There was a guy I knew when I was in my teens. Blond and blue-eyed, popular at the beach, he named his puppy after a superstar. It made him laugh to let people in on the gut-punch nasty joke behind it: that, as far as he was concerned, both were black female dogs.
Chisa Hutchinson’s layered new play, “Amerikin,” has me thinking about that for the first time in decades. Her central character, Jeff, has named his own dog in the same spirit — after a racist slur that he is not shy about shouting into the neighborhood to summon his pup. I’d hate for anyone to think that detail was too exaggerated. Not in these United States it isn’t.
Directed by Jade King Carroll for Primary Stages, “Amerikin” is set in Sharpsburg, Md., which was Confederate country back when the bloody Battle of Antietam was waged nearby during the Civil War. In 2017, it is Trump country, and when the working-class Jeff (Daniel Abeles) and his wife, Michelle (Molly Carden), take their newborn son home, Jeff is eager to give the child he adores every social advantage in their small town.
If that means accepting an invitation from his pal Dylan (Luke Robertson) to join the local white supremacist group, Jeff would be honored. It would bolster his sense of belonging in this place where he’s lived since childhood.
But his nomination comes with an asterisk: He must take a DNA test to prove that he is 100 percent white. To his alarm, the results say otherwise — and even though his tech-savvy best friend, Poot (Tobias Segal), doctors the results, word gets out.
And you know what happens when a band of white racists discovers a nonwhite family living in its midst. As Gerald (Victor Williams), a reporter for The Washington Post, frames it in a headline: “White Supremacist Hopeful Becomes Target of His Own Hate.”
Funny and tragic without being a tragicomedy, “Amerikin” doesn’t fit neatly into a dramatic category. A thoughtful palpation of the civic body, it examines inherited pathologies, protective reflexes and assorted strains of trauma.
This is a play about parents and children and what kind of country we want to be. It suggests grounds for optimism — the possibility, anyway, of understanding, progress and repair. But with a whole lot of avoidable pain along the way.
For Jeff and the exhausted Michelle, the first weeks of parenthood are rough. She is in the terrifying grip of postpartum depression, but he treats her with callousness rather than compassion. It doesn’t help that he reliably brightens at the sight of their neighbor Alma (an exceptional Andrea Syglowski), who is also his ex.
It is Alma’s Facebook post in Act II that piques Gerald’s interest in writing about Jeff. That in turn prompts Gerald’s 20-something daughter, Chris (Amber Reauchean Williams), an aspiring journalist, to accompany him to the interview.
“You think I’m letting you go into Confederate territory by yourself, Black man?” Chris says. “They just had a Klan rally there.”
Hutchinson is taking on a great deal here, and in a couple of spots it feels as if she leapfrogs characters to where she wants them to be: in a pivotal, unlikely monologue by Jeff, explaining to Michelle why he married her and laying out their future, and in a conversation between Gerald and Chris that is difficult to believe they would have in front of Jeff.
At 59E59 Theaters, the production’s sense of regional speech is admirably strong, with accents shaped by the broad Maryland “o.” (The dialect coach is Deborah Hecht.) The set, by the brothers Christopher and Justin Swader, is meticulously detailed. But would Michelle, who cleans up after her husband and his friends, even when she has just given birth, stand for grimy baseboards? I doubt it. The script also has an olfactory plot twist — to say more would be a spoiler — that is implausible, given the set’s tight dimensions.
The cast is terrific, though, and the baby’s cries are impeccably sound-designed by Lindsay Jones. What’s strange is that the swaddled infant requires too much visual suspension of disbelief. It is unambiguously nonpliable, and no real child is that.
We are all of us malleable when we arrive in the world. Every influence leaves its mark.
Amerikin
Through April 13 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; primarystages.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
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