All-star cast and strong direction bring to life a searing portrait of America
Irony is the foundation for the plot of Amerikin — a story about a would-be white supremacist whose membership in a KKK-ish group in Maryland is thwarted by the results of a DNA test showing some African ancestry.
The regional premiere of Chisa Hutchinson’s 2022 play, which just opened at Denver’s Curious Theatre, is a grand slam on every level. It’s a great script, and director Jada Suzanne Dixon, in her first season as the theatre’s artistic director, assembled an extraordinary cast of Curious regulars to portray a Trump-era tragedy that sizzles and sparks with topical relevance.
The lineup is a who’s-who of some of my favorite Colorado actors, starting with Sean Scrutchins as Jeff Browning — a hapless new dad who thinks joining the Knights group will help ensure security for his new family. The actor was last seen on the Curious stage in Heroes of the Fourth Turning last fall in a memorable performance also exploring Trumpy America. Here, he’s front and center as a poster child for the low-information voter with a dog named (N-word), the town tramp for a wife and a shithole little home in Sharpsburg, Maryland that becomes his prison after his would-be white supremacist buddies burn a cross on his front lawn.
Nice.
Playing his bestie, Poot, is Brian Landis Folkins, who’s returning to the stage after a three-year stint working on film and TV projects. Folkins brings his A-game here as townie who’s managed to straddle the line between Trumpy and normal. A computer guy who makes his living hacking into email and social accounts on behalf of suspicious spouses, he agrees to doctor the DNA results to expunge the damning information.
What could go wrong?
The representative for the Knights is Dylan, convincingly played by Michael McNeill as the guy who drank all the Kool Aid and is eager to add a fresh recruit to the apparently thinning ranks of the group. Some of the best laughs happen in the opening scene with Jeff, Dylan and Poot toasting the newborn and dishing up all manner of redneck testosterone.
Meanwhile, Jeff is trying to manage his fragile relationship with his wife, Michelle (Candance Joice), who we learn was the homewrecker who busted up Jeff’s relations with nurse-next-door Alma (Karen Slack). Michelle is suffering not only from the world’s worst case of post-partum depression but the growing awareness that she wasn’t cut out to be a mom and that her husband likely doesn’t much care for her.
Going from depressed to really depressed to super depressed doesn’t give Michelle’s character a great amount of arc, but Joice brings her fully to life as a tragic figure who knows a trap when she sees one. The fact that Alma is right next door is only salt in her wounds, and the enmity between the two women is yet another conflict point among many whirling around poor Jeff.
Slack, as always, is tremendous, playing Alma as a voice of sanity who’s also a passenger on the crazy train of her Trumpy town. In the end, it’s her and Poot alone on stage contemplating the shit-show they’ve just been through — fellow travelers who somehow managed to stay above the hateful fray endemic to so much of today’s rural America.
Red meets blue
Act Two opens in the D.C. home of Gerald Lamott, a Washington Post reporter, and his daughter Chris. She’s reading to him a Facebook post Alma wrote about Jeff’s situation and Gerald seizes on it immediately as a story well worth pursuing. Chris is studying journalism and, despite Dad’s concern about two Black people showing up in that neck of the woods, convinces him to take her along to help and observe.
Cajardo Lindsey comes to the role of Gerald with the 50/50 blend of skepticism and curiosity of any good journalist, and he manages the conflict between personal and professional beliefs with great skill. As despicable as Gerald might view the goings-on in 2017 Sharpsburg, he’s trying to teach Chris the value of objectivity and empathy to get to the meat of the story.
As the whip-smart, wise-cracking teenager, Fountaine is funny as hell, but her main purpose is to represent those of us who would quickly dismiss the Jeffs of the world as unworthy of any sympathy or understanding. I’ve seen Fountaine in half-a-dozen shows over the past few years in a wide variety of roles, and she’s just one of those enormous talents who delivers every time. She was a key figure in last year’s boffo rep trio at the Arvada Center, including a hilarious and high-energy performance as twins in The Liar. Here, she effortlessly slips into the role of a precocious teenager who learns quickly.
Amerikin is staged on a multi-level, flexible set shrewdly designed by Marka Henry and well lit by Haley Hartmann. Like all Curious productions, there are plenty of additional touches like original music and intriguing sound design by Max Silverman, a pretty realistic baby and spot-on costumes by Madison Booth.
It’s all in service to a script that comes across more like something written by an insider who got out of some hate group but was in fact created by a Black woman with a keen ear and sharp eye for the folks on the other side of the tracks. It’s not as much of a message play as some of Curious’s past productions, but it gets its points across primarily by plopping us in the middle of the action to let us see the world from several different perspectives.
It may only be mid-March, but so far Amerikin is the best thing I’ve seen on stage this year.
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