There are times when it can’t be said that a play has “everything but the kitchen sink.” That’s when a play has everything, including a kitchen sink. Chisa Hutchinson’s traffic-stopper, quirkily spelled Amerikin is one of the complete-with-kitchen-sink works. It insists the America on which she’s focusing is more than just a bit out of kilter. Make that greatly and long out of kilter.
Significantly, it’s a more than welcome fathomless dive into racism than raises its insistent head at exactly the right political moment. Not that almost any American (Amerikin?) moment these lengthy-moment days isn’t the exact right moment.
Jeff Browning (Daniel Abeles in a spectacular performance as a bigot from birth), lives in pointedly segregated Sharpsburg, Maryland. (Leastways, playwright Hutchinson presents Sharpsburg that way.) It’s 2017, and he’s so keen on the town temperament that he’s applied to become a member of the World Knights, an association apparently to be taken as a Ku Klux Klan spin-off. Hardly incidentally, Jeff has a dog he calls N*****.
Before being asked to join the select brotherhood, however, Jeff must provide proof he’s genetically fit. Hutchinson beautifully connives that the return letter he receives doesn’t corroborate his belief. And this is the situation on which Daniel’s future balances, a situation that runs smack-bang-wallop into repercussions that leave him, an inveterate liar, nowhere he wants to be, certainly not as an instantly welcomed World Knights member. (Full-time lying is another of-the-corrupt-moment Amerikin elements.)
Complicating the already complicated proceedings is Daniel’s home life. When the downwardly accelerating action begins, he’s the father of a weeks-old, 10-pound son. (Music and sound designer Lindsay Jones takes good care of the swaddled infant cries.) The mother is Michelle Browning (Molly Carden, matching scene for scene Abeles’ breath-taking performance.) It could be said Michelle is dealing with post-partum depression, but that may not be it.
When first seen, she seems to be suffering from what might be termed long-standing pre-partum depression. She’s a woman not on the verge but far past it. How Daniel and she work this out, after admitting to each other that love isn’t part of their equation, constitutes Hutchinson’s few upbeat seconds. Too bad it occurs just before the seemingly reconciled marrieds are scorchingly interrupted by—spoiler alert—an event anyone familiar with KKK rituals will recognize.
So much for down-down-downbeat act one. Act two begins with Washington Post reporter Gerald Lamott (Victor Williams, becomingly authoritative start to finish). A serious probing man, he’s at the office desk that clever designers Christopher Swader and Justin Swader have incorporated on their crisply accommodating set. More immediately, he’s on his computer learning about the Browning situation, thinking there’s a human-interest story in it for him, a story about never-ending man’s inhumanity to man.
Deciding he’s going to follow through, he doesn’t leave for Sharpsburg until he agrees to let daughter Chris (Amber Reauchean Williams, making an outspoken character extremely outspoken), accompany him on the trip. Aware of the frightening consequences afflicting the Brownings, he is convinced his column can help improve their circumstances. Chris, more realist than cynic, isn’t convinced.
What transpires as the LaMotts encounter the Brownings is the act-two burden, most—if not every minute of it—recognizably credible. The metaphoric fly in Gerald’s metaphoric healing ointment revolves around Daniel’s psychological make-up as shaped by long-established Sharpsburg attitudes. (Surely, Hutchinson means Sharpsburg to stand in for communities across the Amerikin—er, American—map.) The outcome…well, it won’t be revealed here, not even a devastating hint.
Adding to the work’s impressive theatrical weight are three Sharpsburg residents, each portrayed with gravity, each acting so persuasively—as directed by Jade King Carroll—it’s as if they’ve never lived anywhere but Sharpsburg. Alma Tillery (Andrea Syglowski), Daniel’s onetime girlfriend, still cares about him. She’s the one who contacts Gerald out of concern. Daniel’s best and longest friend Poot Spangler (Tobias Segal), is an ecstatic womanizer, completely uninterested in joining the World Knights. Dylan Hoffenberger (Luke Robertson), on the other hand, is the NFL-loving World Knight who’s recruited Daniel and is warily invested in Daniel’s DNA health.
Amerikin isn’t a perfect play, although the first act dances close to that point. In the second act, however, there are a few glitches. As it begins, Hutchinson lets the audience know the Brownings have been under siege on what sounds like a daily and, even more so, nightly basis. Yet, when the Lamotts come to the Brownings’ front door—Gerald later remarks to Daniel that referring to a “Black man” is “not an insult”—they encounter no sign of menace. Nor are they endangered when a short time later, again at the open front door for several full-exposure minutes, no Sharpsburg marauder threatens them.
All the same, so much of Amerikin is absolutely right—is so absolutely on track with the abominable failings of today’s anti-DEI American society—that Hutchinson’s lapses are minor enough as makes no matter. On the contrary, the tragedy arrives as the exceptional political play very much needed right now.
Amerikin opened March 18, 2025, at 59E59 and runs through April 13. Tickets and information: primarystages.org
