Currently onstage at Buddies in Bad Times, director Jay Northcott’s production of the ridiculously named Bootycandy is a triumph. Blazingly funny and brutally sad, Robert O’Hara’s zinging text links together a vignette structure through unexpected metatheacricality that brilliantly interrogates itself as well as the larger landscape of contemporary theatre in all its diverse, performative, well-intentioned, reductive contradictions.

Nick Blais’ clever design is a giant phallus of variable subtlety depending on your perspective, but it’s also a pulpit and a contemporary art piece. Northcott’s direction is bold, intimate, and beautifully focused. A single scene in act two starts to lean a little too sketch comedy in tone (the scene is not coincidentally the least connected to the larger world of the play) but the deft cast keeps this exuberant play’s feet firmly on the ground, never compromising clarity of either content or emotion as they navigate multiple characters in multiple voices.

At one point, an assembly of Black playwright characters take up a chant, calling for audiences to choke on their work. It’s a strong sentiment- nothing too simple to reckon with can ever be truly rewarding. Bootycandy lives up to this hope in spirit at least, wrestling with tough content while also testing the boundaries of its audience’s comfort levels with everything from direct eye contact to hyper-explicit dirty talk. But, as much chewing as is required, this play is nothing if not digestible, as tasty as it is nutritionally dense*

*”bootycandy” is slang for penis within the play but I ask that you make like the lady in the lobby who could not figure out what the set represented and just let me innocently get away with that final metaphor, okay?