Theatre North: “Chicken & Biscuits”
Tulsa Performing Arts Center, Liddy Doenges Theatre
May 18, 2025 (performances run through May 25)
The death of a patriarch is the inciting incident in Douglas Lyons’ Chicken & Biscuits, which Theatre North presents through this weekend—and which affirms that grief can be more than a bleak experience, especially when we use it to open ourselves up instead of locking ourselves away.
The play centers around a fractured family convening for the first time in many years for the funeral of Bernard Jenkins, whose death reunites his two estranged daughters, the tightly-coiled Baneatta (SynCeerae Robbins) and the firecracker Beverly (Jazzy BS). Baneatta is a tenured professor who married a loving pastor and has two adult kids; Beverly is a single mother and college dropout who sets her eyes on bagging a new man at the funeral.
The sisters’ different life paths aren’t the play’s only source of conflict; the tension extends into the next generation, too. Baneatta’s son Kenny brings his white, Jewish boyfriend, Logan, to the service, knowing his mom does not approve. Her daughter, Simone, is freshly free of a toxic engagement that has left her wounded. Beverly's brash daughter La’Trice keeps asking questions no one wants to answer. And Baneatta is keeping a secret from everyone.
If Chicken & Biscuits had been a drama, witnessing and processing these conflicts would have made for a very heavy Sunday afternoon at the TPAC. To my delight, it turned out to be a comedy. You catch the playwright’s tone as soon as you walk into the theater. Stained glass windows hang from the ceiling, flanking a giant cross and framing a coffin: a stark reminder of the death that brings these characters together. But the stage’s warm lights, bright flowers, and pre-show playlist featuring one bop after another clearly signal an approach to death that tracks through life.
The set of “Chicken & Biscuits” at the Liddy Doenges Theatre in the Tulsa Performing Arts Center | photo by Alex Isaak
This play premiered in 2021 on a Broadway stage; it's difficult to translate to a theater with fewer technical capabilities. In a space where you can’t truly isolate areas with lights, curtains, or movable walls, the shifts among several settings in the play’s first 30 minutes (Baneatta’s house, Beverly’s motel room, a generic outdoor space, an Uber, the outside of a church, and a church kitchen) stunt the play’s momentum. Director Jarod Kopp works to mitigate this by giving each opening vignette a distinct location on the stage and giving the actors blocking that plays up laughs.