Amerikin – 27 March 2025

There’s a strong push from civil rights advocates to acknowledge that everyone is human and therefore equal. Right from the get-go, Amerikin challenges this notion by confronting us with the one group we don’t like to think of as equally human: white supremacists. We spend the first act getting to know the white members of our cast of characters: Jeff (Daniel Abeles), the proud father of a newborn infant and his wife Michelle (Molly Carden) who finds the infant revolting and is in  serious state of post partum depression, his friends Dylan (Luke Robertson) who personally recommends Jeff for the Knights and Poot (Tobias Segal) who tries to fit in but isn’t really on board with white supremacy (having loved a Black girl once), and Jeff’s former-lover-turned-neighbor Alma (Andrea Syglowski) who is deeply human, albeit equally ignorant when it comes to communities outside of her own. In the first half of the show, we see Jeff as what most would describe as “a good guy” apply to join the Knights and then find out that he has African heritage in his DNA. He enlists Poot to photoshop his test results, but the Knights find out, burn a cross on his lawn, send a brick through his window, and persecute him. In act two, an African American journalist named Gerald (Victor Williams) and his daughter, Chris (Amber Reauchean Williams) come deep into Trump country to interview Jeff in order to run a story on how the persecutors become the persecuted.

Aesthetically, act one is deeply grounded in realism in terms of scenic (Christopher Swader/Jeff Swader) and lighting (Carolina Ortiz Herrara) elements, which was good, because a lot of audiences in more liberal parts of America can’t believe that this is anyone’s reality. In particular, each individual perspective was shown as very unique—in its own spectrum, a nuanced diversity in beliefs among white supremacists and the ultra right wing that defies the pervasive belief in a black-and-white mob mentality that liberals frequently feel they are up against. These characters believe in abortion. They believe in science. They believe in peace so strongly that they won’t even be honest with each other. Jeff isn’t perpetrating any kind of domestic abuse and takes on the tasks Michelle doesn’t want to with no inherent push back from any kind of toxic masculinity. He may not love her, but he also doesn’t hit her or hurt her or yell at her or blame her. When she commits suicide offstage in the space between act one and act two, it is her own unhappiness that she drowns in; Jeff is genuinely trying to make the best of it and willing to shoulder responsibility for parenting his infant. These characters are also capable of learning—where they are on the spectrum of white supremacy shifts and changes throughout the show.

Enter the Black journalists. Act two is not linear like act one, because protagonist Jeff Browning is not processing his life story in a linear way. As he begins to tell the journalists the story of his life, rather than hear him recount it, we see it take place in other parts of the set, with aesthetic lighting grounding us not only in which moments are taking place in the present and which in the past, but also subtly spotlighting who is watching. Gerald gets many moments where he shuts down his daughter’s belief that she’s heard enough to know how to feel about Jeff. Her initial vibe check makes her feel sorry for him, but as Gerald’s questioning uncovers more and more facts, Chris feels less and less on board with Jeff actually being a good man worthy of their help. Along the way, Gerald teaches Chris to re-examine where her gaze is coming from. What Jeff is recounting may be revolting, but he is recounting it to two educated Black journalists in his living room. Before the tenor of this encounter is irrevocably changed by the discovery of Michelle’s corpse, which Jeff springs into action to protect by aiming a gun at Chris, who Gerald springs into action to protect, many lessons are learned and internalized by many people, whose lives are altered by seeing each other’s humanity despite a life of being revolted by a particular subset of people. They’ve never confronted how much nuance exists in these people who are lumped together based on where they were raised and what they were taught, not who they can be.

There’s an incredible amount of nuance, depth, and breadth to Amerikin, and the title evokes an ominous reference to “better kin than kind”. In this story, everyone genuinely tries to be kind, or at least polite. It inspires hope by calling out the hypocrisy of dehumanizing those who you perceive as dehumanizing you. There’s a complexity to being human that makes even the most revolting people deserving of what the character of Gerald calls, “solidarity.” I hope that America can do what Gerald does in this story—uncover the facts behind the emotions and only take action when genuinely threatened. Even after, he forgives, and gets Jeff committed to a psych ward rather than vying for a prison sentence. Right now, I’m not sure enough Americans would really take the time to sit down and talk to people they already know that they hate. Yet Amerikin clings to a hope that experience and understanding are still enough to change the mind, the heart, and the world.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Berlin Rosen.