AISLE SAY New York

Reviewed by David Spencer

The folks who make up academic study guides for plays, if they worked on American Son or The Lifetime of a Fact, probably had a field day on each, and that’s actually meant as high praise.

            In a manner that is both far less common than it used to be on Broadway, yet also far more immediately connected to current events and concerns, both plays explore contemporary social issues, but in a manner that frustrates garden variety politicization. In neither of the plays are the answers pat, and in both of them, the characters on all sides are not only hugely smart, but as events develop, more richly complex than they seem at first.

            To vastly oversimplify, by way of contrast the two, the first play, The Lifespan of a Fact, is about the deconstruction of what purports to be a full and complete picture, to find its ambiguities; whereas American Son is about an effort to clarify ambiguities to form a complete picture.

            In The Lifespan of a Fact, glossy magazine editor Emily (Cherry Jones) hires young researcher Jim (Danielle Radcliffe) to examine a new human interest piece by acclaimed American man of letters John (Bobby Cannavale), about the death-leap suicide of a teenage boy in Las Vegas. She thinks it’s a masterwork that will go down as one of the Magazine’s finest moments. But what she assumes will be a relatively routine fact-check becomes an assiduous breakdown to the tiniest detail. Yet as the ego-bloated author himself takes pains to say, he doesn’t write “articles,” he writes essays, more impressionistic than reportorial, using his observed interpretation of what things mean to get toward the larger truth. As self-evidently bogus as this might seem, remember we’re dealing with unusually intelligent characters and he manages to put forth a case worthy of debate. The question is, can the case validate publication? Though the issue is deadly serious and played for real stakes, the writing encompasses deft comedy, and under the direction of Leigh Silverman, all three players deliver it with the assurance of those born to resonate with funny.

            In American Son, distraught mother Kendra (Kerry Washington) is in a Miami police station, awaiting news of her son, Jamal, who has been missing, and not getting much help (she thinks) from station officer Larkin (Jeremy Jordan), who has caught her complaint. Is it possibly because she’s black and he’s white? It sure seems so, at least that she’s being somewhat patronized. But the levels to the situation, especially as the play’s two additional characters, one white (Steven Pasquale), one black (Eugene Lee), enter the scene, go much deeper, and turn unexpected corners. Even the facts, as we begin to know them, become less absolute as other facts beneath those change the dynamics.

Virtually anything else I tell you about American Son is a storytelling spoiler. And though I suppose most other reviews will have gone deeper into the story—and I’m not putting them down for it; it’s not easy to evaluate a play exploring complex topical themes while revealing nothing much about it—I’m going to stop there. I attended American Son cold, without foreknowledge of anything (other than creative IDs and bylines), and if you can preserve that “innocence,” you owe it to yourself, because the test of your own socio-political assumptions and preconceptions is part of the experience. Like The Lifespan of a Fact, American Son has its share of laughs, but it’s not comedy, and part of the experience, too, is volatility—knife-edge tension created by the cast under the direction of Kenny Leon—and the possibility of learning if the endgame is tragedy.

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