Race Relations in Tiny Maryland Town at Center of Playwright Chisa Hutchinson’s Latest, ‘Amerikin’
After one character who wants to join a white supremacist group takes a required ancestry test and gets some surprising results, ‘Amerikin’ traces the fallout, in which four other characters play substantial roles.
While I’m not sure if the tiny town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, has a tourism or public relations department, if so it should be on high alert: That is where a celebrated playwright, Chisa Hutchinson, has set her latest work, “Amerikin,” and her portrait is not flattering, to say the least.
The first citizen we meet in Ms. Hutchinson’s Sharpsburg — after an opening dose of Lindsay Jones’s incidental music, basically a parody of classic Southern rock — is Jeff Browning, a white man in early middle age who never met a sentence he couldn’t mangle grammatically. Jeff is a new father, and he also has a dog; his son and pet are respectively named Hunter and … well, an epithet that rhymes with “bigger.”
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