‘The Hot Wing King’ flies high at NCTC – A superb regional premiere of the Pulitzer-winning comedy

“All this Black love! I can’t take it!” declares one of the half-dozen meaty male characters who take charge of the stage and will take hold of your heart in playwright Katori Hall’s uproarious 2021 Pulitzer-winning play, “The Hot Wing King.”

Now at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, the show shines under the direction of the mononymous ShawnJ, who keeps its intricate mix of spicy, sweet, and sneakily profound moments as smoothly coordinated as a Steph Curry Slide.
The top-level story finds a group of queer friends gathering to compete as a team in a weekend wing-cooking competition. But bubbling in the sauce are angst over commitment, the closet, family ties, and finances. It’s the stuff of everyday life, but it all comes to a boil at once in a well-modulated multiplicity of conflicts that, to the credit of all involved, somehow dodges melodrama.

There are times that Matt Owens’ clever set, which compresses two floors and the backyard of a small Memphis home into a single stage unit, is full to bursting with all six cast members, four of whose roles have main character energy. ShawnJ maintains precise control of both the traffic flow and the emotional overflow.

Chicken tender
Vivid and gripping, this production –among NCTC’s best in recent seasons– presents gay Black men in a way they’re rarely portrayed on stage or screen: mutually supportive, empathetic, and self-reflective.

Unlike the Pulitzer winners in drama that immediately preceded and followed Hall, Michael Jackson for “A Strange Loop” in 2020 and James Ijames for “Fat Ham” in 2022, the playwright gives us gay men who are rich in family, both blood and found. There is no woeful isolation here. The men of “The Hot Wing King” hold each other to high standards and are able to find forgiveness when they fall short.

The show’s central couple is Dwayne (James Arthur M), a workaholic hotel manager, and Cordell (Bradley Kynard), seeking work in Memphis after divorcing his wife, coming out, and coupling up. It’s their home (though only Dwayne pays the bills) where the action takes place.

Families of birth and of choice clash, and later meld, when Everett (Taylor Ryan Rivers), the teenage son of Dwayne’s late sister, hopes to move in with his uncle and Cordell. The young man’s father, TJ (Kennzeil Love) is a small-time drug dealer whose machismo covers an aching awareness of his failings and aspirations.

While there’s one passing, intentionally hurtful flare-up, neither father or son are particularly phased by Dwayne and Cordell’s sexuality, a refreshing aspect of the play’s overall framework. Cordell’s internal homophobia is stronger than any outward prejudice addressed over the course of the show.

Two additional wing men, Big Charles (Twon Marcel Pope) and Isom (Omar Stewart) provide comic relief and pithy wisdom from the sidelines of the central family fracases. Pope makes Charles iconically laconic, a laid-back presence whose listening skills befit his work as a barber (Dwayne and Cordell first met at his shop, Charles’ Chops). Charles may not have much scripted dialogue, but Pope’s palpable, ever-present attention to his scene partners’ interactions lends monologues’ worth of meaning to his piquant, perfectly timed facial expressions.

Isom, a sex-positive social butterfly currently dallying with Charles, is the least richly written role, but Stewart gets big laughs out of the character’s sass without ever surrendering to stereotype.

Depite its effectively tempting premise, “The Hot Wing King” ultimately has little to do with cooking or competition. Instead, its key ingredients are comradeship and constructive collaboration.
And it’s great to see Katori Hall and NCTC steer clear of well-trodden ground here. There are no drug-addled thugs, no martyred Mamas. And perhaps most notably, while analysis can always fairly unearth systemic social flaws, this play does not directly concern itself with racism. “The Hot Wing King” gives the bird to expectations.

‘The Hot Wing King,’ through Oct. 19.  $36-$65.50. New Conservatory Theatre Center,  25 Van Ness. www.nctcsf.org