Review: Immediate Family at Booth Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

Anyone who saw the fine Theatre Charlotte production of Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly this past spring can be forgiven if they feel a vague sense of déjà-vu at Booth Playhouse, where a revival of Paul Oakley Stovall’s Immediate Family has been launched with ultra upscale production values by Blumenthal Arts.

Both of these family dramadies are hiding a long-ago infidelity that led to left-out stepsisters, both gatherings may shortly involve two impending marriages, and both center around prosperous Black families about to be surprised by the race of their prospective in-laws. In both, there’s a brother on the brink of publishing or finishing his first novel – and talk of ordering in Chinese food.

Before we discover any of this at Booth Playhouse, there’s the set design of Immediate Family. It is almost the mirror image of the three productions of Stick Fly that I’ve seen on Broadway in 2012, at Actor’s Theatre in 2015, and at the Queens Road barn this May – with stage right and stage left reversed. Both plays were initially presented in Chicago, Diamond’s in 2006 and Stovall’s in 2012.

While there is no blood relationship between Diamond and Stovall, there’s a definite family link between the two most famous exponents of their scripts. As the left-out stepsister in the Broadway production of Stick Fly, Condola Rashad became a breakout star in 2012, and her two-time Tony Award-winning mom, Phylicia Rashad, is now directing Immediate Family for the third time (previously at the Mark Taper Forum in 2015 and at the Goodman Theatre in 2012).

Chicago, LA, and Charlotte. We’re in good company, for Rashad has been on the QC scene tweaking the production while Stovall is also in the mix. The playwright, who was in the national tour of Hamilton as George Washington, was fine-tuning his script as the Blumenthal Arts extravaganza was previewing and gathering media publicity, already extended to September 7 before its official opening. In multiple ways, this run is upsizing the norms of locally-produced theatre.

Previews? Press events? Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night performances? It’s happening. We haven’t seen this much buzz over a local attraction at Booth Playhouse since Charlotte Repertory Theatre was at the height of its ambitions in 2003. Rep planned to take its production of The Miracle Worker, starring Hilary Swank,to Broadway.

Never mind the buzz and, if you’re still pondering Stick Fly, don’t worry about the déjà-vu. Immediate Family has its own story to tell, turbocharged with one big issue that Diamond never addressed.

Still, I’d say that Stovall should definitely bulk up his script – and strengthen his exposition – if he plans to fulfill his Broadway aspirations. For her part, Rashad needs to get more power and sharpness from key players.

All of this proves easier for me to summarize than it was for a press night audience to see and hear. In real time, determining how Evy is related to Tony takes way more time than it should, partly because Evy is bossy – and starchy – enough in the opening scene with Tony to be his mom. Or evil stepmother. And since the fancy Blumenthal Arts playbill departs from the playwright’s practice of listing his characters in order of appearance, you may wind up confusing Ronnie and Evy until intermission. Or beyond.

There are no strangers onstage until after intermission, so everybody in Immediate Family already knows everyone else – as the title implies. There is a next-door neighbor, described as the Bryants’ “play sister” in the script, who could catch up with returning family and new arrivals. To his credit, Stovall introduces her early on in the second scene, conveniently toting in trays of food that she’s cooked up for the rehearsal dinner just as Jesse arrives.

They greet each other loudly enough: “…BLACK FAGGOT!” “…LESBIAN!” But the actors playing Jesse and Nina, Elijah Jones and Kai Almeda Heath, don’t speak nearly as loudly or clearly afterwards, trimming off too much and making it too real for me to consistently understand them in Row H. When Jones and Heath cruised through the siblings’ birth order and legitimacy, it was a blur.

As the inside outsider, Nina becomes a juicy role, so it was a shame that Heath zipped through so many of her sassy one-liners so unintelligibly. That’s a problem that Rashad may have already fixed.

But the more consequential bulking up of the action is unfinished work that only Stovall can do. With their loud greetings after Evy’s first exit, Nina and Jesse foreshadow the big issue that the Bryants will confront before the night is done, one that Stick Fly never tackled. There’s a disconnect that Stovall will expose between the widespread homophobia in the African American community and the prominent roles that gays have played in their cultural heritage.

He needs to do it more often and more aggressively. Ronnie and Evy, who will tangle more heatedly in Act 2, sideswipe the issue of homophobia before intermission. Preparing to teach a summer school class to young Blacks, Evy plans to blow their hip-hop TikTok minds by introducing them to the pillars of their heritage, one inspiring biography at a time.

Malcolm X, MLK, Medgar Evers, Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, Sojourner Truth, and Booker T. Washington are already written up. So Evy wants Jesse, the best writer in the family, to help her fill out her gallery of 50 Black heroes by completing bios of Rosa Parks, the Obamas, and five more of his choosing.

Ronnie asks for a look at Evy’s list. She scrutinizes the list closely. Where are Langston Hughes and Billy Strayhorn? It’s mostly a list of political figures, Evy responds. And what about Bayard Rustin, who refused to give up his bus seat 10 years before Rosa Parks, and organized the storied 1963 March on Washington?

Cornered, Evy answers frankly that Rustin was arrested on “morals charges” several times. We don’t learn until deep into Act 2 that Evy has problems saying “gay” out loud.

But Ronny can. In fact, she may have undergone a sexuality makeover while Stovall was expanding his original one-act play into its present form. Instead of calling her stepsister on her homophobia then and there, she waits until later to lobby Jesse into sneaking in bios not only of Rustin but also of Langston Hughes, Barbara Jordon, Alice Walker, and Angela Davis.

Jesse deflects when confronted with these gays – only fessing up when Ronnie plays her trump card. Lorraine Hansberry! Evy would kill him, Jesse blurts out: perfectly mirroring Stovall’s own reluctance to confront the issue head-on.

Let’s say it plain. Paul, you’re in the New South now in 2025. Bring it, bro!

I say this all the more boldly because Stovall is already on the record saying that he wants to.

Thanks to Rashad’s casting, there’s plenty more firepower available for both Evy and Ronnie to turn up the heat at the Booth. We love hating Evy almost from the moment the lights come up with all the haughtiness, bossiness, and preacher’s-daughter righteousness that Christina Sajous lavishes upon her. Whether plotting to waken her summer school students or sitting down to a game of bid whist, this is one serious woman. The slow burn she does at the card table is beautifully modulated and explosive.

As hinted earlier, it’s Britney Coleman as Ronnie who gets shortchanged on chances to turn up her fire – though you won’t be at all disappointed when Coleman reaches her boiling point. Not only does Ronnie miss out on a full-frontal assault on Evy’s homophobic pantheon of Black icons, but Coleman doesn’t really get a chance to build grandly to her destructive drunkenness in Act 2. It kind of creeps up suddenly, notwithstanding Stovall’s foreshadowing in Act 1.

Less subtlety, and maybe some comical misdirection, would work better. When Stovall does detonate his denouement, albeit without sufficient build, the effect and the efficiency of his work are breathtaking.

Chemistry between the Bryant brothers could hardly be better. The scene where Jones “comes out” to Tony is simply a gem, with Freddie Fulton as fresh-mouthed to his elder brother as he was to Evy. But Tony doesn’t always come off as the carefree hipster in the family. When Jesse’s partner of three years, Kristian, not only reveals himself as a man but a white man, Fulton aligns with Evy in his disapproval – drawing some of the flak reserved exclusively for her until then.

Andy Mientus’s arrival early after intermission was therefore a litmus test of sorts. Those in the press night audience who gasped at Kristian’s Svedish vhiteness obviously hadn’t opened their playbills and scanned the cast photos. I kinda envied their surprise. Jesse’s difficulties with Evy, specifically his ploy of passing Kris off as the wedding photographer, rightfully test the men’s relationship, so Mientus gets to show us some strength of character as well as wholesomeness.

But Stovall doesn’t stop there. There’s an unexpected late-night scene, one of his best, where Mientus and Sajous are all alone by the bookcase. Nicely done all around.