The play “Flex,” written by Candrice Jones, begins previews tomorrow at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and opens on July 20. It tells the story of a high school girls’ basketball team in rural Arkansas in the late 1990s shortly after the launch of the WNBA. With aspirations of going pro, these young women must first navigate the pressures of being young, Black, and female in their surroundings.
Jones grew up in rural Arkansas, playing basketball from a young age. “A town very invigorated by basketball,” she said. Initially, boys’ basketball got much more attention than girls’ hoops, but Jones saw that shift over time. “The team I was on—we were pretty passionate and dedicated,” she said. “For our small section of the state, we had a lot of talent on our team, and we had some moms who were pretty passionate about their daughters playing.”
Today, Jones is an award-winning playwright. “Flex” dramatizes the experiences of young Black women who played the sport. The team in the play deals with a lot of problems. These are not exactly what her teammates experienced, but “Flex” does take inspiration from the issues Jones and her teammates faced during high school.
“One of the characters has to learn [teamwork], and the journey of her learning is basically the major arc of the play,” Jones said. “That sense of community definitely happens whenever this play goes through the rehearsal process. There’s something about the basketball part of this play—them all coming together and doing basketball drills together and watching them learn how to shoot a layup—[that] definitely gives a heightened sense of community.”
Jones developed “Flex” at the 2020 Humana Festival of New American Plays. When the play was staged in Arkansas, some of her former teammates came to see it. She did not come into the casting process looking for actresses who looked athletic, because her high school teammates didn’t necessarily look athletic. However, she did hope they’d have some experience with basketball.
“I was hoping there would be actresses who would audition who had, at some point, as young women—like me, taken basketball very seriously, and at some point, decided theater was the thing instead of basketball,” Jones said. “We auditioned so many women who had that story.”