All About Hip-Hop

Milwaukee Repertory Theater presents Parental Advisory: a breakbeat play in the Stiemke Studio September 26 – October 29, 2023. Pictured: Amir Abdullah (foreground) and Marvin Quijada. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

You enter the Milwaukee Rep’s Stiemke Theatre past an assortment of graphic posters and artist album covers, plus earphone chances to sample the rhythms and rapid-fire prose syncopation that have taken over the nation in the last decades – the hip-hop musical form that is the framework for this 75-minute performance.

The entryway is one of several Rep enhancements for Parental Advisory (subtitled “a breakout play”) through October 29. The visual aids clarify for both hip-hop aficionados and parents whose children and grandchildren have grown up with this music that all these audience groups are the target of this play – consisting onstage of one well-amped DJ and a couplet-happy MC, now in his forties. In rap and spinning gestures, they embody hip-hop, its history and its platform as a life force and a fight for free expression, plus its growth into respectability.

Once it was rock-n-roll, Elvis and The Beatles of the 1960s that ruled America, but hip-hop — growing dominant for at least 40 of the 50 years it now claims as an anniversary — is the sound style now challenging America. Still offensive to some, but assuredly middle aged and deeply rooted.

The title of Parental Advisory harks back to the 1980s parental movement led by Tipper Gore to force labels on explicit lyrics in albums by Cyndi Lauper, Black Sabbath, Prince, AC/DC and many others. How quaint it all seems in this era of streaming, smart phones and sound clouds, where the kids know more about gadgets and cuss words than their parents.

The modern equivalent is the parental movement to ban books for exploring racial history or discussing lifestyles. The play makes the sarcastic point that, given the language of today’s politicians, censoring hip-hop and books does seem rather ridiculous.

The Rep’s written play guide contains the reasons for the play’s existence in a dialogue between playwright Idris Goodwin and director and co-conspirator Kyle Haden, who explore the evolution, delays, rewrites and workshop leading to this premiere. It may also answer a lingering question for many patrons: whether this is theater, hip-hop justification, hip-hop revelation or a bit of it all.

The stage is long, rectangular and underused, light-infested with lounge areas next to a major home recording studio. The intent is to make the audience feel under glass to receive both the music and the meaning. The hip-hop heat creates linguistic speed while the actors try extra hard to manufacture authenticity. They start out authentic and end up as a pleasant troupe of two actors to spend time with.

In gum-chewing looks and flash, Marvin Quijada embodies Timeless, the DJ who controls a fascinating flow of hip-hop licks both famous and (dare I say) timeless. Amir Abdullah is the tall, golden-tongued MC breaking out quicksilver rhymes and family soliloquies, raising key questions about social attitudes while overplaying his interludes of emotional intensity.

Playwright Goodwin loads the dialogue inventively with modern references to movies, songs and celebrities (we laugh again at how Ice-T is the longest surviving regular in the “Law and Order” franchise – and hear the original snippets of his music that make that longevity an ironic sellout). The wit of the writing keeps the audience attentive for the first half, softening the sense that Quijada and Abdullah are actors directed to stretch emotions and pretend conflict.

It helps to like hip hop going into this show and it does deepen our understanding and empathy of the music. But it sure takes a lot of artifice to keep us involved.

Parental Advisory Gallery

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blogs here and here.