Can Jordan E. Cooper, RuPaul, Lena Waithe, and Will Smith Save ‘Ain’t No Mo’’?

Jordan E. Cooper still had opening night flowers in his dressing room when it was announced that Ain’t No Mo’ would close this Sunday, after a scant two-week run on Broadway. Cooper, 27, who is the youngest Black playwright to reach Broadway, shared the news on social media Friday, with calls to potentially extend the production’s life using the hashtag #saveaintnomo.

“I’m not fighting for a five-year run,” Cooper tells The Daily Beast. “I’m fighting for time to let the piece get what it deserves, and for these actors to be seen amongst their peers,” he says.

While support for Ain’t No Mo’ has spread on social media, it’s unclear whether it will be enough to postpone closure. Since the announcement, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith have bought out a performance, after Lena Waithe, a producer on the show, rallied them for support. RuPaul will host Thursday’s performance. Waithe will host a talkback after Tuesday’s show, and Cooper says there will be more talks to come this week.

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The biting satire, which he wrote and stars in, imagines if Black Americans were flown to Africa in remedy for the untenable woes of racism. (Cooper, in drag, plays the no-B.S. flight attendant.) Though critically well-received, the Lee Daniels-produced show, told in a series of rousing and often uproarious vignettes, has struggled to find an audience, grossing just over $120,000 during the first week of December, a paltry sum too far beneath operating costs to be sustainable.

The production’s abrupt closure follows on the heels of K-Pop, a musical set behind the scenes of Korean pop music, which shuttered Sunday just weeks after its premiere. The back-to-back commercial casualties have prompted renewed discussion about the difficulties that original works by artists of color face on Broadway.

“It’s so much bigger than K-Pop and Ain’t No Mo’,” says Cooper. “We really need to have a conversation about how to market these shows, because the work deserves to live in this space.”

Commercial success has always been tough on Broadway (as many as 4 out of 5 shows lose money for investors). But Cooper, who also works in television as showrunner of The Ms. Pat Show on BET+, notes that it’s especially challenging for works by artists of color to generate buzz on Broadway without a celebrity name attached (like Samuel L. Jackson, currently drawing big crowds to The Piano Lesson, a well-known classic by August Wilson) or existing IP (like Michael Jackson’s catalog, bringing droves to the musical MJ).

“People want to spend their money on what they know, and feel comfortable about what they’re getting,” Cooper says, a feeling that only seems to have grown following the pandemic shutdown, when a starry revival of The Music Man has been the biggest hit, and when acclaimed new shows by writers of any race have faltered over the past two seasons.

“When it's a Black show, or [as we saw with K-Pop] a show with a Korean cast, you have a very specific audience to reach who is going to come,” Cooper says. While audiences who’ve seen Ain’t No Mo’ appreciate what it’s doing, the show hasn’t had enough time or resources to communicate what that is, Cooper says, pitching it as a comedy when it’s much more complicated than that.

“The tools that a lot of these marketing agencies use are the traditional tools, the same old tools that built the master’s house and have been used for every single show,” Cooper says, calling for new ways to reach diverse audiences who may not already attend theater.

“I wish the message we’re sending now had been done a lot sooner,” Cooper says. “A lot of us have never done Broadway before, so we’re trying to do what we can.” And if that means standing outside Hamilton with fliers for Ain’t No Mo’, Cooper says there’s “no shame in his game.”

“I come from a hustler mentality, so this is my comfort zone,” he says. “I’m used to fighting for my work, and this teaches me to never stop doing that.”

Ain’t No Mo’ started as Cooper’s response to grief over violence faced by Black Americans, including his own run-in with a police officer at 7-11 “that almost ended with me getting shot over a $1.75 slushy,” he says. Drawing inspiration from George C. Wolfe’s 1986 play The Colored Museum, Cooper first drafted Ain’t No Mo’, while studying drama at The New School, for himself, not thinking of how it would be received by audiences.

Cooper “didn’t have a filter” while writing, adding that he wanted the work to be authentic and unapologetic. “Especially in theater, there is a comfort zone of Blackness on stage being centered around whiteness, even in the respectability politics of, ‘We’re gonna talk a certain way because white people are listening,’ or, ‘We’re going to express radical opinions in a way that white people can understand and digest,’” Cooper says.

“But that is the problem—why are we writing with whiteness at the center?” Cooper asks. “I will never conform or edit myself because I'm afraid of what a white person might think—that's what we've been doing since slavery.”

In that way, Cooper calls hearing the show every night, if only for another week, “a liberation.”

Cooper is excited but tight-lipped about a new play he’s working on, which he calls “a backstage story,” and a film script he’s just completed that he likens to “a queer version of Steel Magnolias meets Thelma & Louise.” And he insists that whatever happens Sunday, this won’t be the end for Ain’t No Mo’.

“I'm proud that a play like this even got to Broadway,” Cooper says. “I just pray that we start to change the systems in order to support it.”

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