The premise of “American Son,” a dramatic, tense play by Christopher Demos-Brown, is loaded with hot-button issues so fiery, they burn the fingers.
An estranged, biracial couple reunite at a police station in Miami-Dade County when their 18-year-old son, Jamal, goes missing. The police officer in charge doesn’t offer them straight answers. What the couple does know: Jamal’s car has been identified in an incident. And he isn’t answering his cell phone.
To kick off Black History Month, Narçisse Theatre Company Director FL Henley, Jr., brings us a powerful viewing experience in “American Son,” distressingly compelling from beginning to end because of the raw, contemporary issues it raises.
The play’s mood is unsettling, with the setting placing the audience into a police station in the middle of the night. We meet Dr. Kendra Ellis-Connor (Aminah Carter), a forceful, confrontational mother worried about her son. Kendra demands answers from Officer Paul Larkin (Ben Brautigam). She hurls racially charged accusations at the rookie officer while he backs away slowly.
As Kendra and her husband Scott Connor (David Richwine) engage in their own unbridled public argument, we peek into the cracked windows of their house while they unpack their entire lives. Their different races and backgrounds seem too far apart for the couple to have stayed together as long as they did. Even what they each want for Jamal doesn’t match. As they argue, micro-aggressions morph into macro-aggressions. Their tense dynamic continues throughout the play without letting up.
Carter brings strength and heat to her role. When she is visibly annoyed with any of the men in her way, her entire head moves when she rolls her eyes. And when she argues, she puts her whole body into it, sputtering her words. But while she may be too flustered to get her own words right, she bears down on parsing and correcting her husband’s grammar. Carter consistently maintains livid, lava-like energy throughout her performance.
Although the chemistry between Carter and Richwine is stilted at first, it becomes gelatinous in the middle, and rock-solid near the end. They are a couple unafraid of sharing even the ugly things you’re not supposed to say. These two amplify the ugly with race and class differences weaponized against each other. During a rare mellow moment of the play, they remember how they met, and they let us glimpse into their once-sweet romance. And it’s nice for a moment. Then the proverbial bell rings, and they put their gloves back on for another round.
Richwine starts his character off as an even-keeled, worried father and conflicted husband. As tensions mount, he escalates the heat on his reactions to deliver a passionate performance with an explosive finish. In one aggressive scene in particular, Richwine throws his entire body into the ring with a reaction so visceral, I thought he might have actually gotten hurt. (All is well, dear readers.)
While trying to prevent someone from getting hurt, Brautigam plays rookie Officer Larkin with a combination of naïveté and amenability. While he tries to bring calm to the room, none of the other characters are letting that happen. Brautigam’s character approach is in stark contrast to Lt. John Stokes (Mark Maples). As the person in the room with the most authority, both earned and innate, Maples brings a combative interpretation to Stokes. And he brings an unflinching perspective of being both a Black man and a police officer. If Brautigam is the boxer dancing around the ring, Maples delivers the knockout punch.
Henley stays true to his promise of pushing boundaries, bringing the people of Harrisburg a play with “No happy endings. We don’t want audiences to walk away with answers. We want them to be uncomfortably challenged, to walk away with questions, to cause them psychological distress.”
For a locked room piece with only one act that runs 90 minutes, “American Son” offers a packed script. The play brings forth brutally painful topics not only about race, but also about police, co-parenting and family breakdown… topics for you and your plus-one to dissect. I hope you have that deep talk in a comfortable, relaxed venue after the play—freed from the tension of the cramped, fraught police station waiting room.
“American Son” runs through Feb. 18 at Narçisse Theatre Company, 312 Chestnut St., Harrisburg, in the theater’s new courtyard. Find more information at https://www.narcissetheatre.org/current.
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