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Kerry Washington stars in Broadway's thoughtful, tension-filled American Son: EW review

It’s the middle of rainy night when a woman notices her 18-year-old son’s car is not in their driveway. She calls the police to report him missing and learns the car has been stopped in an unspecified incident. When the play opens, the woman, Kendra Ellis-Connor (Kerry Washington), is alone in the waiting room of a Miami police station, coiled in a sterile chair, radiating fear of the worst. Soon she will encounter a young officer (Jeremy Jordan) whose first order of business is to get information about her son, Jamal, who is days away from graduating high school. Does he have a street name? Prior arrests? Gold teeth? Scars? “Does he get those whachacallit… keloids?” She snaps her responses (no to all of the above, save for a small scar from a childhood surgery), her offense at his casual racism spiking from her baseline of panic. When the cop, a parent himself, tells her he understands how she feels, she challenges him: “Do you have a black son?” “Wow… We’re really gonna go there