The playwright Candrice Jones played basketball growing up. As a professional writer, however, she could hardly write “a basketball poem,” she said in a recent interview. “When I committed to telling the story through narrated performance—a play—I saw how those worlds—poetry, basketball, and play structure—collided.” Divided into the four quarters of a game, Flex is set in rural Arkansas in 1998 and follows five young women who play on the Lady Train Team. The girls are attempting to go pro while navigating the challenges of being young Black women in a racist town. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs the New York premiere. —Jensen Davis