American Son Playwright Christopher Demos-Brown on Tackling Big Issues and Attracting Bold Names with His Broadway Debut

Christopher Demos-Brown is a Miami trial lawyer who is now a Broadway playwright with a starry production and a Tony-winning director, but don’t call the American Son scribe an overnight sensation.

“I wanted to be an actor in the worst way, and I was an actor in the worst way, unfortunately,” the playwright jokes on the new episode of Broadway.com's Front Row. His interest in acting blossomed into writing—honing his skills with an improvisational theater company. “I took my first crack at a full-length stage play about sixteen or seventeen years ago and have continued writing ever since.” American Son marks Demos-Brown’s eighth full-length play—and he has written two more plays since he finished it. “[Writing] is something that has evolved over the long span of my life,” he says.

His day job informs his work: “Trial law is inherently adversarial in the American legal system,” says Demos-Brown, “and good drama involves conflict. As a trial lawyer, you read a lot of transcripts after hearing people speak, so you see how words translate to a page, which is also a helpful thing. And being a lawyer also allows you to get involved with a lot of different problems and deal with people when they’re both at their best and at their worst, which is what I think you want to see onstage.”

The playwright’s works have garnered a number of regional theater awards, including the Steinberg Award Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association and both the Carbonell Award and the Silver Palm for best new work. He’s also the founding artistic director of the Miami theater company Zoetic Stage. American Son received its world premiere at the Berkshires’ Barrington Stage Company in 2016 followed by a 2017 production at New Jersey’s George Street Playhouse, but the play—and its playwright—didn’t gain attention in New York City until the announcement that director Kenny Leon was bringing the show to Broadway with Scandal sensation Kerry Washington, Steven Pasquale, Jeremy Jordan and Eugene Lee.

“I found that Chris Demos-Brown is a combination of Lanford Wilson, August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry,” Leon says. “Not that he’s like any one of them, or I’m trying to compare him to them, but he has, in terms of craft, a little bit from all of those writers. And that impressed me. I was surprised—not that he was a white American—I was surprised that this was his first Broadway play.”

“[Kenny] told me, before the reviews came out, ‘Listen, this is Broadway. In regional theater, you get six or eight reviews,’” Demos-Brown recalls. “‘There are going to be fifty reviews for this play, and some people—because it’s a political play, and it’s topical, and you’re a first-time guy, and you’re white, and you’re a lawyer—there are going to be people who don’t like you. And it has nothing to do with you.’ That was helpful.”

American Son earned not only its star’s stamp of approval (Washington told Broadway.com she was “transfixed” by the play), but also big names like Shonda Rhimes, Jada Pinkett Smith and Gabrielle Union-Wade, who signed on as producers. The celebrities got on board because of the play’s subject matter: “[It’s] about race and gender and the treatment of marginalized groups. It’s about the American family.” Demos-Brown was moved to write about an interracial couple waiting for word about their missing teenager at a Florida police station by both the book Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and by “several incidents involving African-American children being victimized by our system in various ways,” he says.

“I think all great plays are grounded in the specifics in order to say something universal,” Leon notes, “and I think Chris has done a wonderful job with that. I mean, if you’re a parent, you have a door to walk into this play. If you’re you have a husband or wife, you have a door to walk through. If you've ever been to a police station…There are many ways where a human can find himself in this play, and that’s quite exciting.”

Watch Broadway.com's Front Row segment on American Son