STAGE: Immediate Family

We very much enjoyed Paul Oakley Stovall's dramedy "Immediate Family", now playing at the Mark Taper. A lively romp on the themes of race, sexuality, and religion awaits when an impending wedding brings four black siblings back to the family home, and one of the brothers, Jesse, has a surprise for the family: a Swedish boyfriend. Bryan Terrell Clark does a great job playing Jesse's difficulty in figuring out just how to break the news to his family. All of false starts, awkward hinting, and procrastination are so genuine and so familiar to those of us who have lived it. The parents in this family are deceased, but the father's portrait prominent in the living room is a constant reminder of what he, a preacher and local leader through the civil rights era, stood for. The eldest sister Evy (Shanesia Davis), an English teacher, very much feels her father's legacy, and has her students writing essays about black heroes. But certain heroes, like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, or Bayard Rustin, are conspicuously absent from her list. A much more liberal half-sister (oops, it seems Daddy had another child with someone other than his wife) breezes in from Europe, adding some spice to the stew. And the poor boyfriend Kristian (Mark Jude Sullivan) arrives late in the proceedings to find out that some members of the family think that he's just the wedding photographer. Or at least they pretend to. There is a great scene near the end where most of the others storm out after an emotional explosion, leaving Evy and Kristian alone together. After an awkward silence, they start to speak, not facing each other, not quite ready to face each other, but speaking from the heart and knowing the other is listening. A powerful scene in an engaging play. (And great direction by Phylicia Rashad.) While I can't speak to the racial element from my own experience, I can speak as a gay man who married into a more conservative small-town religious family, and much of this drama really rings true. After the play, we were flashing back to our own experience of coming home to meet the family, and family members' grappling to come to terms. As all good drama does, this play takes a very specific experience and tells its truth in a way that many will connect with.