Christopher Demos-Brown’s “American Son,” now running at New Brunswick’s George Street Playhouse, under the direction of David Saint, dives eagerly into contemporary conflicts between police and black youth.
It is a play about a middle-of-the-night traffic stop, but the incident and its repercussions are relegated almost entirely off stage.
Starting at about 4.15 am, the play’s plot unfolds in real time as Kendra (Suzanne Douglas) and her husband Scott (John Bolger) wait with decreasing patience in a sterile room of the Miami police station while officers on the overnight skeleton crew try to track down Jamal, their missing 18-year-old son.
All that the flunky rookie cop (Mark Junek) can tell them at first is that their son’s car has been logged in as part of a traffic stop, but details are scant. Jamal is a six-foot, two-inch, black man with corn rows, so despite his parents’ confidence in the strength of his character, Kendra recalls Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown as reasons to worry that her son’s appearance may put him in danger.
The play takes about an hour of its 90-minute run time before it finds its stride, but the closing portion features great moments of high tension. Prior to that, Demos-Brown flails a bit in a seeming attempt to cram every possible social conflict into a short play.
Kendra and Scott are a separated, mixed-race couple who disagree starkly over how best to raise their son. The evening’s crisis quickly erodes their civility, leading to long scenes of bickering about everything from law enforcement to grammar. The mixed-race couple is a vehicle through which the play asks Kendra to stand for black America and Scott for white, thereby transposing their disagreements from the interpersonal to the social. It is a crafty maneuver, if not entirely successful (occasionally it seems as though these are simply two people who get on each other’s nerves).
The long-awaited arrival of Lieutenant John Stokes (Mark Kenneth Smaltz) helps matters considerably: Stokes is in no mood for drama, and Smaltz demonstrably takes charge of the proceedings. His frame is large and his voice booms as he makes clear that it is time for matters to get serious. As Demos-Brown does with Kendra and Scott, he also deploys Stokes as a metonymic voice for all police trying to defend themselves against charges of power abuse, but Smaltz imbues his character with a clear sense of hard-won wisdom.
All this plays out on Jason Simms’s evocatively sterile set, which reduces George Street’s large playing space to a claustrophobic box of a waiting room. That box works frequently more like a kiln here, as Demos-Brown tosses in a vast array of factors contributing to social unrest, and watches as they smolder towards combustion.
Saint’s direction capitalizes frequently on Simms’s set by emphasizing the sparks created when these characters with no place to flee must inevitably clash. Ultimately, that clash seems Demos-Brown’s goal in “American Son.” Rather than aiming his gaze at the scene of conflict between police and black youth, the playwright pans away to its context — and the larger tenuousness of black adolescence in America.
American Son
George Street Playhouse
9 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick
Tickets online www.GSPonline.org or by phone (732) 246-7717. Running through February 26.
Patrick Maley may be reached at patrickjmaley@gmail.com. Find him on Twitter @PatrickJMaley. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook.
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