The Nuyorican Cafe on Manhattan’s Lower East Side has shown all the plays in Ishmael Reed’s 2009 Dalkey Archive Press collection The Plays: Savage Wilds (in 1991), Preacher and the Rapper (in 1994), The C Above C Above High C (in 1997), Hubba City (in 1996), Mother Hubbard (in 1998), and Body Parts: A Serious Comedy (in 2007). The Final Version also appeared at the Cafe (in 2014). His latest, Life Among The Aryans, is being staged there now as well.

The Poets Cafe, located, since the Seventies, in the Lower East Side, is an appropriate venue for Reed’s irreverent and penetrating works on race. The Cafe has resisted the flood of private capital and cultural dilution which have transformed the surrounding blocks into an archipelago of open-air brunch spots. It has done so with a fidelity to its original vision as a home for marginalized voices, even as New York squeezes out its Puerto Rican and African-American populations.

Life Among The Aryans, set in the near future in the southern town of Whoop-And-Holler, unfolds after the Presidency of P.P. Spanky, a reactionary reality-show host. A Jewish progressive has since been elected, and the new President announces reparations payments for all African-Americans. This outrages John Shaw, an unemployed White Supremacist (played by Frank Martin), but his ragtag outfit struggles to come up with a coherent response. First, his mentor, Leader Matthew (played by Timothy Mullins) skips town with the funds for the revolution. Then, his wife, Stella (played by Lisa Pakulski), and her friend Barbara (played by Jennifer Glassgow), undergo an experimental transracial procedure to become Black. They collect reparation monies and vacation overseas. Eventually Shaw must reconcile his racial fantasies with his isolated reality.

Reversals fill the play. John Shaw, who dreams of overthrowing the “Zionist-occupied government,” is Jewish. And when Doris Johnson, an African-American laborer played by Malika Iman, files for her reparations check, she is turned away. She doesn’t have the right documents.

Another twist is that the racist White Lightning Network has a South Asian anchor. The role is small—the anchor, played by Monisha Shiva, appears three times—but her narrative frames the play. She conveys, through her physical composure and exaggerated facial expressions, an intensity, that, exceeding that of the propagandist, enters the realm of the true-believer.