Ain’t No Mo’ Pushes Back Broadway Closing Date By a Week

The Ain’t No Mo’ cast during the opening night curtain call. Photo: Bruce Glikas/WireImage

Update, Thursday, December 15 at 10:20 p.m.: Ain’t No Mo’ ain’t leaving Broadway just yet. Playwright and star Jordan E. Cooper announced today that the production has pushed back its scheduled closing date from December 18 to December 23 thanks to community support. “We got one more week to prove a point,” Cooper said onstage during curtain call. “And with God’s help, we can turn that week into another week into another week into another week. We can show that shows like this can have a space on Broadway.”

Ain’t No Mo’, which opened on December 1, uses a series of comedy sketches to explore what would happen if the government put Black people on flights back to Africa. After the production received an eviction notice last week, Cooper — the youngest Black American playwright in Broadway history — called on fans to help extend the show’s run. According to a press release, the resulting campaign to #SaveAintNoMo prompted performance buyouts supported by Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade, Queen Latifah, Tyler Perry, Shonda Rhimes, and Sara Ramirez. Other significant contributors included Reverend Al Sharpton, Swizz Beatz, D-Nice, Derrick Hayes & Pinky Cole, Jeremy O. Harris, Denee Benton, Debbie Allen, and Dominique Morrisseau. During tonight’s curtain call, Cooper once again requested that audiences spread the word and continue boosting ticket sales. “Tell people that we’re doing something special here,” he implored. “We gotta change the face of Broadway so that somebody coming after us ain’t gotta do all this work.”

Original story published December 10, 2022 follows.

Broadway has decided that Ain’t No Mo’ will be no more. The play, which puts Black people on a government-funded plane back to Africa in a series of comedy sketches, is now scheduled to have its final performance on December 18, two and a half weeks after it opened on December 1. Directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, the satire first took flight with a 2018 run at the Public Theater. The stacked producing team includes Lee Daniels, RuPaul, Jeremy O. Harris, Lena Waithe, Gabrielle Union, Dwayne Wade, and the Jets’ C.J. Uzomah. At the time of its closing, Ain’t No Mo’ will have had just 22 preview performances and 21 regular performances. The news comes just a couple days after the musical KPOP announced that its Broadway run had been similarly cut short.

Ain’t No Mo’ playwright and star Jordan E. Cooper confirmed the news of the closure on social media before curtain on Friday, but urged fans not to view the decision as final. Cooper, who at age 27 is the youngest Black playwright to ever premiere work on Broadway, said in his statement that the decision could be reversed with enough ticket sales. (According to the New York Times, Ain’t No Mo’ grossed $120,901 last week, which is “well below” the production’s weekly running costs, and had the lowest average ticket price on Broadway.) “Now they’ve posted an eviction notice, we ‘must close’ December 18th,” Cooper wrote. “But thank God Black people are immune to eviction notices.”