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Stomping As They Climb in Jordans
Ife Olujobi’s claws-out satire doesn’t quite reach the tragic potential of its DEI-in-the-workplace premise.
(It’s a great gag when, eventually, one of the white ensemble members — Brian Muller, nailing it — shows up as Lil Klonopin, a face-tattooed, G-Star-wearing “rapper and influencer” who’s introducing his new line of watchbands.) Jordans has its sights fixed on the morning after the night of our good (or at least good-looking) intentions, and it’s sharpest when sending up not only the hollow, crassly profiteering incorporation of DEI into a white-dominated workplace but also the ways this new system — supposedly such a moral evolution from the old one — still pits Black people against one another, like vassals waging bloody war over tiny gains while, in fact, the king still owns everything. When the plumbing goes haywire at the climax of Act One, we should be witnessing an explosion of the literal bullshit underneath Atlas’s glossy white surface, but what we get is a couple of small, easily manageable onstage leaks.
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