STAGE WEST: "The Hot Wing King" at Cygnet Theatre

Left to right: Jocorey Mitchell, Kevane La'Marr Coleman, Rondrell McCormick, Tristan J Shuler and Xavier Daniels in "The Hot Wing King."                                                                    Karli Cadel Photography

                Wings are not my thing. A good story is. So are characters worth caring about.
          “The Hot Wing King” has all three, and I have to admit that once the opening-night performance of Katori Hall’s winning dramedy at Cygnet Theatre was over, I did start wondering if I’d judged wings too harshly.
            Cordell Crutchfield and his sous chefs, aka the New Wing Order, sure know how to cook them. As it turns out, the hotter the better.
            Hall’s play, centered around an annual Hot Wang Festival in Memphis, had an inauspicious beginning, world-premiering on March 1, 2020, at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va. Steve Broadnax III, who earlier this year directed the outstanding “Appropriate” at the Old Globe, was at the helm of that first “Hot Wing King” production, one suspended practically from the start by COVID-19.
            “The Hot Wing King” would return to theaters in safer times, however, and end up winning Hall the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2021.
            At Cygnet under the direction of Kian Kline-Chilton (who just recently directed “We Are Continuous” at Diversionary in University Heights), “The Hot Wing King” is being staged as the theater’s penultimate production before the company relocates from Old Town to its new venue in Liberty Station. With its superb ensemble and a tale that can be affecting a well as joyous, “The Hot Wing King” is an entertaining show with multiple emotional entry points.
            That Hot Wang Festival contest is Hall’s pretext for examining what it means to be a Black gay man, what constitutes a family and how fragile relationships – all relationships – truly are.
            Cordell (Rondrell McCormick, returning to Cygnet three years after appearing in its “Mud Row”) has left his wife of 20 years and two children in St. Louis and moved to Memphis to be with the man he loves. That would be Dwayne (Tristan J Shuler), who has opened his home and his heart even as he harbors doubts about the depth of Cordell’s emotional commitment.
            That’s simmering beneath the surface of an at-first-blush lighthearted story situated primarily in the kitchen, where at the outset Cordell, Dwayne and their New Wing Order team that also includes barber and rabid Memphis Grizzlies fan Big Charles (Xavier Daniels) and the proudly flamboyant Isom (Kevane La’Marr Coleman) are prepping for that wings contest. It’s Cordell’s dream to be crowned the “Hot Wing King.”
            The first 15 minutes or so of the play finds the team in high spirits, in and around the functional kitchen designed at Cygnet by Audrey R. Casteris – cooking, joking, dancing. Though it becomes apparent that Cordell and Dwayne are still working out the full extent of their relationship, events don’t take a major turn until the unexpected arrival of Dwayne’s teen nephew EJ (Jocorey Mitchell) and his shady father TJ (Carter Piggee). They need refuge from something unspecified and unlawful that TJ is up to.
            Because the boy is the son of Dwayne’s slain sister (in a police killing for which Dwayne blames himself), EJ is taken in and upstairs “for the night.” This is enough to incite objection from Cordell, who believes Dwayne is making all the household decisions unilaterally. As the wings contest nears, the stakes heighten, stakes that have little to do with cooking.
            Will Cordell and Dwayne stay together? Can they make it work?
            What about the Hot Wang Festival?
            The two conflicts would seem only tangentially related with one far more important involving as it does Cordell’s and Dwayne’s relationship, Cordell’s identity crisis and the future of a teen-aged boy who because of his father is on the road to no good, though he’s a boy who wants no part of that.
            The prep for the wings competition provides cathartic humor amid the high drama, especially when the playful, unpredictable Isom inadvertently spices the batch to be entered in the contest with extremely hot ingredients. Dwayne’s innocent taste of that misguided concoction, a golden comedy moment, had the Cygnet audience howling on opening night. Me too.
            That diversion does not detract from the weightier narrative – the ensuing confrontations and confessions are often heart-rending.
            Shuler, who’s making his San Diego theater debut with “Hot Wing Kings,” is the standout among the stellar cast. A special nod, too, to young Mitchell, a student at Grossmont Community College, who makes us feel the desperation to be loved and to belong that resides in a boy who’s lost his mother and whose father has lost his way.
            The New Wing Order foursome is a treat to watch when they’re in full cooking and cavorting mode. At the same time, Hall’s script does not waver from its insights into what is Black masculinity, what makes a father a father, and what makes a man a man.
            That all this requires two hours and 45 minutes with an intermission may be understandable, but the play had room for trimming, and it seems to end at least three times before it actually does.
            Who am I to question a writer like Hall, but possibly she over-wrote even as she wrote beautifully. At least the wings don’t get overcooked. Over-spiced, yes, but not over-cooked.
            “The Hot Wing King” runs through May 2 at Cygnet Theatre in Old Town.