![]() ![]() Youngest child AJ (Patrick Agada) is a high school senior applying to colleges, but you can tell right away that he doesn’t share his father’s enthusiasm for the idea that he’ll someday take over his father’s pulpit. Daughter Dee-Dee (Melanie Loren) - Diane’s identical twin - is withering in the shadow of her departed sister, whose ashes are given such prominent placement in the family home that you can apply Chekhov’s rule about guns to her urn. ![]() Oh, and he’s now going by Abdul-Malik.Īlbert the elder is none too happy to see his son come home. It’s days before Thanksgiving, and the family is gearing up for two emotionally taxing events: a special service at the church to mark the anniversary of Diane’s death, and the release on parole of “Little Al,” or Albert Melvin Jones IV (Clinton Lowe), who’s spent the last six years in lockup for a crime he maintains he didn’t commit. It’s little surprise to learn how poorly he practices what he preaches.įollowing that prologue, Colston jumps ahead six years to the Jones family home in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. Because here’s the thing: “The First Deep Breath” earns that kind of talk.īut though we see him struggling, he preaches the story of Jesus calming the storm, saying “Peace, be still.” We must have the faith to calm our internal storms, Pastor Jones tells his congregation. Yew is too savvy a producer to put expectations like that onto a play that can’t live up to them. Victory Gardens’ own press materials encourage such thoughts - the theater’s artistic director, Chay Yew, goes so far as to position Colston’s work “in the tradition of August Wilson, Eugene O’Neill and Tracy Letts.” I might throw Lillian Hellman into that lineup, too. Broadnax III seem to be inviting comparisons to Letts’ momentous drama: in the new play’s three-act, three-and-a-half-hour structure in scenic designer Regina García’s tri-level home squeezed into the frame of Victory Gardens’ stage, recalling Todd Rosenthal’s “August” set in ending the middle act on a fraught family dinner replete with vicious truth-telling. Run time: 3 hours 35 minutes, with two intermissionsĪt times, “Breath” playwright Lee Edward Colston II and director Steve H.
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