Review of Flex at Lincoln Center Theater

During this trip to New York City, only a few shows were on my must-see list. Flex at Lincoln Center Theater was something I found out about through social media, and I knew I wanted to see it as soon as I saw that it was a piece on basketball and rural life.

I used to play basketball once upon a time, and I like seeing representation of sports in shows, although I ended up missing out on shows like Take Me Out when they had their run on Broadway. So I ended up getting $30 seats on WNBA Night for Flex, and I ventured out to Lincoln Center’s Newhouse Theater on a Tuesday night from Midtown.

I was seated in C 42, which is the seat on the far right. It’s literally the furthest seat on the side, but the way this show was set up is that the girls end up actually playing basketball, so you don’t miss anything when it came to seeing faces and whatnot.

My biggest problem of this show was that I was next to a field trip of young girls who had clearly no idea what theater etiquette was, as they ended up talking through the entire show. I ended up missing some key dialogue because of it, and although I could figure out what was said later, I was getting upset that these kids were ruining my experience.

But that doesn’t reflect on the show at all. Let’s get into the review.

An all-Black girls’ basketball team in rural Arkansas grapples with their sports and personal lives.

The core of Flex is the concept of a team. Taking place in rural Arkansas where the dust gets in your eyes, a group of five girls prepares for the regional championship. Each of them comes into this with their own problems.

There’s Sidney, the star basketball player who was moved from California to Arkansas by her mother, and she’s worried that the move will ruin her D1 basketball prospects.

Opposite of her is point guard Starra, whose monologues show that she wants to make her mother proud and get recruited, and whose jealousy of Sydney motivates Starra to poke holes in Sydney’s condom, trying to get her pregnant and off the team.

April is pregnant and not allowed to play because of their coach’s rules, and she grapples with the decision of deciding to get an abortion to keep playing with the team as the big championship looms ahead of them.

Cherise just got her youth minister license and preaches about God to the other girls, but the other teammate, Donna, has a crush on her. All of their problems intersect because of Starra meddling with Sidney’s affairs, forcing the team to make decisions about what their future looks like, especially when the conflict increasingly begins to blow up throughout the course of the play.

I thought the acting in this play was very high quality; I thought that each of the actors was able to embody the character and draw out a performance that felt very real throughout the play. They were very convincing as a high school team that’s on the brink of ruin without their star players, and as they have to deal with the circumstances of their personal lives very much bleeding into their sports life, even if they try to separate everything.

Most interesting are the intersecting monologues done by Starra, who breaks the scenes into monologues as the other characters pause. She is desperate to prove herself to everyone around her, which leads her to making terrible decisions throughout the course of the play.

There’s pockets of humor throughout the play, and while I didn’t find myself laughing much, the audience around me was having fun with the humor. It’s set in the nineties, so the ambiance feels like it’s coming from that period as well with music and design.

My one question about this play is about how certain characters may lean too much into archetypes, such as having the star player, the one who wants to succeed, the gay one, the pregnant one, the one that’s too devout for God.

There’s a course that each character is clearly going to follow throughout the play, and although they grow as human beings and characters throughout the play, they still end up leaning into these archetypes a bit too much for my liking. That doesn’t make it bad as a play, but we lose track of the fates of other characters outside of the main ones.

Overall Thoughts

I attended the WNBA talkback after the show, and one of the things that made me really interested is that for this production, there are two different endings.

If the actor misses that final shot, that changes the ending of the show. They act it out like a loss, but if she makes the shot, that means the ending is the regular happy one.

That’s a fun fact most people don’t know and it depends on the night at the end of the day. But all in all, minus the annoying high schoolers next to me (the moderator of the talkback also called them out jokingly, but I think she really meant it), I’m really glad I saw this production.

I genuinely enjoyed it, and the cherry on top is that I got cheap pizza after. Go see it before it closes on August 20!

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