Tobias Segal and Daniel Abeles in Amerikin. Photo: Justin Swader

There’s a spectrum of white racism in Chisa Hutchinson’s Amerikin, from intentional, consciously articulated bigotry to casual, thoughtless hate, from the bystander who’s slightly uncomfortable with what’s going on around him but never speaks up about it to the broken person whose own damage bubbles out in hateful forms. Even the most thoughtful, empathetic white character, an emergency room nurse, makes allowances for others’ bigotry up until that bigot is someone she doesn’t like anyway—and then she’ll throw in a few misogynist insults while she’s at it. Set in Sharpsburg, Maryland, 2017, the play is full of white people whose lives are harder than they feel they ought to be, people desperate for community, people who voted for Trump and don’t even hate Black people, they just “don’t want them marryin’ our people or livin’ in our neighborhoods or takin’ our jobs.” So it’s only natural that some of them want the benefits of belonging to the World Knights–they may be white supremacists, but they support their members with shared childcare and access to the best jobs in town and help planning funerals. And they might shun a longtime friend whose Ancestry.com results came up a little different than he’d predicted–they might even burn a cross on his lawn–but what’s a little racist terrorism between neighbors?

Amerikin, presented by Primary Stages, covers a lot of ground in two hours, not only trying to portray the way this kind of baked-in racism feels from inside the community but also juxtaposing that with the vantage of two outsiders, Black journalists from Washington, DC. Still, while Hutchinson and director Jade King Carroll for the most part successfully evade the purely polemic, the piece often feels tame and reasoned given the physical and ideological violence at its core. Its characters seem to have a surprising amount of self-awareness and clarity of motive. Facts on the ground, of course, change for some of them, but Hutchinson doesn’t dig too deeply into the characters themselves; they tell us things about how they feel, but the play’s relationships don’t feel organic or rooted in those emotions. Carroll gets marvelous work out of her performers, but some of the actors feel like they’re going deeper than what’s on the page. The play, to me, felt most successful outside of the issues it’s examining head-on–a harrowing portrayal of post-partum depression; a surprisingly tender male friendship; the crushing economic anxiety of the post-industrial South–and that’s due largely to the compelling work of the actors. 

The play, at first, seems like a simple, realist story: Jeff Browning (Daniel Abeles) and his wife, Michelle (Molly Carden), are new parents. Their marriage didn’t start out on the best footing—Jeff’s ex, Alma (Andrea Syglowski), caught him cheating with Michelle and left him. (Alma is now the Brownings’ next-door-neighbor, provoking plenty of opportunities for both awkwardness and narrative convenience.) Michelle is hit hard with post-partum depression. Carden’s performance is so raw it’s painful to watch, and it’s even more painful to watch her greeted with incomprehension verging on exasperation by her husband. Abeles brings a surprising sweetness to Jeff, but that gentleness is reserved for his infant son and his best friend, Poot (Tobias Segal, whose facial expressions write his character an entire subtext).

Jeff may be more a “good guy with bad ideas” than a racist on deeply held principles–unlike his friend Dylan (Luke Robertson)–but he’s the kind of guy who’d name his black dog with a racial slur as a joke, and see no issue with shouting the name through the streets when the dog goes missing. He’s honest enough, when pressed, to admit he probably wouldn’t do it if he had any Black neighbors, but when Alma suggests he should be careful about what he teaches his son, Jeff laughs it off as a joke. Dylan and Poot nestle on either side of him, racist-spectrum wise—Dylan is a hard core member of the local white supremacist organization who brings Jeff a Confederate flag as a baby gift; he’s eager to induct Jeff into the White Knights once his DNA results come back. Poot doesn’t really agree with all that stuff, but he’s comfortable keeping his head down and keeping as many secrets as he needs to in order to fit in. 

But even for Dylan, the racism never feels as grounded or emotionally real as Michelle’s anguish or the wary affection between Alma and Jeff or Poot’s wistful reminiscence about a Black woman he once dated. (Segal, with one quick gesture when asked why he always had to go visit the woman in New York rather than her coming to Sharpsburg, says more about the way racism warps the community than all of Dylan’s Confederate-flag-bestowing and talk of ethnic purity.)  True, in some ways the casualness and lack of malice in Dylan’s statements makes them all the scarier, but he still comes off as jovial rather than menacing, even when he and his “brothers” turn to terrorizing Jeff after DNA results show that his ethnic makeup isn’t as white as it appears. And I didn’t really get a sense of how these three men, all raised in the same community and all friends, landed at such different spots. Dylan’s family has been in the Knights for generations, it seems, but what brings Jeff to be so eager to join and Poot so relieved to keep his distance? Then there’s Michelle, whose misery and shame about her misery are so palpable before Jeff’s DNA results that it feels like a retcon to attribute her emotional state to the “taint” of this new knowledge. She’s never liked Dylan, is annoyed that Jeff didn’t consult her before applying for the Knights, and seems more amused than glad that the women in that community are willing to socialize with her now.

In act 2 we add Washington Post reporter Gerald (Victor Williams) and his daughter, Chris (Amber Reauchean Williams), a journalist in training, and the structure of the piece grows more complex. (The contrast in Christopher Swader and Justin Swader’s set design between the brief glimpse we get of their house and the detailed, shabby domestic interior of Jeff and Michelle’s house is illuminating.) Seeing a hook to a story at the intersection of the political and the personal that might grab attention, Gerald shows up on Jeff’s doorstep with an offer of help, and of a chance to get his story told. It’s admittedly a satisfying twist to have the role usually played by a well-meaning “white savior” taken by two Black people with more financial and cultural capital than any of the Sharpsburg residents, but it’s a stretch to think that the increasingly beleaguered and desperate Jeff would let two Black strangers into his home after he’s nearly been firebombed out of town for potentially having one Black great-grandparent. 

And shifting the play from a depiction of action as it occurs to flashbacks of actions that happened between act 1 and act 2 lowers the stakes somehow. The play becomes about Jeff’s retrospective attempt to explain and justify his actions, only to be outmaneuvered by Gerald. But after Gerald allows Jeff to walk into his trap, and after the interview comes to a tragic end, Gerald is generous enough to write a story that finds common ground between himself and Jeff in their desire to protect their children. And while I recognize that in these trying times, it’s incumbent upon all of us to find empathy for our fellow humans even at their most misguided and wrong, but it feels too simplistic of Hutchinson to put that burden solely on Gerald and Chris–not to make that same request of Dylan. It goes unquestioned that Dylan immediately turns on his old friend; where’s his empathy? And what happens if the Black guy for once isn’t “the guy who ultimately figures out how to restore humanity,” as Gerald describes the role Will Smith plays in I Am Legend. It looks like Gerald is going there, when he starts to call Jeff out on his lies. But he ends up being the bigger person, and giving the audience an exit ramp for our own discomfort. 

I wanted to be more uncomfortable, honestly. I want to see the showdown between Dylan and Jeff more than I want to see Chris making polite conversation in a convenience store with Dylan. I want to see Michelle wrangling with her own hate. Amerikin is looking at a dynamic, and at people, that we need to interrogate in the theater, but it felt like Hutchinson and Carroll didn’t trust us to see the characters in their entirety without a “right-thinking” stand-in.