American Son is the first collaborative partnership between Bluegrass Theatre Guild, of Frankfort, and  Message Theater, Lexington (produced by Patrick Mitchell, directed by Shawn Reaves).

NOTE: Tickets on this site (Yapsody) are for the Apr 21-23 run of American Son in FRANKFORT at Kentucky State University, Bradford Hall.  (If you are looking for tickets to our production in Lexington, Apr 14-16, please visit www.lexingtonky.gov/black-box-theatre

SYNOPSIS ~ An estranged bi-racial couple must confront their feelings about race and bias after their son is detained by local police following a traffic stop incident. Their disparate histories and backgrounds inform their assumptions as they try to find out what happened to their son.  At 4:00 AM in a Miami police station, all they know is, “There was an incident. We don’t know what. The car was stopped and there is a pending investigation.”

From the New York Times review: “American Son, by Christopher Demos-Brown, is part of a wave of new plays that consider the vulnerability of young black men in their dealings with the police… The style here is neither surreal nor poetic; it’s ticktock realism, deployed in real time. And the focus is not on the young men or the police but on the parents caught in between.”