Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale combust in AMERICAN SON, Christopher Demos-Brown’s timely and agenda-driven new play

• By drediman
• November 22, 2018
• No Comments

Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale in Christopher Demos-Brown’s “American Son” at the Booth Theatre. Photo by Peter Cunningham.

There’s no denying the intensity that drives American Son, the timely and agenda-driven new play by Christopher Demos-Brown which recently opened on Broadway at the Booth Theatre. Set in the middle of a rainy night in the waiting room of a Florida police station, the play depicts anxiety-ridden upper-mddle class ex-spouses – played by Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale – as they await of news their bi-racial son, who may or may not be be the subject of police brutality. Suffice to say, it’s a tough play, and one that attempts to look at this country’s clear and oft-undiscussed and shunned issues around race and class straight in the eye.

So how does it stack up against the other offerings of this uncommonly busy season for new plays on Broadway (a fantastic occurrence)? Indeed, American Son joins The Ferryman, The Lifespan of a Fact, The New One, Network, To Kill a Mockingbird, Bernhardt/Hamlet, and The Nap so far this fall (the last two have already closed). I would say Mr. Demos-Brown’s play falls squarely in the middle of the pack. It’s hard not to be caught up in the play’s visceral, mostly race-fueled shouting matches in real time. But if you step back a little bit, you’ll notice that the piece perhaps too-neatly packs its comprehensive set of shifting points of view into its compact 80-minute running time, so as to detract from its believability.

Luckily, director Kenny Leon does a fine job of highlighting the domestic aspects of American Son, thereby masking the play’s thematic Pandora’s box tendencies, staging a gripping production that’s tight, naturalistic, and deceptively straightforward. His quartet of actors – Jeremy Jordan and Eugene Lee as police officers join Ms. Washington and Mr. Pasquale – is excellent. Ms. Washington, in particular, has the unforgiving (and at times thankless) task of coming up with an open wound of a performance, portraying a woman relentlessly, and at times unattractively, on edge. She superbly delivers. Mr. Pasquale is nearly as effective, giving a simmering, nicely-calibrated performance that eventually and inevitably combusts, as well.

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AMERICAN SON
Broadway, Play
Booth Theatre
1 hour, 20 minutes (without an intermission)
Through January 27