‘American Son’ @ Theatre Arlington
Photos by Gloria Adame
—Jan Farrington
She called him “Junebug” when he was a little boy.
Playwright Christopher Demos-Brown’s American Son, playing at Theatre Arlington, is so real it hurts.
For most of us, it isn’t our own personal pain we’re watching. But in an uber-realistic style that goes back in American playwriting more than a century, American Son draws us into a story that insists upon staying completely real to us, an “as its happening” situation about race and bias that grows darker with every one of its 90 minutes.
In other words, American Son refuses to turn itself into “art.” It never lets us off the hook of knowing that “these things” happen, and all too often. Poetic, it’s not. Compelling theater? Yes, it is.
Black mother Kendra (Jasmine Shanise) anxiously checks her phone in the waiting room of a Miami-Dade County police station. It’s dark outside, but getting toward morning. Her son, off in the family van, hasn’t come home, and she’s had a call from the police. The young officer Larkin (Dan Abramson) at the desk doesn’t know a thing…or says he doesn’t. He asks if her son Jamal has a record, any “juvie” offenses, known street names. Does he have gold teeth? She looks at him, outrage in her eyes.
As Kendra, Shanise gives us a remarkable, ferocious, tight-wound portrait of a woman navigating a world that’s very different from her poor childhood on the edges of Miami affluence. She is wholly focused on her one son and his future—expensive private schools, getting into West Point. And yet, here’s officer Larkin, clueless about most things but so certain it makes sense to ask her if Jamal has scars, gold teeth, gang connections.
Kendra’s straight-arrow husband Scott (Rodney Honeycutt) will come into the picture soon. Eventually, so will a blunt Black police Lieutenant (Tyrone King) who calls Kendra “sistah” and tells her her own life story—in terms she doesn’t much like. The action of American Son is found mostly in the conversations between the four characters (though there’s one startling physical interaction that’s a brand-new and humiliating experience for father Scott). Husband and wife reveal bitter differences about how each thinks their son should have been raised to face the world: “Did we ever agree on anything?” Officer Larkin complains to Scott that his wife went “from zero to ghetto” in nothing flat when she came up to his desk. Lieutenant Stokes only barely contains his impatience with all of them.
And the question hangs in the air: “Where is Jamal?”
No more can be said without saying too much. We sit very still, open to the realities onstage, drawn into the nightmare we hope, somehow, will turn out okay. Director Ken’ja L. Brown and her fine cast pull us up close, make us feel we’re in the room.
And we’re waiting too.
WHEN: October 6-15
WHERE: 305 W. Main St., Arlington TX
WEB: theatrearlington.org
