American Son (Broadway) NYC Reviews and Tickets

"TV actress Kerry Washington is superb in a role that plunges her into every imaginable checkpoint on the emotional scale, but it’s the ideas that come at you with a fast and furious frenzy that will escort you out of the theater dazed...Acted with dexterity by a great cast, directed with economy by Kenny Leon, and written with knowledge and sobering humanity by Christopher Demos-Brown...A profound and unforgettable evening at the theater that challenges the mind."
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"A tense, didactic Broadway play for our age of racially charged mistrust...You have to get past all that schematic writing to get to the deeper point, which is that racism poisons everything...The piece wrestles with crucial issues, and it’s performed with enough intensity by Pasquale and Washington under Leon’s theme-based direction that they effectively collide with your own prejudices, whoever you might be. You feel everything the characters feel, and...that has worth."
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"A thoughtful, tension-filled 90 minutes. 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...Kenny Leon paces this taut production more like a thriller than a polemic...'American Son' is most affecting when it is personal, not political...There is, contained within 'American Son’s' lean script, much to discuss after the curtain falls."
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"The writing can be strained and mechanical, but it inches toward a greater complexity...The production, directed by Kenny Leon, occasionally hits its marks too insistently...'American Son' Isn’t a play for the decades, never mind for the ages. But it speaks directly to our grievous times. If the playwright’s limitations are conspicuous, his knowledge of criminal-justice realities brings an uncompromising verisimilitude to an ending that should leave Broadway audiences gasping for breath."
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"It deserves much credit for addressing difficult but important societal concerns with thoughtfulness and empathy — and for being able to rouse such intense reactions...At its best, 'American Son' is smart, mysterious, and engrossing — not to mention an effective star vehicle for Washington, who gives a revealing, sympathetic performance...That being said, it can also feel thin in premise, didactic in tone, and one-dimensional in characterization."
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"A microcosm of the ravages of race relations in this country. Everyone's good, but there are no heroes in this compellingly provocative story...Demos-Brown does an excellent job of drawing us into the conundrum of race in America...All four characters come at the issues from very different perspectives; and under Leon's expert direction, we see how difficult it is to find common ground...Enhancing the production is an outstanding company of A-listers.”
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"A ripped-from-the-headlines plot that couldn't be more relevant, from-the-gut performances by Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale, and a staging by Kenny Leon that elicits an extremely vociferous audience response...A play that says a lot and nothing simultaneously...Demos-Brown has created archetypes instead of characters...At least the performances are vivid...'American Son' could have been a landmark Broadway play, but instead it only skims the surface."
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"It's an interesting piece of writing...The characters are less fully-fleshed out humans than they are representations of types created to express four sides of what is arguably the most controversial issue facing America today...The playwright seems determined to introduce every racially-orientated aspect of the situation into the one-act...The play can get a bit didactic, and the coincidences that fuel the storytelling can get strained, but under director Kenny Leon, the cast is convincing."
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