Review: A Black Journalist Interviews a Possible White Supremacist in Amerikin

Those who went to journalism school back in the day will surely remember one value many of its professors trumpeted: the aim for objectivity, of simply reporting facts to allow readers to draw their own conclusions.

Is it enough to be impartial, though, when it comes to speaking truth to power, especially when such powers actively amplify misinformation and try to return the United States to a regressive status quo? These days, it seems there’s a generational divide between old-school journalists who believe in gathering all sides of an issue and new ones who embrace a more overtly activist stance. The most interesting thing about Amerikin, the new Chisa Hutchinson play making its New York premiere via Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters, is the way it dramatizes the fine line between “fair and balanced” and “bothsidesism.”

That, however, doesn’t become apparent until the play’s second act. Hutchinson devotes the first to the travails of one Jeff Browning (Daniel Abeles). In an opening scene in which he addresses his newborn son, Jeff comes off as an oily prototype of a working-class American white guy: swearing in front of his kid, voicing his hope that he will grow up to become a Baltimore Ravens fan, making off-color jokes with his friend Poot (a scene-stealing Tobias Segal) when he visits him in the hospital.

Such impressions are reinforced in the next two scenes back at his home in Sharpsburg, Maryland. Not only does he have a runaway dog that he calls by the N-word, but he’s then seen hanging out with Poot and Dylan (Luke Robertson), downing beers and shooting the breeze even as his wife, Michelle (Molly Carden), deals with what initially appears to be an extreme case of postpartum depression.

The central drama of Amerikin develops when Jeff receives the results of an ancestry test and discovers that he has African blood. This endangers his candidacy to become a member of a white-supremacist organization called the World Knights, of which Dylan is a member. Out of desperation, he turns to Poot, a computer repairman who moonlights as a hacker on the side, asking him to doctor the ancestry results to erase the offending detail. Though the loyal Poot—who is marginally more racially progressive than his friends, thus why he refuses to join the World Knights himself—does what Jeff asks, somehow the original results get into the wrong hands. As a result, Jeff’s neighbors turn against him and burn a cross on his yard.

That’s when reporter Gerald Lamott (Victor Williams) and his daughter, Chris (Amber Reauchean Williams) enter the picture. Upon seeing a Facebook post from Jeff’s neighbor, a kindly nurse named Alma (Andrea Syglowski), about Jeff’s predicament, Gerald decides to interview him in what he regards as an attempt at empathy for the kind of person he would normally despise. Chris, herself an aspiring journalist, inevitably regards such an attempt with suspicion, enough that she insists on going along with him. Thus, the second act of Amerikin becomes something of a procedural, with Gerald and Chris interviewing Jeff to uncover the truth not only about how he got into this situation, but also about just how much of a white supremacist he actually is.

The twists and turns of its central mysteries are diverting enough, especially with director Jade King Carroll finding inventively fluid ways, with the aid of Carolina Ortiz Herrera’s lighting design, to weave past and present.

Richer characterizations might have made the revelations land with greater force, though. While Abeles shades his character with notes of genuine human warmth, even he can’t quite shake off the sense of a character being written according to the dictates of a plot and Hutchinson’s larger points. Same for his Black counterpart, Gerald: His apparent idealism about the power of journalism to bridge social divides beggars belief coming from a seasoned journalist—a contradiction that Williams, for all his effortless authority, can’t reconcile.

Nevertheless, as an act of provocation, Amerikin is certainly bound to start interesting conversations. To her credit, Hutchinson doesn’t come down on either side of the impartiality-versus-activism-in-journalism debate. As the play’s title cleverly suggests, Black or white, journalist or civilian, we’re all still forced to coexist and reckon with each other in this vast, divided country of ours.