A SIMMERING MELODRAMA
‘The Hot Wing King’ serves up lesson on Black gay identity
“The Hot Wing King” is a lively comedy about friends and family in Memphis, Tennessee, cooking up what they hope will be a prize-winning batch of spicy chicken wings, but that’s not why Katori Hall’s play deserved to win the 2021 Pulitzer Prize. “The Hot
Wing King” is also a simmering drama of Black identity, gay identity, Black gay identity, community, domestic relationships and father-son bonding.
Hartford Stage is giving the play one of its first regional theater stagings following its 2020 Broadway debut and 2021 Pulitzer win. Christopher Betts, the recipient of the theater’s first Joyce C. Willis artist-in-residence fellowship, is the director.
A lot of the show is light, funny and sweet, yet it is also full of serious disagreements which threaten to upend friendships, a romantic partnership and a parent-child relationship. There’s also a lot of suspense surrounding the team’s chances in the wings competition.
There’s even a bit of mystery in the play’s title: Why is “Hot Wing King” singular? Aren’t they all potential BBQ sauce potentates? All is eventually revealed, though the script has its own changing priorities and the creation of the sauce is often far less important than the men’s many squabbles and disagreements.
Some of the weightiest conversations concern the struggles of being a gay Black man in contemporary America. Some of the brightest comedy springs from the same source. “The Hot Wing King” is not subtle or graded. The darker moments lead to hugging and tears. The lighter ones can get as broad as
vaudeville. The phrase “pecorino cheese” is delivered like a stand-up comedy catchphrase and gets a big laugh the way just because it is said that way.
Given the nature of the competition, it should come as no surprise that there are several scenes where characters experience sudden extreme reactions to a taste of the sauce. As soon as it’s explained that there’s a jar containing the hottest spice in the world in the kitchen, you know what’s in store, and the cast does not disappoint. There is a lot of running, jumping, fanning of faces and chugging of milk.
Betts’ production chooses to make the household setting decidedly upper middle class, with nice furnishings and fancy art prints on the walls. The set for the Broadway production in 2020 was scruffier and not as spacious. Since the two main characters who live in the house are presented variously as neat freaks, control freaks and guilt-ridden about work, chores and social obligations, the scenic design by Emmie Finckel makes a lot of sense.
The openness of the performance area also allows the characters to wander out into a side yard or upstairs into a fully detailed bedroom or to the front of the stage for an unexpected moment of acknowledging the audience, urging a sing-along to the Luther Vandross love anthem “Never Too Much.”
Despite its 21st century setting and its attention to gay culture, “The Hot Wing King” has quite a lot in common with the Black family-centered 20th century cycle plays of August Wilson. This includes the idea of people sitting around the house or yard confessing their worst fears, while others are getting up to serious trouble. “The Hot Wing King” veers from heavy drama to outrageous comedy in a way that Wilson’s “Piano Lesson” or “Radio Golf ” do. It has the same sort of rhythmic and musical interludes Wilson perfected in nearly all his works, moments which lead the characters to interact naturally and non-verbally.
Hall’s plot keeps you guessing. Who among these men hanging around the house will still be living or visiting there the next day?
It takes a special sort of actor to navigate such highs, lows, hots and colds. This production is stocked with such skilled performers. The play’s main couple of Dwayne (whose house is where all the action happens) and his boyfriend Cordell (who’s in charge of all the cooking) are played by Calvin M. Thompson and Bjorn Dupaty, who played the same roles in a production of “The Hot Wing King” last year at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta directed by Katori Hall herself. Thompson is great at playing an uptight workaholic and Dupaty is a believable overeager unemployed overachiever who’s afraid of not pulling his weight around the house yet also has an equal say in everything to do with their relationship.
Postell Pringle as Big Charles exemplifies the couch potato sports fan, standing up for all the big ensemble scenes. Marcus Gladney Jr. is E.J., the defiant teen thrust into his uncle Dwayne’s universe because his father T.J. (a tough, slyly funny Alphonso Walker Jr.) doesn’t seem up to the job.
Israel Erron Ford, who starred in Betts’ production of Tarell Alvin Mccraney’s “Choir Boy” at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2022 and also distinguished himself at the Yale Rep in Charles Cofield’s
Afro-futurist “Twelfth Night” in 2019, does not play the lead character of “The Hot Wing King,” but in many ways his Isom is the heart and soul of this production. Isom sets the mood over and over with a jaunty flair for the extreme. He’s both a mischief-maker and a peacemaker. He’s also a welcome distraction from all the travails the others are facing. Ford gives an exhaustingly energetic, radiant performance that may be over the top but is also exactly what this all-over-the-place play requires.
There’s a lot going on in “The Hot Wing King,” yet the hot wings are able to keep everyone focused. Even when people run off, melt down or just get sleepy, there’s always someone near the kitchen.
Of all the shows where some scent-based special effects would come in handy, this is the one. Yet while Hartford Stage went to the trouble of wafting in the smell of a roast baking in the oven when it did the similarly kitchen-set “Having Our Say” in 2016, there’s nothing onstage that lets you experience the aroma of a spicy sauce that’s been simmering for hours.
The play is not as progressive as it thinks it is. Its arguments about homosexuality and masculinity will seem tired and old-fashioned to some. Hartford Stage has certainly done deeper character studies of Black and/or LGBTQ+ characters navigating their families and communities. But this one has a special mainstream appeal (though some audience members said they had trouble with some of the thick Southern accents) and a great sense of humor.
Above all, “The Hot Wing King” is a heavy, hearty crowd-pleasing melodrama. Those hug-filled scenes of forgiveness get huge ovations. The two-and-a-half hour length seems unnecessary at first but becomes useful as the audience acclimates to the long, difficult day and night the characters are experiencing. Like a good barbecue sauce, this play creeps up on your taste buds until its has taken over all your senses.
“The Hot Wing King” by Katori Hall, directed by Christopher
Betts, runs through March 24 at Hartford Stage, 50 Church
St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesdays at 7:30 p.m., Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. (except March 20, when the performance is at 2 p.m.), Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. $20-$100. hartfordstage.org.