The Lady Train in a car (clockwise from top left): Erica Matthews, Brittany Bellizeare, Tamera Tomakili, Renita Lewis and Ciara Monique.
Watching Flex, you may be reminded of The Wolves, the pre-pandemic Off-Broadway hit about a girls’ soccer team. Your mind may flash to TV shows about Black female friends, like Living Single or Insecure. One scene might make you think of Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the 2020 indie film in which a teen travels with her friend for an abortion. The new play also brings to mind any number of dramas—on stage or screen—with a protagonist who’s determined to escape a dead-end hometown, or all those sports stories where everything’s building up to the Big Game.
Yet despite the familiarity of various plot and character elements in Flex, this New York debut from playwright Candrice Jones feels like a singular creation. The main characters are the members of a Plainnole, Ark., high school basketball team nicknamed the Lady Train. So this is the rare sports-themed play about female, not male, athletes. Rare, too, are scenes like Flex’s—young Black women hanging out and talking, their dialogue, in content and vernacular, quite specific to their gender and race. Another unusual thing about Flex: White people are, basically, immaterial to the story; they are not depicted, not even mentioned.
Starra (Matthews, left) and Donna (Lewis) relax off the court.
With these key distinctions, Flex seems like something you’ve never seen before—which makes it exciting to watch. The play does have the typical sports-story arc of the journey to the championship game, but that isn’t the focus of the plot. It’s really about the girls’ (and their coach’s) interpersonal drama and socioeconomic issues, only some of which are related to basketball.
The cast has terrific chemistry, and individually they offer highly believable and naturalistic performances. Erica Matthews—one of several cast members making her Off-Broadway debut, and an impressive shooter and dribbler—reprises her role from Flex’s 2022 regional premiere as team captain Starra, a gifted player, fierce competitor and second-generation Lady Trainer.
“No more Plainnole dirt courts for me, Mama,” Starra says in one of her monologues addressed to her late mother:
No more dust in my eyes, my ankles, my fingernails. I’m gonna win regionals, then state. Ain’t no way you gonna believe this, but scouts are coming here. You said by the time I got older, there’d be a girls’ NBA. You were right.... See? I remember everything you said, and Ima do whatever it takes to make it. After I get recruited, every dream we had is gonna come true.
Before this season, Starra had been used to dominating the squad and the attention it gets. Now, however, she has a teammate named Sidney (Tamera Tomakili), who moved to town from California and may be just as talented as Starra. Sidney’s the one the college recruiters are eyeing, and Starra does not like sharing the spotlight.
Bellizeare as April, who’s been benched due to her pregnancy, with Tomakili and Lewis in the background. Photos by Marc J. Franklin
She’s holding a grudge against another teammate, too: April (Brittany Bellizeare), who’s pregnant. The Lady Train fell apart last year when three players got pregnant—the coach (Christiana Clark) won’t let pregnant girls play—so this year’s team made a pact. “We put our hand on a ball right before the season started and made a promise to each other: No drinkin’, no smokin’, no sex.” Plainnole’s other two starters are Cherise (Ciara Monique), Starra’s sweet, sensitive cousin and a newly ordained youth minister, and Donna (Renita Lewis), the quietest and most studious of the five, who is having a secret romance with Cherise.
A few story lines, about sexual abuse and the lesbian relationship, are shortchanged by Flex’s script. And the second-act scene in which Cherise baptizes each of her teammates seems superfluous, albeit atmospherically staged (Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “This Train Is Bound for Glory” provides the soundtrack). But the mix of sports and sisterhood, and all their attendant emotions and conflicts, is deeply affecting. An ebullience pervades the two extended scenes with all the teammates that take place off the court, even though some upsetting topics are raised. Overall, the production does such a good job of capturing the people, place, and time (it’s set in 1998), you feel wrapped up in these girls’ world.
Plus, there’s genuine basketball action! Flex opens on the Lady Train players skittering side-to-side as they practice footwork drills while shouting out directions and encouragement. For the title game in the final scene, the actors are in constant motion, running plays and narrating what happens with the unseen other team. Amber Batchelor and Ladies Who Hoop are credited as basketball consultants, and probably helped director Lileana Blain-Cruz with the clever choreography of these on-court scenes.
Flex runs through Aug. 20 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in Lincoln Center. Performances are 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday and at 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit lct.org.
Playwright: Candrice Jones
Director: Lileana Blain-Cruz
Sets: Matt Saunders
Costumes: Mika Eubanks
Lighting: Adam Honoré
Sound: Palmer Hefferan
