A near-capacity audience at Friday's opening night of Chicken & Biscuits in the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's Octagon Theatre frequently became the de facto congregation at an African-American family's funeral service for Rev. Bernard Jenkins, shouting "Amen" and "Hallelujah" on cue, and surging to their feet in a rousing ovation at the end of the performance.
An entertainingly infectious comedy-with-a-message, playwright Douglas Lyons's Chicken & Biscuits became one of the most frequently performed plays in the USA soon after its 2021 Broadway debut.
And though there are so many familiar tropes [family secrets, feuding siblings, rebellious teenagers, a gay interracial couple, et al. that we've seen via Tyler Perry and others], and the big surprise is amply signaled from the start, there is some freshness to Lyons's script; its success rests on the director and acting company who at ASF deliver the goods in non-stop rollicking style for about two hours.
The eight member acting ensemble -- Tristan Andre, Rosalind Brown, Tea Guarino, Ethan Jack Haberfield, Tracy Conyer Lee, Krystel Lucas, A. C. Smith, AhDream Smith -- are directed with flair by Ron Himes, who keeps the energy high as they engage in preposterous antics of a family grounded by love that isn't always their top priority...as one character remarks: "Family is a loaded word."
People ought to be on their best behavior at a funeral, especially honoring a man who meant so much to so many, and whose shoes as head of a family and pastor of a church will be hard to fill. But best behavior is challenging to almost every character. -- Lyons takes most of Act I with lengthy expositions to establish individual character traits and their relationships to one another [we get to know them pretty well, and look forward to each comic conflict], so when it comes time for each of the principals to deliver testimony to their father, grandfather, father-in-law, prospective in-law, each one tops the other in a hilarious "throw down" sequence. -- And when the surprise comes, Act II serves to unravel everything and bring it to a satisfying conclusion.
To their credit, the ensemble's exaggerated behavior is aways grounded in truthfulness, and no matter how much we might laugh when they're at each others' throats, there's a sense that this "family" truly love one another, are willing to learn from seeing things through other people's perspectives, and forgive one another so they can truly celebrate what it means to be a family.
Enjoy the ride.
