Who doesn’t love a come-from-behind story, where the team from Nowheresville, USA, is ultimately victorious, having overcome all their personal and athletic obstacles? It’s an old trope. But it always works. And it works awfully well in “Flex,” the West Coast Premiere of Candrice Jones’ play about the 1997 girls’ high school basketball team of Plainnole, Arkansas.
1997 was the WNBA’s first year, and the girls of the Lady Train team can begin to imagine a future in basketball. Starra Jones (Santeon Brown) is the team captain. A bit ruthless as a player, she follows her deceased mother’s advice that a foul doesn’t exist unless the ref sees it. Through Starra’s late-night soliloquies addressed to her mother, we get a sense of what drives her ambition: she wants to make it to the state championship. With that exposure, maybe she’ll be spotted by a college scout and succeed where her basketball-playing mother missed out.
But Starra has a new competitor in Sidney Brown (Paige Mayes), who recently moved to town from Oakland, CA. A strong player, and more sophisticated (her condom on a cucumber lesson is very funny), Sidney also has a lot riding on “getting to state” ─she’s already being scouted. Starra’s jealousy and competitiveness go too far, in an afternoon TV-movie way, causing a serious break within the team.
The team needs five players, but April (Camille Collaço) is pregnant, despite the team’s “no sex” rule. Coach Francine Pace (Halili Knox), the near-perfect coach, won’t let April play, even after the entire team practices while wearing fake baby bumps. April’s quandary about whether to have a baby is handled sensitively and realistically. The discussions among the girls are even-handed on the difficult subject of abortion.
However, the devout Cherise (Emma Gardner) keeps wanting to baptize the team, as though that would erase all their problems, jealousies, and insecurities. Despite her strong religious feelings, Cherise tentatively acts on her romantic attraction to the practical Donna (Courtney Gabrielle Williams), who has her future all mapped out.
One can’t help rooting for the team as the two-hour, 20-minute (one intermission) production reaches its climax. That’s when the stage, which had been earlier divided between a backyard dirt basketball court and the high school gym, enlarges to the action of a full-court gym at the crucial game.
It’s hard to be a teenager, and even harder to write realistically about teenage years. Playwright Candrice Jones, with expert direction by Margo Hall, pulled it off. The cast was uniformly excellent, and they all played good-looking b-ball. However, one or two of the lesser teenage difficulties could have been left out to focus more in depth on the major problems and players. That said, I really enjoyed “Flex” and recommend it.
Developed at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of the Arts, and National New Play Network’s National Showcase of New Plays, “Flex,” which made its New York premiere at Lincoln Center Theater in 2023, is now at SF Playhouse through May 2, 2026.
By Emily S. Mendel
© Emily S. Mendel 2026 All Rights Reserved
