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Douglas Lyons has been in two Broadway shows as a performer. But when “Chicken & Biscuits” debuts at the Circle in the Square Theatre, it’ll be his first Broadway credit as a playwright.
It was announced this week that “Chicken & Biscuits” would have a limited run at Circle in the Square with preview performances starting Sept. 23 and opening night on Oct. 10. The run is scheduled to end on Jan. 2.
The playwright calls the play “a heartfelt comedy,” “a multi-generational Black play” that also has elements of “queerness,” in that one of the couples in the eight-person cast of characters is gay. “Chicken & Biscuits” involves a funeral and some shocking family revelations.
Lyons grew up in the Fair Haven Heights section of New Haven. He attended Career High School in New Haven, where teacher Kristen Grandfield Schimanski cast him as Tony in “West Side Story.” Lyons saw a poster for the University of Hartford’s Hartt School hanging in a classroom, so he applied there. While at Hartt, he was cast in a reading of the musical “Band Geeks” at the Goodspeed Festival of New Artists.
Connecticut now knows Douglas Lyons better as a playwright. His children’s theater piece “Polkadots: The Cool Kids Musical,” inspired by the 1957 Little Rock Nine school desegregation battle in Arkansas, had its premiere at the Ivoryton Playhouse in 2016. It has since been performed around the country and at several other theaters in Connecticut, including West Hartford’s Playhouse on Park in 2018.
Lyons attended a performance of “Polkadots” at the new Legacy Theatre in Branford in May. “I cried. My mother cried,” he said in praise of that production.
Another Lyons musical, this one for adults, is “Five Points,” set during the Civil War and concerning an African American entertainer and an Irish dancer. “Five Points,” co-created with Ethan Pakchar and Harrison David Rivers, had a reading at the Goodspeed Festival of New Artists in 2018. Lyons says “Five Points” has had four live readings since then plus a virtual one during COVID.
He has several other projects in the works, and hopes to start performing again now that theaters are reopening.
Does Lyons ever write roles with himself in mind? “My heart is not to write for myself,” he said, but he wants to keep active as both an actor and a writer. “My hope is to get into TV and film work for 2022. But there are a lot of writing things happening right now.”
The off-Broadway run of “Chicken & Biscuits” at the Queens Theatre was cut short by the coronavirus crisis. The show’s transfer to Broadway was only recently confirmed, Lyons said: “Seven weeks of me not sleeping while it was in the works.”
The Broadway version features some new faces. These include big names like Norm Lewis, the first African-American performer to star in “Phantom of the Opera” on Broadway; and Michael Urie, star of of TV’s “Ugly Betty,” whose stage work includes the one-man show “Buyer & Cellar” in New York and at Westport Country Playhouse.
Lyons said the Broadway version is not the same as the off-Broadway one. “I call it a revamped production. I always rewrite, every rehearsal, every preview,” he said.
He says Lewis has been a “very vocal supporter of my work for the last several years.” He added that Urie became fond of the play when he did a benefit reading of it for Lyons’ The Next Wave Initiative, a project the playwright leads for The Directors Company theater that is dedicated to “amplifying future Black voices in the American theater.”
Besides having a Black playwright and the youngest Black director in Broadway history, Zhailon Levingston, the cast and crew of the show are predominantly Black.
Another distinction: “Chicken & Biscuits” is a comedy, following a spate of heavy Black dramas on Broadway. “It’s not often that Black writers get to do something that’s not dark. We have to write about being oppressed. We have to talk about slavery. But we can also bring joy. This play will bring joy.”
Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.
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