NEW TWIST ON ‘AMERICAN SON’
Pittsburgh Public Theater is in the strange position of going head to head with Netflix — both are presenting the taut drama “American Son.”
The streaming service adaptation features the original Broadway cast, including Kerry Washington, “but you’ll like ours better,” says Justin Emeka, and here’s why:
“What’s exciting for me,” the director explains, “is how much we are adding to the story with the four people we have in the room, and how much we are bringing to the story with who we are. I feel like we are offering something special, beyond what’s been done.”
Emeka has updated Shakespeare for the Classical Theatre of Harlem, and his other directing credits include Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Sweat” for the Public.
For “American Son,” he has gathered a cast including Bianca LaVerne Jones (City Theatre’s “The Mountaintop”) as Kendra, a black mother waiting in a Miami police station for word on her teenage son, Jamal. All she has been told is that he was stopped by police in his car, which is registered to his white father, Scott (David Whalen). It’s 4 a.m. in “American Son,” and a lone officer (Michael Patrick Trimm) is being stingy with information. Frantic Kendra and cool Scott, who are separated, must await the arrival of Lt. Stokes (Guiesseppe Jones) for news of their son.
Emeka was attracted to the play for its “relevancy and trying to shine a light on and put a certain woman’s struggle onstage in a way I don’t think often gets put on stage,” he says. “It raises a conversation about the struggles of a black mother trying to raise a black son in contemporary America, and how many struggles there still are with that. And I was interested in the relationship between Scott and Kendra and what it means to engage in an interracial marriage in 2020.”
Kendra’s plight is the stuff of nightmares. Jones says it’s the toughest role of her career, and that was just in preparing for it, before a single performance.
To internalize Kendra, the actress searched the internet for a photo of a young man who would be about the age of Jamal, her son in the play. She happened upon the smiling face of Antwon Rose II. It wasn’t until she dug a little deeper that she understood he was a Pittsburgher who had been killed by a police officer.
Stories about the harsh realities of “driving while black” in America are all too many, so happening upon Antwon “really was striking,” she says.
As part of her preparation, Jones also read interviews with her predecessor, the “Scandal” actress who said Kendra was her toughest role. Now Jones is making the role her own, and Emeka has been thrilled watching her process.
“The work David [Whalen] and Bianca are doing is going to blow the city away,” Emeka says. “Bianca getting at the heart of the story, and what she’s doing, it’s hard for her to see, but I keep reminding her, what she’s doing is incredible.”
The character of Kendra, a psychologist, struggles to remain reasonable while confronting her straying husband and a son who has been acting out since his father left, along with her fears during the excruciating lack of information about Jamal.
“I have been personalizing the play, and it is a very dark place to go for me, playing Kendra. I am aware of my own blackness, being black in a white neighborhood, having grown up in a white neighborhood with a younger brother and cousins. Socially and economically, we were fortunate enough to grow up in ‘good’ neighborhoods” — the air quotes are hers. “But it comes with — in the context of the script — being aware of my own blackness at all times when I am out and about.”
At various times in the play by Christopher Demos-Brown, audience members may find themselves taking sides, perhaps feeling some empathy for the young police officer doing his best to follow protocol.
He isn’t impolite so much as he is faced with a mother who needs to know what’s going on with her son.
While Kendra and Scott relive their broken relationship and their parenting of Jamal, facts about the stop begin to emerge, and the tension builds.
“The complexity of this issue is, it’s hard to say who the bad guy is,” Emeka explains. “When you are dealing with systemic problems, it’s not one person. It’s a legacy of systemic problems that have been built into the soil of America, that if you are not being vigilant in every position, it’s easy for the systemic to take over and say, ‘It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way it is.’ ”
Emeka notes that the playwright allows each character “to land points ... but I also want us to stay focused on there is injustice and tragedy here.”
Washington, in an interview with The Wrap, says that was the reaction from mothers affected by police brutality who saw the show on Broadway.
“They are so grateful that we don’t let people off the hook, that you ... don’t get to walk out of the theater pretending that everything is OK, ’cause it’s not,” the actress said.
The situations presented in “American Son” are not just specifically about race and gender; they are also universal. Every parent can relate to not being able to find a child who may be in trouble. There also is a marriage in crisis, and the play lets us
know — as they remind each other — it wasn’t always this way. We get to know what attracted Scott and Kendra to each other in the first place, along with glimpses into how they view their roles as parents.
Throughout her ordeal, we get to know Kendra, who flashes her psychologist’s eye at the young officer, whom she sees as standing between her and her son. But she’s quite different with Scott.
“For her husband, she’s doing the motherly thing that I’ve seen my mother do to my father many times,” Jones says. “Many mothers in the audience will recognize her trying to help the daddy along, to recognize what their kid is going through. Like my mom, just me becoming a young woman, she had to help me come into my womanhood. … My mother helped my father understand who I was becoming and my brother as well.”
She points to a moment between Steven Pasquale as Scott and Washington as Kendra in the original version of “American Son,” when both are desperately trying to get information, and the young police officer is pushing back.
In hopes of gaining cooperation, the white husband tells his black wife, “Let’s not get everybody riled up with this Black Lives Matter stuff. We can ask for our son, but let’s not lecture these people.”
To Jones, it is a pivotal moment, one that has made her wish that “right after the play, don’t even take a bow,” there could be a reading of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Birmingham Letter,” in which he explained, “Why We Can’t Wait,” which became the title of his book.
The idea of a mother waiting to make her point, so as not to make the white police officer angry . ... “God, that burns me up, as Bianca and as Kendra,” Jones says. “As someone who said yes to this role and says yes to roles that are meaningful in the 21st century, we have to look back at Martin Luther King and look at things like that historical letter and say, ‘Don’t ask me to wait. Don’t ask me to stop. Give me the ballot. I need to vote now. I need to march now. I need to protest now. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.’
“I hope,” she adds, “that people in the audience are awake enough to see that, when he asks me to not make anyone mad, to not ruffle any feathers, that they think, ‘She shouldn’t wait. If that were my son, I wouldn’t want anyone to wait.’ ”
That kind of passion is what director Emeka says Pittsburghers will see live — as opposed to their screens — when they come to the O’Reilly Theater for “American Son.”
“As an artist, I’m treating it like it’s the first time the play has ever been done and finding where’s the magic that we can offer,” he says. “Compared to Broadway and Netflix, I think that’s what makes what we’re doing in Pittsburgh so exciting.”