Open this photo in gallery: Jasmine Case in a scene from Flex. Ken Mackenzie’s set turns the Crow’s Theatre into a gym, which allows the audience to sit 'courtside'.Elana Emer/Crows Theatre Title: Flex Written by: Candrice Jones Performed by: Jewell Bowry, Jasmine Case, Asha James, Trinity Lloyd, Shauna Thompson, Sophia Walker Director: Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu Company: Crow’s Theatre and Obsidian Theatre Venue: Crow’s Theatre City: Toronto Year: Until May 18, 2025 Critic’s Pick Clare Barron’s Dance Nation, Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, Rajiv Joseph’s King James: For as long as there have been playwrights, there have been plays about sports, works set against the precipitous ticking clock of a championship game, tournament or performance. Audiences tend to flock to these plays, to lap them up like Gatorade — who doesn’t love an underdog? In Flex, American playwright Candrice Jones injects sky-high stakes into a high school basketball team in rural Arkansas. It’s 1997, just a year after the formation of the Women’s National Basketball League, and these players, young Black women who dream of making it out of their small town, need to win the next match if they want university basketball recruiters to take them seriously. But they also have to avoid getting pregnant. Jones takes two clichés of coming-of-age writing — the all-consuming importance of The Big Game™ and the barbed threat of becoming a teen mom — and presents a wholly original story that twists, leaps and volleys like a real game of basketball. Just when you think you know what’s going to happen, Jones cuts deeper and sharper into the societal conditions that have led to the plight of Plainnole’s Lady Train, a group of girls with far more to prove to their town than their dribbling abilities. Open this photo in gallery: The production offers star performances from Trinity Lloyd, Asha James (front) and Jasmine Case and Jewell Bowry (back).Elana Emer/Crows Theatre Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu commands Flex’s crackling Canadian premiere with just the right amount of compassion for the teens who, over the course of Flex’s two-hour runtime, make adolescent choices with monstrous, potentially devastating consequences. When team captain Starra (Shauna Thompson) channels her insecurities into an act of sabotage against her biggest rival, it might seem like Flex has run out of places to go — but Tindyebwa Otu drives the play home with relentless, intentional pacing, resulting in an electric production that is never boring. Life After’s stunning new production is a show-stopper Throughout Flex, Coach Francine Pace (Sophia Walker) continually reminds her team that a train is only as strong as its weakest link — and there are none here. Walker works through the many layers of Coach Pace with subtlety and spunk, setting her own baggage aside for the teens in her care and picking it back up only when the coast is clear. It’s an excellent, robust performance that rivals Walker’s previous work as Nurse Vera in Nick Green’s Casey and Diana. The same goes for the rest of the Lady Train, from Thompson’s gutsy, wounded Starra to Jasmine Case’s fiery Sidney. Jewell Bowry brings real, bleeding pathos to pregnant player April, while Trinity Lloyd and Asha James run fascinating rings around each other as they untangle the messy relationship between born-again Christian Cherise and sensible, quiet Donna. As far as the basketball of it all goes: I’m no expert, but hey, they had me fooled. I actually found it most impressive when the team just barely missed their shots — when the ball kissed the bottom of the net as prescribed by Jones’s script, or when it teetered along the rim before falling into the hands of a waiting player. (That said, it’s live theatre, and Crow’s has posted signs in the lobby warning that “the action of the game might spill into the audience” — so stay alert when the ball starts flying!) The technical side of the production is no less impressive — Ken Mackenzie’s set turns Crow’s Theatre into a tired gym, meaning a solid chunk of the audience gets the chance to sit courtside. (Tindyebwa Otu, too, ably navigates the challenges of staging a basketball game on a half-court, especially in the play’s final beats.) Raha Javanfar’s lighting is equally exceptional — glowing LED stripes add a dash of Day-Glo optimism to a story (and team) that could use a little fun. It’s downright exciting when the lights start to dance around the hoop. Somewhere around the middle of Flex’s second act, I found myself thinking not of Dance Nation or The Wolves — those comparisons came easily within the play’s first 30 seconds — but of the Netflix series Cheer, which for two seasons followed a competitive cheerleading team in rural Texas. Like Flex, the multipart documentary centred on the realities of small-town Evangelical life in the American South, where abortions are tough to access and where young athletes’ dreams frequently spill over state borders to the cities along America’s coastlines. The girls on the Navarro College cheer team have a lot in common with Plainnole’s Lady Train. They’d almost certainly bond over a Frappuccino or late-night run to Chick-fil-A; perhaps they’d practise sprints together on a local track. But in Flex, the Lady Train are their own cheerleaders. The girls are their own saviours, their own best friends. And regardless of the result of that final basketball game, Crow’s and Obsidian have a winner on their hands. Look out, local championship game — or, er, this June’s Dora Awards.