Review: Terrified Mom of an "American Son" Tries to Get Police to Take Her Seriously

"American Son" is an earnest, issue play, given star power by Kerry Washington. She plays a terrified mother who is at a nearly-empty Florida police station at 4 a.m., looking for her 18-year-old missing son.

Washington's character is black and her FBI-agent husband (Steven Pasquale) and the bumbling, newbie police officer (Jeremy Jordan) are white and she can't get anyone to take her fears seriously. Her son Jamal is mixed race and hasn't come home. It doesn't matter that he has a Lexus and attended private schools — she knows what this could mean. 

Audiences will understand where this play is going from the first few minutes, but "American Son" is not about the narrative, which has a few too many theatrical "gotcha" moments for my taste. Instead, it is interested in airing an argument about the pervasiveness of racism. Though its main character is a black woman, the play seems squarely aimed at well-meaning white people. It uses Pasquale's sympathetic character and a grizzled, seemingly-reasonable black policeman (Eugene Lee) to bring up all the things white people often say: if they don't want to get pulled over, black boys shouldn't wear clothes that make them look like gangsters, they should be subservient to police, they shouldn't be driving around purposeless in the middle of the night, especially in the South. 

The play airs all those arguments — and then literally shoots them down.

After seeing this show, I thought a lot about Washington's performance. She plays the mother as irritable and angry, and she stays that way. There's little humor and almost no nuance, just 90 minutes of close-to-tearful raging. It can feel one-noted; she can be unlikable. I worried that it also played into the stereotype of the irrational, angry, black woman.

And yet, her character is not irrational: Her son is in danger and no one will see it and no one will help her. She is right and she knows it. The men around her are condescending and say racist things. Doesn't she deserve to be angry? In fact, isn't she only seen BECAUSE she is angry? Because she is not taken seriously as a black woman, aren't persistence and anger the only effective weapons that she has?

"American Son" may have a shaky narrative, but it is a searing political argument. It says, this boy isn't in danger because he is acting in an "unacceptable" way — he's in danger because everything, from the names of our streets, to the cadence of our speech, to the architecture of our buildings, to our core institutions are used as weapons against him.

American Son, by Christopher Demos-Brown, directed by Kenny Leon. At the Booth Theatre through Jan. 27., 2019.