SEASONING NEEDED
Experienced hands could’ve made ‘Chicken & Biscuits’ work
Broadway is striving to encourage young Black directors and find a new, more diverse audience. These are crucial goals. But the way to achieve them is not for the old Broadway hands (of all races) merely to step out of the way, offer up the space and disappear.
Making a play work for the commercial stage is a tricky craft that has to be learned. Those experienced hands have got to stick around and help these vital new voices.
Had that happened at Circle in the Square Theatre, “Chicken & Biscuits,” the struggling new Broadway play by Douglas Lyons, might not have baked for close to 2 hours and 15 minutes without an intermission.
If you’re engaging an audience in some profound and riveting experience, a concept so intense and immersive that you fear the audience’s loss of concentration, you can ask them to sit for that long and maybe you’ll be fine.
But “Chicken & Biscuits,” which was directed by Zhailon Levingston, is not such a show.
It’s a warm-centered farce, a traditionally structured comedy wherein the members of a flawed but loving Black family gather to bury their patriarch, and in so doing find out some unexpected truths about themselves.
This is a longstanding formula in the theater, variously recalling Horton Foote’s “Dividing the Estate,” Larry David’s “Fish in the Dark,” the immersive “Finnegans Wake” and movies from
“The Inheritance” to “A Madea Family
Funeral” to “Knives Out.”
It’s a popular device because death works very well in the theater.
A funeral shakes things up, creates emotional stress and provides an excuse to reunite people who either didn’t like each other much or had no idea about family secrets not yet fully buried. It can be moving or funny or (as in this case) can try for both at once.
But either way, people still have to pee. And, if thwarted by running time, try to pee they will.
Thus, at the matinee of “Chicken & Biscuits” I saw, audience members started to rise from their seats well before the end of the show. And since Circle in the Square is a theater mostly in the round, that means everyone could see them looking for the door or even ending up heading backstage.
As a one-act comedy, this show is some 45 minutes too long. And even with an intermission, the chronically underpaced attraction would still need to excise all of its false endings, unnecessary scene changes (the play could easily all take place in the same sanctuary instead of characters getting into Lyfts and so on) and all kinds of other time-consuming clutter.
If all that happened, we’d have an entertaining show aimed at a popular audience. A fun night out reminding us of the importance of familial love, tolerance and forgiveness. Lyons’ play, which stars Cleo King, Norm Lewis and Michael Urie, and features Alana Raquel Bowers, Ebony Marshall-Oliver, Aigner Mizzelle, Devere Rogers and NaTasha Yvette Williams, is filled with warm-centered performances and broad but entertaining characters.
These include an in-your-business grandmother (Mizzelle), two fighting sisters (played by King and Marshall-Oliver) and a gay grandson (Rogers) who has brought along his Jewish partner (Urie) to this Black funeral, despite being still in the closet where half his family is concerned.
Lewis plays the vocally mellifluous pastor trying to hold his family together while Bowers plays the rebellious teen of the bunch. Williams plays a hitherto unknown family member who arrives at what should have been the Act 1 curtain.
Everyone is either a type or a stereotype, but that could still work in comedy, especially since types are based on truths and Broadway comedies rarely have put
Black families like this one on these stages. These are all lively performances (Urie has his usual impeccable comic timing and Bowers, especially, is a natural improviser). Plus most of our families, whatever our race, are familiar with the issues on view here.
But Levingston, the debuting Broadway director, badly needed a partner who could help him navigate some of the technical demands of this medium and remind him about the importance of staging a show for an audience — just as Lyons also needed someone who could help him shape and hone this potentially enjoyable material so it flowed with enough juicy consistency to carry us smoothly through with logic and veracity.