By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com
A black mother. A white father. A son who has been in a car accident. A police officer who is unwilling to give clear information.
Starting this week at The Switch Theatre, 10029 E. 126th St., Fishers, Carmel Community Players (CCP) is staging a 90-minute no-intermission drama titled American Son that plays out in real time. It is being billed as, “A gripping tale of two parents caught in our national divide, with their worst fears hanging in the balance.”
The Reporter spoke with CCP Director Bradley Allan Lowe about what audiences can expect in this play, which stages Aug. 8 to 17.
“A mom in the middle of the night realizes her son isn’t home, so she contacts the authorities, and the police say that his car has been in a ‘situation,’” Lowe said.
Unable to get more information, she goes to the police station, but is only given non-answers.
“It kind of unlocks the door on just what it’s like to be a mom,” Lowe said. “Then you layer in the fact that she has a black son. So there’s that conversation of police and race, but it also turns out that her husband is white so there’s a conversation between the two of them that’s about the disconnect. The father is actually an FBI agent, so he is the cops, which adds to the discussion of where your bias lies.”
Lowe discovered this play in 2020, during the height of the pandemic.
“I was directing a different show at CCP when the pandemic hit,” Lowe told The Reporter. “We were dealing with the pandemic, and we were dealing with the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, and I was dealing with a lot of large personal things in my life. I felt like we were all very numb.”
Lowe said this is a better time to stage this story for a variety of reasons.
“Five years later, on a personal note, I have since become a parent of a teenager,” Lowe said. “I have custody of my nephew, so it’s a lot more personal now. I don’t think we’re quite as numb, being outside of the pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement is not at its height as it was in 2020. It’s definitely a heavier show now.”
One of Lowe’s choices to pull the audience into that heaviness and rising tension across the approximately 90-minute runtime necessitated using microphones for all four actors.
“I had this epiphany for the show where I was like, ‘As the story intensifies – because it does have a lot of tension built into it – I wanted to replicate that tension with the rain sound effects. We’ll have the actors actually mic’d. Where a lot of plays don’t mic their actors, we chose to mic them so that we can have that background rain intensify as the story goes on.”
While this is a tense drama handling very heavy topics, Lowe said it is something a very wide audience can connect with.
“It’s a really cool story,” Lowe said. “At the end of the day, it’s a story about a mom just being worried about her child. The other layers, while very important and visited very heavily throughout the story, are also relevant, but I think it’s very relatable. Just to be the parent of a teenager and what it’s like to not have that control, and not have answers, and have other people have that information that they aren’t willing to give you – that’s the core.”
According to Lowe, this play has never been staged in Indiana. You can be among the first audiences to see it live in the Hoosier State.
American Son stages at The Switch Theatre, 10029 E. 126th St., Fishers, from Aug. 8 to 17. Go to carmelplayers.org/tickets or call (317) 815-9387 for tickets.