Bootycandy Loves Taking a Poke at Its Own Audience

George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum, an Off Broadway hit in 1986, was groundbreaking in the way a gravedigger is. Amid brilliant satirical confetti it declared an end to a certain strain of black theater writing exemplified by a sketch he titled “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” taking off on the domestic piety of A Raisin in the Sun. Now, the wittiest of the post-Wolfe provocateurs, Robert O’Hara, opens the season at Playwrights Horizons with the insanely entertaining Bootycandy, a play whose very title (a euphemism for penis that’s way more embarrassing than the word it replaces) would give Raisin’s Lena Younger palpitations. But then O’Hara has no interest in earnest accommodation and stylistic comfort. As the play opens, the mama figure isn’t on the couch (she’s in a short skirt, putting on lipstick) and she isn’t trying to straighten out an aimless son whose “brow is heavy from 300 years of oppression” (as Wolfe put it). Rather she’s trying to straighten out a proto-gay preschooler who has too many questions about personal hygiene and blowjobs.