It's possible to think of everything that unfolds onstage as a power struggle; everything is two (or more) people struggling to get what they want. Maybe life isn't always like this, but life isn't theater. Part of the fun of going to a play is considering all of the decisions--behind props, behind an actor's posture, behind lighting--that go into even one moment, even one split-second.
"American Son," on Broadway, is overly-schematic. The characters feel like devices. There's a sense of "agit-prop"; rather than trying to capture enduring, subtle truths, the playwright might just want to "stir you up."
But it's still fun. It's fun to consider everything happening "underneath the dialogue." A white officer assumes a black visitor's son is "a certain kind" of person; the visitor throws him off when she mentions that her son loves Emily Dickinson.
And then, this absurd and still striking exchange. The cop: "Dickinson! Love Dickinson! IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES!"
And the mother: "That's Charles Dickens."
A moment of awkward silence, then the cop produces a mansplain-ish smirk. With quiet pity, he says, "Well, I don't THINK so...."
From there, a feast of miscommunication. Dropped balls, and sometimes the dropping of the ball is (semi)-intentional. Enraged by the country he lives in, a young black man posts, on his car, a bumper sticker that says: "SHOOT COPS (on your camera when they are making an arrest)." The bit in parentheses is (deliberately) very small.
Race means power, in this play, and power means access to information. When the white cop meets a white dad, he is suddenly free with the facts, facts that were not made available to the black mother. "I mean," says this cop. "That lady would not calm down. She went from zero to ghetto in a split-second. You know?" (This bit of metaphorical language--"from zero to ghetto"--gets stuck in one's memory. It becomes more potent in the next moment, when the white dad reveals that he is in fact the spouse of the black mom. There's a collective gasp in the audience, and that's the kind of satisfying thrill you get *only* from live theater.)
The playwright seems intent on showing how everyone is simultaneously guilty and innocent. No one is off the hook. Also, no one is really, firmly, *on* the hook. When it emerges that the boy, the titular "American Son," is dead, the details are extremely complex: The son was not in possession of drugs, but was near someone who had once been in possession of drugs, a rainy night made visibility hard, someone's hand slipped, a bullet picked a trajectory no one would have desired...These are concrete details, but they also seem to refer to something more cosmic: the tragedy of the human condition. The way we struggle to know and understand one another, and the way we fail, inevitably, because we do not even know ourselves.
I almost bought tickets to "The Waverly Gallery." I almost went that route because it seemed tasteful and "buzzy"; this was the play everyone was talking about. Elaine May, decorously and slowly dying! A prestigious script by the prestigious man who gave us "Manchester by the Sea"! Lucas Hedges, being exquisite and subtle yet again!
Then I remembered something: I secretly thought "Manchester by the Sea" was really boring. And--say what you will about "Scandal"--the juiciness of a Shonda Rhimes/Kerry Washington collaboration seems to be a constant, a given, something you (or I, at least) can depend on.
So I went with the melodrama. Simmering tension, fault lines, tips of icebergs, submerged, mammoth-sized secrets. A corpse. People writhing in endless pain. Twists and turns. Cartoonish--maybe--but: Recommended!
"American Son," on Broadway, is overly-schematic. The characters feel like devices. There's a sense of "agit-prop"; rather than trying to capture enduring, subtle truths, the playwright might just want to "stir you up."
But it's still fun. It's fun to consider everything happening "underneath the dialogue." A white officer assumes a black visitor's son is "a certain kind" of person; the visitor throws him off when she mentions that her son loves Emily Dickinson.
And then, this absurd and still striking exchange. The cop: "Dickinson! Love Dickinson! IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES!"
And the mother: "That's Charles Dickens."
A moment of awkward silence, then the cop produces a mansplain-ish smirk. With quiet pity, he says, "Well, I don't THINK so...."
From there, a feast of miscommunication. Dropped balls, and sometimes the dropping of the ball is (semi)-intentional. Enraged by the country he lives in, a young black man posts, on his car, a bumper sticker that says: "SHOOT COPS (on your camera when they are making an arrest)." The bit in parentheses is (deliberately) very small.
Race means power, in this play, and power means access to information. When the white cop meets a white dad, he is suddenly free with the facts, facts that were not made available to the black mother. "I mean," says this cop. "That lady would not calm down. She went from zero to ghetto in a split-second. You know?" (This bit of metaphorical language--"from zero to ghetto"--gets stuck in one's memory. It becomes more potent in the next moment, when the white dad reveals that he is in fact the spouse of the black mom. There's a collective gasp in the audience, and that's the kind of satisfying thrill you get *only* from live theater.)
The playwright seems intent on showing how everyone is simultaneously guilty and innocent. No one is off the hook. Also, no one is really, firmly, *on* the hook. When it emerges that the boy, the titular "American Son," is dead, the details are extremely complex: The son was not in possession of drugs, but was near someone who had once been in possession of drugs, a rainy night made visibility hard, someone's hand slipped, a bullet picked a trajectory no one would have desired...These are concrete details, but they also seem to refer to something more cosmic: the tragedy of the human condition. The way we struggle to know and understand one another, and the way we fail, inevitably, because we do not even know ourselves.
I almost bought tickets to "The Waverly Gallery." I almost went that route because it seemed tasteful and "buzzy"; this was the play everyone was talking about. Elaine May, decorously and slowly dying! A prestigious script by the prestigious man who gave us "Manchester by the Sea"! Lucas Hedges, being exquisite and subtle yet again!
Then I remembered something: I secretly thought "Manchester by the Sea" was really boring. And--say what you will about "Scandal"--the juiciness of a Shonda Rhimes/Kerry Washington collaboration seems to be a constant, a given, something you (or I, at least) can depend on.
So I went with the melodrama. Simmering tension, fault lines, tips of icebergs, submerged, mammoth-sized secrets. A corpse. People writhing in endless pain. Twists and turns. Cartoonish--maybe--but: Recommended!
Comments
Post a Comment