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We gave him a B +
It's in the middle of the night that a woman realizes that her 18-year-old son's car is not in their driveway. She calls the police to report her disappearance and learns that the car was stopped in an unspecified incident. When the play opens, the woman, Kendra Ellis-Connor (Kerry Washington), is alone in the waiting room of a Miami police station, wrapped in a sterile armchair, beaming with afraid of the worst. She will soon meet a young officer (Jeremy Jordan) whose first goal is to get information about his son, Jamal, who is just days away from the baccalaureate. Does he have a street name? Previous arrests? Gold teeth? Scars? "Does he have those whachacallit … keloids?"
She replies her answers (not to all of the above, except for a small scar from a surgical operation practiced in her childhood), her misdemeanor of occasional racism emerging from her initial state of panic . When the cop, a parent himself, tells him that he understands what she feels, she challenges him: "Do you have a black son?"
"Wow … are we really going?" He asks.
"Oh, we've been here for a while," Kendra replies.
We have been here for a while, before a national abyss of tragic misunderstanding. This is the ground of Christopher Demos-Brown's new play American son, which explores the question in 90 minutes of reflection and tension. It's a piece about race, yes, and about the assumptions we make about people. It's also a play about misunderstandings, unintentional and willful, inconsequential and potentially deadly. It is, on the one hand, a bait for an important national conversation, but the director Kenny Leon (Children of a little God, a grape in the sun) tune this tense production more like a thriller than a polemic, with reversals and revelations to try to discover: what happened to Jamal Connor?
The discussions about race and police in America are tense and uncomfortable in real life, and this is also true at the beginning of American son. The conflict on stage begins with broad and sometimes crazy blows: does Agent Larkin really need to point out to Kendra that, although we do not see them, there are two adjacent fountains in this former Southern Police Station? ? (The authentically depressing set includes intermittent rain, lit by parking lights through the station windows. The effect is realistic except when thunder and lightning jostle with action The scenography is by Derek McLane, Peter Kaczorowski's lighting and Peter Fitzgerald's sound design.)
The same hilarious ignorance of Larkin will later offer the public some rewarding moments: When Jamal's white father, Scott Connor (Steven Pasquale), arrives, Larkin takes him for a lieutenant assigned to the case and discharges him. about "keeping the natives at bay". He soon faces the reality that he describes Kendra in such unhappy terms to her recently separated husband.
What begins as a thematic game of ideas now revolves around a family drama and becomes all the more effective in narrowing the black and white circle of society, even black and white in the same decaying marriage. . "I do not know if I spent a night filled with sleep since the birth of this boy," Kendra told Scott in a desperate exchange. "You just snore away."
American son It's more touching when it's personal, not political: when you understand that Jamal, a student from a preparatory school at West Point this fall, has recently combed his hair, started wearing loose jeans and adopted what Scott calls, "it's stupid, loping, slash walk", not just as an exploration of identity, but as a way to differentiate itself from his father, who dropped his family away. Has this reactionary change in Jamal's attitude and appearance been a factor in the turmoil he experienced that night?
Kendra tries to contextualize her son's actions, while controlling her anger – different customized custom strains for her and the police – and trying to calm her own fear. Washington is a careful and nuanced actor. those who know her mainly from Scandal will find it facing a crisis situation in a very different way. Here, it is a mother who could not sleep that night but who always asks enough energy for the school of those around her.
Pasquale embodies a completely different conflict as husband, FBI agent: her son is biracial, African-American and African-American, though this distinction disappears in a police report describing Jamal as one of " three black men. the men in a Lexus. Sometimes Scott is Kendra's strength and advocate, and his own vulnerability as the father of a missing child is revealed in a wave of quiet anger. Other times, he falls more comfortably into the fraternity of the forces of order. In a role that might have seemed artificial to illustrate points of rhetoric, Pasquale made him a specific person.
The cast is complemented by Jeremy Jordan, who is as friendly as possible in the role of the young officer with preconceived ideas, and in the role of veteran actor Eugene Lee in the role of Lieutenant John Stokes, who, along with character of Pasquale, book some of the turnarounds of the play. d & # 39; waiting. Kendra is prepared to fight a white police force – Larkin's Jordan is only a warm up for her – so she is briefly projected by the entrance to Stokes, who is black and who advises severely: much less heartache if you stop jumping to conclusions. "
Could this be so: Fewer assumptions, less heartache all around. There is, contained in American sonThe script is skinny, much to discuss after the curtain falls. B +
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