“If you want me to be your blk person survival guide slash encyclopedia,” Imani snipes, “I got a rate.” It’s $50 per question.
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The playwright, who identifies as nonbinary but is comfortable with female pronouns, uses the abbreviated spelling “blk” to create a verbal distinction between a people and a color. She credits the Chicago poet Avery R. Young with that coinage, and you can hear in Barnes’s use of it, as well as in the incredible precision of the dialogue throughout, a poet’s attention to sound and meaning.
Yet “BLKS,” which had its world premiere at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in 2017, is the opposite of precious. As its bleaker themes begin to emerge, first in flashes and then more pervasively, Barnes never slumps into abstraction.
So when we hear, near the beginning, that June has just landed a great job as an accounting consultant at Deloitte, it slips by as mere irony. Surely an accounting consultant would have advised her not to room with two women who cheerfully call themselves “the most-fired blacks of 2015.”
But eventually her status as a successful young black woman starts to throb like a tension headache. When she gets punched by the ethnically ambiguous dude, the police refuse to come. When she reads on her phone that “another one” was killed — another unarmed black person, that is — the idea takes hold for her and for us that there is no escaping American racism, any more than American men, even if you pull down $100,000 at Deloitte.
June, Octavia and Imani bear up as best they can, with gallows humor, abundant weed and fifths of Maker’s Mark. Sex, too, is an anesthetic, if a short-acting one. Without pressing the issue, “BLKS” describes a world in which black women have only one another to lean on. Even the nice guy that June meets at a club (Chris Myers) turns out to be a stalkery nerd with Krazy Glue in his manbag.
