A Florida police station in the middle of the night. Two parents searching for answers. AMERICAN SON is a gripping tale about who we are as a nation, and how we deal with family relationships, love, loss, and identity.
We don't get many ancient Greek tragedies on Broadway. Tastes have changed, and what we think of as dramatic has shifted into different patterns. So Christopher Demos-Brown's American Son seems like a play from another time. It basically consists of two-person arguments, interspersed with messenger speeches: Something has happened offstage, and we wait with the characters to find out what it is. The rhetoric is heavy-handed, the grief and fear are unremitting, the brushstrokes are asphalt-thick, and there's no subtlety in either the characterizations or the narrative structure. In other words, Demos-Brown hasn't written a particularly skillful modern drama. But when the fate of a nation was at stake, Euripides wrote plays like this too.
No spoilers here, but that ending and the way the ending is phrased and treated (like a soap opera cliffhanger) instead of feeling real and raw, which I am sure was the intention, feels rushed and horribly exploitative. It struck this critic later that this ending is how the play may have more effectively begun from before peeling the layers away from this 'American Son' and his parents' marriage, and the police brutality and racism the play seeks to skewer and impeach.
2018 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2019 | Drama League Awards | Distinguished Performance Award | Kerry Washington |
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