Bootycandy’ is an ambitious satire

You’ll have to see the show to learn what body part Bootycandy, the peculiar, slang-style title of Robert O’Hara’s satirical and offbeat five-actor play, is a codeword for. It’s actually a surprise. However, I can tell you that the show, which serves as the season opener for Off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons, is an uneven, messy but often hilarious ride throughout the imagination and memories of a gay African-American male. Imagine a graduate school seminar in gender and racial studies and deconstructionist theory, as told through the skit-like structure and over-the-top tone of Saturday Night Live. The first few vignettes include an awkward “birds and the bees” chat between a mother and son, a pastor who reveals himself to be a cross-dresser in front of his congregation, a four-way phone conversation about an extremely inappropriate name for a baby and a rambling homeless man.