Theatre in the X presents Don Evans’s One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show

Maureen Henighan Booker’s production features a great soundtrack (including R&B and early disco ranging from Funkadelic to Bootsy Collins to Ashford & Simpson), a game cast who put their all into delivering Evans’s witty, uproarious lines, and a fully engaged audience who brought their own chairs and blankets to laugh and gasp at the characters’ most ridiculous moments on opening night.

A sharp, involving satire

Even when One Monkey originally opened in 1982, it was technically a period piece with its 1970s Philly setting. Like Sondheim’s musical Company, the play reflects post-counterculture social anxieties about love, sex, and intimacy. Evans’s sharp satire lasers in as well on Black respectability politics and bourgeois contradiction. The Harrison family, including the Reverend Avery (Davon Cochran), wife Myra (Danielle Shaw), and son Felix (Eric Carter), keep up a pretense of “white is right” snobbery and have perfect furniture, even if Avery grouses that they can’t pay the rental installments, and Myra mispronounces “seduce” as “sedate.”

Their lives change once Avery’s niece Beverly (Tasha Holmes) comes to visit and brings her swaggering guardian—and club owner—Caleb Johnson (Carlo Campbell) into their lives. Then there’s Felix’s copy of The Joy of Sex, which finds its way into Avery’s lap, and there’s Li’l Bits (Semaja Murphy), Felix’s smart, ambitious, but “working class” new girlfriend, whose friend hasn’t visited yet…

A big, ambitious show

Playing nearly three hours with a 15-minute intermission, the text sometimes feels absurdly overstuffed, which the Theatre in the X founders seemed aware of during the opening-night introduction. But that’s also because One Monkey is ambitious, looking to fully interrogate the gulf between young and old, “rich” and “poor,” and impulse versus intent. Characters, including Myra, Caleb, and Beverly, get funny, complex soliloquies, revealing their fears and desires to the crowd when they’re often too proud or too scared to say them to anyone else.

Like the doctor in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, Caleb wants to remake Beverly as he sees fit, and his macho attitude gets in the way of his obvious feelings for her. Campbell as the often bare-chested, huffing and puffing Caleb nearly walks away with the show, and when he reveals the disappointment and bitterness in Caleb’s life, it’s a great turn for a previously absurd figure.

Holmes as Beverly matches Campbell scene for scene, handily portraying Beverly’s strength and naïveté, while Cochran and Shaw are great at playing smug hypocrisy and smiling pretension respectively. Carter’s sexually frustrated Felix does some of the best physical comedy of the show when his teenage character describes himself as “a tiger!” Murphy as Li’l Bits is a force to be reckoned with, and the same goes for Janan Ashton playing Caleb’s sometimes “girl,” the brash, liberated hairdresser Mozelle. Avery and Felix are both snobbish towards these working-class women and also lust after them.

Between sociocultural change and upward mobility

Part of the charge of One Monkey is how the Black bourgeoisie disdain “impropriety” and end up feeling caged by their own desires. Still, Li’l Bits rightly points out that poverty is materially worse than being middle-class or “rich,” and the ending finds a place somewhere between sociocultural change and upward mobility. What’s most important dramatically is that one character learns how to be their own person, regardless of what anyone else wants or expects of them. Anyone who sees these characters’ journeys, this production, and set designer Nana Nimako’s mid-century throwback sets (built at Philadelphia Scenic Works) will have an excellent time in the park.