Review: Immediate Family and the Tyranny of Older Siblings

What do we owe our siblings? Does shared DNA necessarily bind us in a lifelong relationship? And if so, what does that relationship entail? What can brothers and sisters reasonably expect of one another in a purportedly free country?

My brain was left swimming in a sea of such questions after viewing Paul Oakley Stovall’s Immediate Family, now playing at Blumenthal’s Booth Theatre (previous iterations played at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre over a decade ago). A hearty family dramedy punctuated by audience laughs and gasps, it vibrates with comedic and dramatic tension under Phylicia Rashad’s finely calibrated direction, inviting us into the inner circle of a Black American family still holding it together—barely.

The Rev. Jesse Bryant and wife have shuffled off this mortal coil, leaving their eldest daughter, Evy (Christina Sajous), the de facto head of the family. It’s to her well-appointed Chicago townhouse (lovely scenic design by Paul Tate dePoo III) that the Bryant siblings return to celebrate the marriage of their little brother Tony (Freddie Fulton, charmingly broish). That includes half-sister Ronnie (Britney Coleman), who lives in Brussels where she works as a painter, and with whom Evy has long had a strained relationship.

“You big Black faggot” is how lesbian best friend Nina (the unfailingly hilarious Kai Almeda Heath) warmly greets her “play brother,” Jesse Jr. (Elijah Jones), who is indeed all three of those things—not that his sexuality is something he feels comfortable discussing with his hetero siblings, especially not Evy. But they’re going to have to discuss it eventually, because guess who’s coming to dinner …

It’s Jesse’s boyfriend Kristian (Andy Mientus), who is not just white, but ultra-white: Swedish. (The audience at the Booth, which was roughly half Black the night I attended, audibly heralded the arrival of this central conflict, proving that Stovall is still on to something over a decade after he initially penned this play.)  A talented professional photographer, he has agreed to shoot the wedding as a favor. But as far as Evy is concerned, he’s just the photographer and she’s not sure why he has shown up bearing gifts to her home the night before the rehearsal dinner, a time she wants reserved for immediate family. How Nina falls under this category is one of those arbitrary distinctions that power declines to explain, because it doesn’t need to.

Sajous’s unflinching performance is the rock on which this drama is built. A teacher who obviously exerts dictatorial control over her classroom, she has conspicuously excluded Langston Hughes and Bayard Rustin from her lesson plan on Black leaders. She firmly believes it is the responsibility of Black Americans, as a besieged minority, to multiply rather than just be fruitful—and that Jesse can still turn away from what she sees as a choice. Kristian’s rage is natural when he discovers how little Jesse has done to prepare his family for this introduction, but Sajous makes us understand in our guts why he stayed quiet.

So does Jones, who delivers a sympathetic performance as a man stuck between a rock and a hard place. He’s not alone in his cowardice. For much of the play Coleman’s fiery, scotch-fueled Ronnie (who arrives accompanied by the unmistakable click-clink-clink of bottles from the duty free) is the only sibling willing to stand up to Evy, perhaps only because she’s always been an outsider. The power dynamics that siblings establish in childhood, which often stubbornly persist into adulthood, do not apply to her. But whereas she has a history with this family, Kristian is a total outsider keen to stay on his best behavior. With red cheeks and bitten tongue, Mientus gives an extremely relatable performance as this Swedish fish out of water.

Rashad’s well-paced production immerses the audience in the Bryant family, establishing distinct relationships between individual siblings: the queer shade shared by Jesse and Nina, the fraternal affection of Jesse and Tony. Levi J. Wilkins’s subtly suggestive lighting design and Mikaal Sulaiman’s jazz-inflected sound further support a production that is as solid as it is watchable—a perfect cocktail of comedy and drama.  Family secrets come to light and old scabs are picked over the course of two hours, 20 minutes of laugh-out-loud, edge-of-our-seats theater.

This play about a well-to-do Chicago Black family confronting the long-ignored obvious is bound to draw comparisons to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose, winner of this year’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize, which was also directed by Rashad. But Stovall persuasively shows that the preservation of a family brand is not the only reason we exert tyrannical power over the people we claim to love the most. Which once again prompts the question: Why do we, a free people, subject ourselves to that kind of domination? Answers may vary, but Immediate Family proves an excellent way to start the discussion.