The “Power” actor’s debut as playwright and director turns a Black cultural pastime into an all-day event. Its biggest trick is making the audience feel like guests.
At Spades the Play, the first thing you see isn’t a stage. It’s a table: cluttered, lived-in and surrounded by chairs, sitting in the middle of the room like it’s waiting for the next hand. You don’t so much see Marcus Callender’s first play as get pulled into it, and that difference is the point.
Callender, best known for Power and Wu-Tang: An American Saga, wrote and directed the show, and it has been ten years in the making. It’s set in Harlem in 2013 and based on events from his own life. A tight group of twenty-somethings gathers for their weekly Spades game, and the real action isn’t the game on the table. It’s the games people play with each other. As the cards are dealt, the banter drifts toward honest talk about love, loyalty and the blurry space where friendship ends and something else begins.
At the center is Gill (Broderick Clavery), the host and the gravitational pull of the group. He’s popular, magnetic and a good time. He’s also messy. Early on we learn he’s entangled with a married man. What makes Gill interesting is that he lives by his own code: he holds his friends accountable even when he isn’t living right himself. Clavery plays that contradiction with ease, charming enough that you forgive him and sharp enough that you notice he’s the one keeping score.
Cori (Akilah A. Walker) grew up with Gill, and both are D.C. natives. She’s loud, needy and desperate to be seen, and the insecurity is visible from her first entrance. Walker’s performance is the most divisive of the night by design. Cori got under my skin, which is clearly what the role asks for. Even while she grated on me, I kept thinking: I know her. Everyone has a Cori in their circle. Walker commits to the character without softening her, and it pays off.
Cori’s attention is fixed on Andre (Derrick Alexander), the charming player everyone warns you about and nobody listens to. The spark in the group comes from Nefertiti (Erin Nicole Washington), the newcomer. She’s bubbly, clearly from the West Coast, a little older, established, and not interested in anyone’s games. She and Cori don’t get along from the start, and the friction between them drives much of the evening.
Nefertiti also brings the play’s best comic engine: she can’t play Spades. She may have played once or twice, but none of it has stuck. For anyone who knows the terminology and the unwritten rules, watching her fumble through hands is agony and pure joy at once. Callender knows his audience will have flashbacks to the partner who reneged or bid wrong at the worst moment, and he milks it.
Callender also makes a smart choice about the game itself. The play isn’t a hand-by-hand record of wins and losses, which would be hard to stage honestly without a rigged deck. The game serves as rhythm and atmosphere. What stays with you from a real Spades night is rarely the score. It’s the conversation around the table, and that’s what the play captures. The story is simple and easy to follow. Its strength is recognition: the roasting, the reveals, the way friends go at each other’s necks and still show up next week.
The staging makes that closeness literal. The fourth wall is broken throughout. Actors sit beside audience members and speak to them while the room still functions as a fly-on-the-wall view of a private night. Phones are discouraged. Reactions aren’t. The cast deserves credit for holding focus while the audience gasps, laughs and talks back a few feet away. The play moves from comedy to frustration to real hurt, and more than once it reopens wounds you thought had healed.
It isn’t flawless. The opening leans heavily on sexual innuendo that gets fairly graphic. The play settles down after that, but it’s a jarring way to start. The production also includes smoking on stage. It didn’t linger on clothes or hair, but it needs clearer advance notice. For some audience members it’s a preference; for others it’s a health concern.
What sets Spades the Play apart is everything around the play. Callender and his team have built the whole event. Tables are set up throughout the venue for guests to play before and after the show, alongside an open bar and a DJ. Sunday performances add a brunch with food from local Black chefs, and the result feels a lot like a cookout. At the D.C. stop, at Culture House DC (a former Black church dating to the 1800s), a host went around making sure nobody sat out a hand. By curtain, the audience wasn’t just warmed up. We were in character.
That design addresses something traditional theater often ignores. When people get dressed up to go out, they want the before and the after, not two hours in a seat and a drive home. Spades the Play builds that in. The tour ends in Miami during Art Basel, and that booking hints at a bigger future: this is the kind of show that fits naturally into film festivals, culture conferences and destination weekends, part performance and part event.
The show also has room to grow. Its structure is simple enough to expand, extend or recast, and Gill’s apartment could plausibly host many different nights. Those of us who grew up around a Spades table know there’s never just one story. If Callender keeps going, the only thing he shouldn’t change is the format. The table in the middle of the room is what makes the show.
Spades the Play is millennial-coded, Spades-coded and proudly Black, and it welcomes a mixed audience without watering itself down. It’s generous and funny, with an ambition that reaches well past the stage. Callender has dealt himself a strong first hand.
Spades the Play is touring nationally through December: Los Angeles (Amazing Grace Conservatory, Sept. 23–Oct. 18), Atlanta (Cam Kirk Studios, Oct. 21–Nov. 15), New Orleans (Fire House Loft, Nov. 18–29) and Miami during Art Basel (Dec. 2–6). Tickets are available through Posh.