Its the middle of rainy night when a woman notices her 18-year-old sons car is not in their driveway.
She calls the police to report him missing and learns the car has been stopped in an unspecified incident.
Does he have a street name?
Credit: Peter Cunningham
Does he get those whachacallit… keloids?
Were really gonna go there?
Oh we been there for a while, Kendra replies.
We have been here for a while, at a national chasm of tragic misunderstanding.
It is a play about race, yes, and about the assumptions we make about people.
It is also a play about misunderstandings, inadvertent and willful, inconsequential and potentially fatal.
(The authentically depressing set includes rain falling intermittently, illuminated by parking lot lights through the stations windows.
The effect throughout is realistic, except when the thunder and lightning cranks up with the rising action.
You just snoring away.
Was this change in Jamals attitude and appearance a factor in the trouble he found himself in that night?
At other times he falls more comfortably into the fraternity of law enforcement.
In a role that could have felt contrived to illustrate rhetorical points, Pasquale makes him a specific person.
Would that it could be so: Fewer assumptions, less heartache all around.
There is, contained withinAmerican Sons lean script, much to discuss after the curtain falls.B+
