Review: ‘Superheroes’ an intense, imaginative look at C.I.A. drug scandal

Somebody’s trying to tell you something, and it’s clearly something desperately important, but you can’t understand him. You’re trying to focus on every word, because it seems imperative that you get the message, but you just can’t follow.

That’s what it feels like sometimes watching “Superheroes,” the world premiere play that opens Cutting Ball Theater’s 16th season. Written and directed by Sean San José and produced in association with Campo Santo, the theater company that San José co-founded, it’s a lively, explosive and surprisingly upbeat indictment of U.S. government complicity in bringing crack cocaine to the inner city.

The play is loosely inspired by reporter Gary Webb’s 1996 San Jose Mercury News investigation into the connection between the crack epidemic of the 1980s and Nicaraguan drug traffickers. His reporting, which laid out a case that the drugs were being smuggled into the United States to fund the CIA-backed Contras in Nicaragua, was also at the heart of the recent feature film “Kill the Messenger,” starring Jeremy Renner as Webb.

What does any of this have to do with the “superheroes” of the title? Not much. The word pops up here and there in San José’s play as an all-purpose metaphor: for the way the drug makes you feel, or what you’d have to be to resist temptation. Most aptly it describes the brave reporter who’s willing to lay down her life to get the truth out there.

In this version, the reporter is a young woman, one who’s been assassinated in an attempt to bury the story. (That’s not much of a spoiler, because it’s the first thing she tells us about herself.) Now a ghost who calls herself Aparecida, she guides us through the story in a series of flashbacks shown in nonchronological, at times almost random-seeming, order.

Delina Patrice Brooks plays the role of Aparecida with grace and keen intelligence, watching everything intently and often in amusement. It’s sometimes jarring to see her dancing with a big smile on her face when we’ve just been talking about something really grim going on, but her moves are magnetic.

There are a lot of full-cast dance breaks throughout the play, to catchy snippets of James Brown, Sam and Dave, the Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five woven through Jake Rodriguez’s compelling score and sound design. All the dancing, directed by Rashad Pridgen, is surprisingly jubilant and utterly captivating.

A powerful acting ensemble makes up what Aparecida refers to as “this MTV/BET/Cinelatino cast of cartoon characters.” Myers Clark’s Free is a swaggering drug dealer with buffoonish cockiness and a fixation on pop culture. Ricky Saenz is all nerves as Free’s longtime Nicaraguan drug connection, and Juan Amador plays a suave and sinister drug lord with a penchant for goofy facial expressions. Britney Frazier is a feisty dealer’s wife turned fierce informant when she feels her man’s been used. Donald E. Lacy Jr. keeps up a passionate and slightly crazed stream of sermonizing as an agonized reverend.

San José’s script is full of densely poetic speeches that sound terrific but can be frustratingly opaque in a play that’s so much about getting at the truth and making it known. A scheme to market drugs in some way through the church is hard to parse when it’s initially discussed and doesn’t become any clearer when it’s put into action. It’s unclear what connection there is, if any, between Free’s two Nicaraguan partners in crime (though it may be discussed in some of the long passages in Spanish). But as hard as it is to decipher at times, “Superheroes” draws you in with its intensity and never lets go.

Contact Sam Hurwitt at [email protected], and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.