly...’Ain’t No Mo’ is one very smart, slick, satirical show that deserves a longer run...This exciting production is likely to do for newcomer Cooper’s career what 'The Colored Museum' did for Wolfe."
Read more