On October 29, Kerry Washington, Steven Pasquale, and director Kenny Leon joined a talkback discussion moderated by Jocelyn Prince following The Landmark screening event of American Son.
The Broadway play American Son—which premiered at Booth Theater in NYC and closed in January 2019–will be available on Netflix starting November 1.
As the play transitioned from stage to screen, there were minimal changes from the original scope. For instance, the set stayed the same and the overall structure was driven by the dialogue.
Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale play Kendra and Scott, the parents of their son Jamal, who has been missing for hours. In just 90 minutes of acute dialogue and micro-aggressive language, viewers adopt their son, and his falling storyline lands itself into the laps of those watching. Through the intimacy of the scenes, the presence of racial prejudice is felt even in his absence.
Immediately following the screening, the moderator asked viewers to describe their reaction to the film. Jocelyn Prince prompted the audience to discuss solutions and here’s what Kerry Washington had to say:
Kerry Washington: “There’s one thing I want to invite us all to remember and that’s that these folks are employees of the state, which means that they work for us. We pay their salary. Every time we get a check, there’s money taken away for taxes that pays their salary, so we are part of the system. Whether we like it or not, but what that means is that we are terrible bosses if we don’t supervise our employees. We have to tell them how we feel and the same thing goes for our representatives in D.C. These guys walking around in suits on Capitol Hill, they’re not our bosses, they work for us, but if we don’t hold them accountable, if we don’t vote, if we don’t volunteer, if we don’t use our voices then they get to make decisions for their own best interest and not for ours. So we don’t even have to infiltrate the system, we’re in the system. We have to know our power and use our voices. I guarantee every single person in this room has something to offer. It might be five dollars a month, you might say to me, ‘I can’t afford to give any money,’ so it might be rides to the polls because maybe you have a car. Maybe you can donate your time and volunteer in knocking on doors. There’s something that you have to give. Maybe your gift is baking, so you bake a cake, you take it down to the volunteer office to encourage folks there that are working 16-hour days to try to protect our democracy. You have a gift, whoever you are, you have something to give. You don’t have to be Kerry Washington to make a difference. All you have to be is you. That’s what democracy looks like, so you figure out what your gift is and you figure out who needs it. The other thing to remember when we’re filled with all of this pain is that we actually don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We don’t have to build the organizations to make the change. People are in the trenches every day working on these issues. They just need us to support them. We’re not on our own.”
On the decision to join the production…
Kenny Leon: “For me, it was how Christopher Demos-Brown told the story. He could have made the cop white and then I think if you do that, you minimize the conversation… So he told it in a much broader way. He never let us, and I was adamant about this for the film… I didn’t want you to see Jamal. Because once you see Jamal, it’s like, oh, that’s that black kid or that white kid. And I was like no, let Jamal be everybody’s kid. What if this happened to your kid? And I’m so proud that we’re doing it with Netflix because I think that’s the way to broaden this conversation.”
Steven Pasquale: “When this president was elected, like most of us, I was so [enraged] for months that when this play came to me, it really satisfied a need to work on something that feels important because history is told by our warriors and our leaders and our storytellers, and when our warriors report to leaders who are corrupt, it falls on the storytellers to hold the mirror up to us to show us what we are. And this felt important to me and of course Kerry Washington, who doesn’t want to be around Kerry Washington?”
Kerry Washington: “To me the play honors our experience as black parents, it allows us to see ourselves and to know that our fear, our anxiety is justified, that our desire to do a dance around the safety of our children is a challenging one but one that brings great reward because of the beautiful blessings that our black children are to us. And yet in the choice to be a black parent is the inherent quality of vulnerability. And that’s true for all parents. All parents are vulnerable—once they’re outside of you, you can no longer control what they eat and what they hear and where they go, but when you are a parent of a black child there are systems in place that are invested in the demonization and destruction of your child and so it is so much more complicated and difficult. So I think the desire to honor what it means to parent black children, and I say it that way rather than say what it means to be a black parent because I think it’s so important that Scott’s character is white…and I think one of the things that Steven does so beautifully in the film and in the play is that he comes in with all this entitlement swagger. He comes in like I’m a white man, I know I’m going to get what I want, I got an FBI badge, I represent the power, I’m going to let you talk trash about my wife and it can be our joke cause we’re white men. He’s got all of that and by the end of the play because he is the parent of a black child, none of it matters. So that dynamic to me was so important, to reflect and honor what it means to parent a black child and also to allow other people who don’t have the gift and blessing of parenting black children, because it is fundamentally that, a window into the complexity of what we go through. How we live, how we think, what we’re afraid of. That this isn’t our imagination. Drop into the nightmare of it for a night with us. I dare you to spend 90 minutes walking in Kendra’s shoes and then tell us that we’re overreacting.”
