“White Supremacist Hopeful Becomes Target of His Own Hate.” So reads the headline that undergirds Chisa Hutchinson’s play Amerikin, a tragricomedy that registers closer to reality than fiction. Produced by Primary Stages for its Off-Broadway debut, the show tells the story of Jeffrey Browning, a young father with a new baby and a wife coping with postpartum depression in Sharpsburg, Maryland.
Sharpsburg looms large in American history. Maryland was a slave state, its northern and eastern borders demarcate the Mason Dixon Line, and Sharpsburg is home to the Antietam battlefield, where the bloodiest battle of the Civil War took place. Not 18 miles down the road is Harpers Ferry, where abolitionist John Brown attempted to raid a federal arsenal and stoke a slave rebellion in 1859.
More than 150 years later, Sharpsburg has remained a site of racial antagonism and disputed history, triggering everything from racial slurs at a Little League game in 2011 to the vandalism of a Robert E. Lee statue in 2020. Driving through town on her way to a job in nearby Shepherdstown, West Virginia, the playwright was struck by the number of Confederate flags flapping outside people’s homes. “I really don’t like fearing things or fearing people that I don’t know,” Hutchinson said in a promotional video. “So I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll do some research. I’ll write a play.’”
That play became Amerikin, an apt title for a drama that calls into question what it means to be American and who gets to bear that designation. The inflection point comes when Jeff, played by Daniel Abeles, accepts an invitation to join the World Knights, a local white supremacy group, in hopes of bettering his social standing and giving his newborn son a leg up. He eagerly awaits the results of his DNA test, but when they arrive they contain an inconvenient truth: Jeff Browning is 14% Sub-Saharan African. He is literally brown-ing.
Wordplay is a notable part of Hutchinson’s strategy. For example, the misspelling of American in the title emphasizes the word “kin” in a play about family. In one early scene, Jeff whistles for his missing dog while chatting with his ex-lover and neighbor, Alma, played by Andrea Syglowski. Alma questions the name he’s chosen for the dog: “You think it’d be okay for your little son to be runnin’ around sayin’… that?” The audience is left wondering until the end of the scene what the dog’s name could possibly be. The mystery is solved when Jeff yells “N—— n—— n——” at the top of his lungs.
In the hands of a lesser writer, Amerikin’s premise could have easily become an oafish setup for a punchline steeped in schadenfreude; a white supremacist who realizes he’s part Black is, after all, the stuff that clickbait dreams are made of. Hutchinson, however, treads the line deftly. The banter between Jeff and his friends Poot and Dylan, played by Tobias Segal and Luke Robertson respectively, flows with the ease of a sitcom. The specificity of the Mid-Atlantic accent is a hard nut to crack, but the actors do so convincingly.
If Amerikin is an anthropological project, it ultimately has a humanizing effect. Hutchinson, true to her own words, has put the people she fears under the microscope, not to otherize them, but to understand how hate gets normalized in a community focused on helping its own.
The play doesn’t just stick to race, either. Molly Carden gives a powerful performance as Jeff’s wife, Michelle, whose increasingly bleak outlook is exaggerated by her untreated postpartum depression. Since she’s given birth, all the attention has been on the baby, not her and “how I was feelin’ after squeezin’ a damn bowlin’ ball out of my vagina.” In one scene, Jeff shoves a breast pump under Michelle’s shirt; they sit in silence as the machine whirs, as if sucking out her life force in order to feed the baby.
Jeff’s redemption arc begins in Act Two with the arrival of Gerald Lamott, a Washington Post reporter played by Victor Williams who is hoping to revitalize his portfolio with a headline-catching story when he learns about Jeff’s situation from a Facebook post. Gerald also happens to be Black. Obsessed with understanding the hapless would-be white supremacist, he and his skeptical daughter Chris, played by Amber Reauchean Williams, hop in the car and drive to Sharpsburg.
In many ways, Gerald functions as the voice of the playwright. He is a Black man extending compassion to a white man with a dog named N——, when many others in his place would rather laugh at Jeff’s misfortune. Even when he catches Jeff in a jumble of his own lies and an unthinkable discovery is made, Gerald remains steadfast to “the power of understanding.” On the car ride home, he tries to explain the logic of his actions by referencing I Am Legend, the post-apocalyptic zombie thriller in which Will Smith figures out a way to turn zombies back into humans.
“If it were you who turned rabid and violent and lost your humanity,” Gerald says to his daughter, “I hope that someone would have the heart to capture you and cure you. I hope that they could work past the urge to blow your head off and see that you were still human. That’s the point.”
Amerikin is a play that never takes itself too seriously, and yet the themes it explores are some of the most consequential: race, belonging, and the lengths one is willing to go to protect their family. Confronting our fears can be an ugly and painful process, Hutchinson seems to be saying, but perhaps it’s worth the compassion and understanding that’s waiting for us on the other side.
Amerikin | 2hrs. One intermission. | 59E59 Theaters | 59 East 59th Street | 646-892-7999| Buy Tickets Here
