Steppenwolf spills a lot of program ink trying to prepare an audience for 25-year-old poet Aziza Barnes’s first play, BLKS, which chronicles 24 hours in the clutching, haphazard lives of four unsettled twentysomething African-American women in New York. In addition to a full-page welcoming statement from artistic director Anna D. Shapiro, the program includes a three-page as-told-to-style feature in which Barnes muses over the play’s genesis, themes, and images in alternately playful and mystifying prose. Neither is terribly useful in helping us know where things might be headed, or why it should matter. All that’s needed is the ten-line poem Barnes adds as a program insert. It does much to evoke—and to an extent muddy—the promising communal world the author intends to create.
Admittedly, Barnes is writing comedy, for which they (Barnes’s preferred pronoun) have a knack. The play opens with wannabe filmmakers Octavia and Ry in mid cunnilingus, after which Octavia schlumps to the bathroom and checks out her vulva. Surely this will be a moment of rapture and self-love straight out of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Instead, Octavia shrieks. A mole, she shouts, is growing on her clit.
Through 1/28: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM, Tue 7:30 PM; also Wed 1/17 and 1/24, 2 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org.
