The most devastating moment in Ro Reddick’s “Cold War Choir Practice” is not a Soviet missile strike. It is an American bomb, planted by an American cult, detonating on South Salina Street in Syracuse, New York. As flames consume Davis’s Candy Emporium and Atomic Fireballs rain down like radioactive fallout, 10-year-old Meek (Alana Raquel Bowers) watches her nightmare made literal – not by distant enemies across the Iron Curtain, but by the country that taught her to fear them. Reddick’s Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winning play, now at MCC Theater in a co-production with Clubbed Thumb and Page 73, uses fantasy, absurdism, and fourteen original songs to expose a more immediate truth: for a working-class Black family in Reagan’s America, the real threat was never 40,000 Soviet warheads. It was here all along.

The family living above the Roll-a-Rama skating rink represents two paths to survival, both failing. Smooch (Will Cobbs), Meek’s father and a former Black Panther, bought the rink to rebuild it as the community hub it once was – a place for free breakfast, Panther meetings, skating with neighbors. But Reaganomics has gutted the south side, and the business is collapsing. His brother Clay (Andy Lucien), meanwhile, has chosen respectability politics: he’s Deputy National Security Advisor in Reagan’s White House, working on the historic nuclear disarmament treaty with Gorbachev. But Clay’s proximity to power came at a price – he gave a New York Times interview calling his family “hooked on welfare,” a betrayal that cuts to the bone. Neither Black radicalism nor assimilation protects them. Institutional power, Reddick shows us, steamrolls individual choices every time.

Between them sits Meek, who begins the play building a fallout shelter in her father’s office and ends it committing espionage. Through her absurdly literal Soviet pen pal (who communicates via a weaponized Speak + Spell toy that teaches her Russian words like “revolution” and “government official”), Meek learns what her Seedlings of Peace children’s choir never taught her: that the voice of a child cannot stop a nuclear attack, that milkshake diplomacy is propaganda, that her uncle’s White House work is hollow. When the Soviet agent offers cash in exchange for stealing Clay’s classified documents, Meek takes it. Not for ideology. For survival. As she tells her family at the end: “Ain’t nobody thinkin’ ’bout us, but us.” It is a brutal education, and Bowers – an adult playing a child with complete conviction – charts Meek’s journey from terrified innocence to clear-eyed pragmatism with devastating precision.

Reddick stages this education through theatrical excess that is intentional even when only marginally effective. The play includes fourteen original songs (music and lyrics by Reddick) performed by a three-woman Choir (Grace McLean, Suzzy Roche, Nina Ross) that shapeshifts between carolers, the Seedlings of Peace, Soviet agents, and Wellspring cult members. The songs range from saccharine children’s propaganda (“I give my drink to a Soviet child / I let her sip from my straw”) to satirical Christmas carols laced with terms like “Reaganomics,” “supply-side,” and “Armageddon.” The Choir is meant to function as Greek chorus and embodiment of the state’s “iron gaze” – surveillance, manipulation, ideology made flesh. In practice, the device produces odd laughter – the “I got that” kind of audience appreciation for cleverness rather than emotional devastation. The songs are distracting rather than illuminating, the Choir more gimmick than revelation. Reddick is working in a heightened, absurdist mode by design (roller skating is “deconstructed movement, dance – and swag”; no one wears actual skates), but the theatrical apparatus does not fully earn its complexity. When satire becomes this self-conscious, it can undercut the very seriousness it is trying to expose.

The play unfolds in December 1987, the moment Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev are finalizing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty – the triumph that would help Reagan claim victory in the Cold War. Reddick stages this geopolitical theater as counterpoint to the actual crises Reagan ignored or exacerbated: the economic devastation of Black communities under Reaganomics, the FBI bombing of the MOVE organization in Philadelphia two years earlier, the AIDS epidemic ravaging the LGBT community while the administration remained silent. Clay works on nuclear disarmament while his brother’s business collapses. Meek fears Soviet missiles while American inequality destroys her neighborhood. The play’s most chilling insight is structural: Wellspring, the cult that nearly kills Puddin (Lizan Mitchell, playing Meek’s sharp-as-a-knife grandmother), is run by the CEO of America’s biggest arms manufacturer. They recruit ambitious professional women connected to Washington power – like Clay’s wife Virgie (Crystal Finn, appropriately shattered) – to steal classified information that keeps weapons contracts flowing. Mutually Assured Destruction is a goldmine, and arms control threatens profit. The cult uses water deprivation and the mantra “you have all you need” to control its members. But is Wellspring really so different from the Seedlings of Peace teaching children that their voices can stop missiles? Both are forms of indoctrination. Both weaponize the vulnerable. American ideology, Reddick suggests, is itself a cult.

The production, directed by Knud Adams (who helmed the play through its development at Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks and Trinity Rep), succeeds most in its performances. Bowers anchors the play with a portrayal of Meek that never condescends to childhood – she is genuinely terrified of nuclear war, genuinely seduced by the Soviet agent’s promise of safety, genuinely pragmatic in her final choice. Cobbs makes Smooch’s anger righteous without making him a caricature – his love for community and his fury at betrayal exist in the same breath. Mitchell’s Puddin is the play’s moral center, the one who figures out the Wellspring conspiracy (aided by a Barbara Walters 20/20 exposé she watches religiously), the one who escapes the bomb with Virgie and saves everyone. Lucien gives Clay enough humanity that his choices register as tragedy rather than villainy – he genuinely believes proximity to White House power will protect his family, and he is devastatingly wrong. The creative team (Afsoon Pajoufar’s curved Roll-a-Rama set, Masha Tsimring’s lighting, Kathy Ruvuna’s explosive sound design) serves Adams’ vision well, even when that vision is straining under the weight of Reddick’s ambitions.

The question the play leaves us with is whether chaos is the point rather than clarity. Reddick has said she writes “the theme songs to your late capitalist nightmares,” and perhaps the theatrical overload – the tonal whiplash between satire and sincerity, the songs that distract as often as they illuminate, the Choir that’s more clever than devastating – is meant to mirror the disorienting absurdity of living under Reagan’s America, where milkshake diplomacy coexists with weapons manufacturers running cults. But even if we grant Reddick her method, the play works best when it trusts the family story to carry the weight. The counterpoint between Reagan’s geopolitical theater and the Hardy family’s actual crisis is powerful enough without fourteen songs. Meek’s education – learning that survival requires moral compromise, that “ain’t nobody thinkin’ ’bout us, but us” – is devastating enough without the shapeshifting Choir. The insight that the real bomb was planted on American soil, not launched from Soviet silos, lands with force regardless of whether the theatrical apparatus supports or obscures it. Reddick has written a play about a working-class Black family navigating impossible choices in 1987, and that play is vital and urgent. It is just buried under a lot of Christmas carols about Armageddon.