What is the origin of Flex, a beautiful new play by Candrice Jones about a group of high school seniors in southeast Arkansas? “The first complete image I had about the story,” Jones told me the other day, “was of a team of pregnant girls playing basketball.” And that image was prompted by a conversation she had had years earlier with one of the women on her basketball team at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.
“We were on the same team in college,” Jones explained, “but we had been high school rivals. On the way to a game, we were talking trash about why our high-school teams had won and lost. She told me, ‘Candrice, the reason your high-school team never made it as far as you could have is that all of the girls on your team got pregnant.’ She told me this in 2001. At that point, I’d never even seen a professional play. Still the comment remained with me when I began writing Flex in 2016.”
Why such a long creative gestation? “I had to be introduced to theater first,” Jones said, whose hometown didn’t have a theater. “Then, I had to understand character development on stage. I had to understand just what would happen to a character like April, who gets pregnant, and how that would affect the dynamic of the team. I had to decide how far I would take the issue of a female athlete dealing with pregnancy. This isn’t something that male athletes have to face. Even a guy who gets a girl pregnant doesn’t face the same consequences: no one ever tells him to stop playing ball.”
In Jones’s play, “flex” refers to a specific play requiring high-level skills and patience from all five starting players whether or not they are handling the ball. Without April, the team may have to forego the flex play as well as overall competitiveness.
Jones herself has always been competitive, and not just on the court. “I have a brother who is a year older than me,” she said. “When we were young we used to have writing competitions. The first poem I recall writing was prompted by competition. My brother challenged me to write a Mother’s Day poem”. She and her brother weren’t isolated cases. “I come from a family of creatives,” Jones said, “some of whom have pursued the arts and some who have not.”
Jones has always loved literature. “Everything flows from my love of reading. And from my discovery of certain authors. Toni Morrison is one of my biggest inspirations. Jones’s writing practice has been encouraged by one of Morrison’s quotes: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Jones continued: Maybe I’ve missed it, but I had never seen a character like Starra Jones in Flex, – a young black woman who is very ambitious and very proud, who is driven by dreams and goals.” And even when Jones isn’t the first person to tackle a subject she doesn’t let that fact stop her. “If I have the impulse to write something and the impulse feels real then I’m gonna write.” (In addition to Flex, she’s currently working on a play called A Medusa Thread, in which the classically inspired Medusa is a black woman running a modern-day beauty shop; and on a musical, Love Them First, based on a very charismatic primary-school principal in North Minneapolis.)
I asked Jones what she is most nervous about as Flex approaches its first LCT preview in the Mitzi E. Newhouse. “I’m nervous about the audience. The structure of the play asks audiences to immediately immerse themselves into a basketball fueled world. Will audiences be willing to do that?” If an earlier production, at TheaterSquared in Fayetteville, Arkansas, is any indication, the answer is yes. “One of my high-school coaches came to see the play. He cried throughout. He told me afterward that he would sometimes follow boys and girls home after practice, to make sure they didn’t go into each other’s houses. And he would have conversations with the young men, telling them that if they had sex they had to be responsible. I didn’t know that before. I was impressed that there were adults who didn’t just want to forbid behavior but to guide it.”
What excites Jones at the approach of the LCT premiere? “I get the biggest thrill,” she answered, “from the growth I’m seeing from the actors.” Jones added: “Under Liliana’s eye and care” – Liliana Blain-Cruz is the production’s director – “the cast has melded together so well. She keeps things fun but she’s very smart and very concerned with every detail of the play. I appreciate that since communicating the world of the play means honoring every detail.”
Brendan Lemon is a freelance journalist in New York.
