For just a few more days, through Aug. 11, Portland has the opportunity to participate in something special: the creation of a new work by a playwright on the rise. That new play, Reggie Hoops, enjoying its world premiere in a short-run production by Profile Theatre, offers another opportunity whose importance might be easier to miss: the chance to witness people not raced as white wrestling with what it means for them to rise; the costs and who pays them; and whether those costs are worth it.

The playwright powering this story is Kristoffer Diaz, who wrote the book for the current Broadway hit Hell’s Kitchen (nominated for 13 Tony awards, including best musical and best book of a musical). This premiere production of Reggie Hoops comes to us courtesy of Profile, whose attention to Diaz’s work over a two-year season has involved mounting two other excellent productions (The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, which was a runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize, and Welcome to Arroyos) as well as significant work over two years developing this new play from work Diaz started from a Temple University commission eight years ago.

New work requires and benefits from the sort of investment Profile is making, including the collaboration of a director and actors who participate in the table-read process of struggling with what the work means to say and how to say it well. 

Director Melissa Crespo, visiting Portland from her home in New York, loves directing new work, and both she and Diaz have described how they vibed over shared community connections that resonate in the story he wants to tell. And the production clearly has deepened with the contributions of a cast featuring some of Portland’s top talent, some of whom participated early in the build process as well. 

I am among those who gravitate toward new work, especially new work that lifts up stories we don’t often have the opportunity to explore.  And I appreciate Diaz’s attraction to stories that not only don’t hit familiar beats but that may even disorient audiences a little.  As in Chad Deity and Arroyos, Diaz is troubling the American Dream narrative that powers so many of the stories Black and brown people have been allowed to tell. In the hands of a writer who excels at authentically capturing voices that audiences aren’t used to hearing and allowing them to meander, the struggle here feels messy and unresolved.  Reggie Hoops invites audiences into that discomfort.

It should help that the characters make you love them. Reggie (Treasure Lunan) is a locus of the dreams of her parents, who fought hard to give her and her brother Muncie (La’Tevin Alexander) a better shot than they had. So why are she and Muncie both currently functioning as stay-at-home parents to their kids? 

Reggie insists that’s where she wants to be—and her wife, Bells (Ashley Song), is especially convincing that she is happy with the arrangement. But Muncie is clearly pushing at the bounds of his circumstances: He is funny, but also fit to be tied. And Reggie’s insistence isn’t especially convincing. In the play’s early moments, she seems to fighting something, though it’s not clear what.

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The play surfaces its conflicts slowly, flashing back and forth in time between the current day and Reggie’s earlier career as a talented and hard-drinking NBA assistant general manager, as well as bits of the story of the dreams and struggles of her very loving parents, Iz (Julana Torres) and Ben (Setareki Wainiqolo). 

As glimmers of the past are revealed, the struggles of Reggie’s present make more sense—along with why she seems intent on resisting when what seems to be her dream job drops into her lap. It’s not only that the offer arrives via Rafa (John San Nicolas), a reminder of parts of her past that she senses were destroying her. From Reggie’s current vantage point, success and destruction seem to go together. Is that part of a pattern? Is avoiding looking at the dilemma part of the pattern? 

The questions here are difficult, and hard to get to—and Lunan captures Reggie’s struggle to hold the tension of confronting them when the logic of all those who love her pulls in the opposite direction. Bells seems to love Reggie most cleanly, and yet even she seems to feel the collective logic pulling away from what rightly concerns her about the opportunity that has dropped into Reggie’s lap. Song and Lunan give us a complicated relationship, two women for whom love and the opportunity to marry doesn’t solve all the problems we wish they would. 

Wainiqolo and Torres wonderfully convey contrasting examples of people who love each other but don’t quite agree on their options for fighting what feel like unwinnable fights. Ben is a dreamer, and Iz is more prone to doubt—and the bits of their story the play reveals become more and more unsettling in ways we don’t often see. Ben’s dreams involve some hiding, and Iz in some ways chooses to solve her doubts by not looking. There may be more reasons than we realize why it may be hard to persuade those who went before to tell stories of the “real” New York—or of any American city.

In time, Muncie’s caged-animal energy (beautifully embodied in Alexander’s physical performance) makes more sense—or maybe sense isn’t quite the word. It’s a reaction, and a complicated one that I can’t say I’ve seen many attempts to depict. Reggie’s talents seem to fit a conventional version of what those denied an opportunity are meant to fight for. It seems that Muncie didn’t fit that conventional version, or the path to uplift that families like his could see to aspire to. What if the version of loving one’s children that the American dream hands us doesn’t help them find and love themselves? Where would one learn that skill?

The cast is doing some heavy lifting here. They and director Crespo carry Diaz’s intention to keep people complex, and the production holds the audience with its strong performances and smart direction. Their work gives future productions of this play plenty to build on. I only hope that audience members also sit with the questions that Reggie Hoops means to put into play, which have application beyond loving, striving, mixed-race families like this one.

***

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Reggie Hoops continues through Aug. 11 in a Profile Theatre production at Imago Theatre, 17 S.E. Eighth Ave., Portland. Remaining performances are Thursday, Aug. 8, through Sunday, Aug. 11. Ticket and schedule information here.