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.
Director Kenny Leon keeps the action taut during the 90-minute running time, perhaps too taut. There isn't much breathing room in the production - and the ending is so abrupt that it's a wonder the curtain drop doesn't give the actors whiplash. This is the rare show that would benefit from a longer running time, from more scenes exploring the characters in greater depth.
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