By Sandi Masori
SAN DIEGO —- Have you ever driven past a neighborhood and wondered what was going on in the homes you passed? What would you see if you could be invisible and stand at their back door and look in? That’s what it feels like watching Katori Hall’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Hot Wing King, currently at Cygnet Theatre.
The audience is sitting in the extended back yard of the house, watching the inhabitants get ready for a cooking competition. As the play unfolds we understand that we are watching two Black gay couples as they dance and banter their way around the kitchen, making their preparations. It’s interesting and entertaining, but it’s only after 75 minutes into the 165-minute show that we finally get into the conflict and see where the play is going.
Cordell (Rondrell McCormick) has left his wife and children to live with Dwayne (Tristan J Shuler). Isom (Kevane La’Marr Coleman) and Big Charles (Xavier Daniels) live there as well. Cordell and Dwayne met through their mutual barber Big Charles. Two years earlier Dwayne’s sister was shot by police officers while having a mental health episode, and her son EJ (Jocorey Mitchell) spends the next two years moving around couches and temporary spaces with his dad grifter TJ (Carter Piggee).
His dad is involved in mostly petty crimes and drugs, but after 16-year-old EJ gets scared by a robbery gone wrong he wants to live with his uncle Dwayne and get off the streets.
Cordell is resistant to this idea because EJ has stolen from them in the past and Cordell is worried that he will screw up yet another’s kid’s life if the relationship doesn’t work out. He feels he screwed up with his own children, who aren’t speaking to him because of the impending divorce. EJ’s father is also resistant to the idea, feeling that it would be better for EJ to be raised on the streets and to “learn how to be a man” than to be raised by a houseful off gay men.
Cordell has what he and the others think is a winning recipe for the hot wing competition. He enlists his friends to help with the cooking, issuing them very specific instructions like “stir three times counterclockwise and then tap the spices into the bowl three times.”
In spite of this, the fabulous Isom, in all his campy glory, decides that the spice is not spicy enough and dumps the entire jar of rare peri-peri spice into the mix- the very spice that Cordell had earlier said required no more than just a pinch due to its extreme heat. Chaos ensues as they scramble to try to figure out how to save their competition entry.
The set is a very detailed kitchen and living room, along with a slice of the yard. It is all beautifully done by scenic designer Audrey R. Casteris. Directed by Kian Kline-Chilton, the actors are well suited to their parts, with Coleman’s flamboyant Isom providing extra color and comic relief.
One of the things that I really liked about the play was that while it was a slice of Black gay life but it wasn’t specifically about the trauma of being Black or gay. I’d love to see more Jewish stories like that, where the characters happen to be Jewish and are living their life and the conflict is something beyond their being Jewish. The tv show was a good example of this.
The Hot Wing King plays through May 2.
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Sandi Masori is a theater and restaurant reviewer for San Diego Jewish World