INTERVIEW: Cleo King on building a family in Broadway’s ‘Chicken & Biscuits’
Photo: Chicken & Biscuits features a talented cast of performers, including Cleo King, center. Photo courtesy of official site.
Cleo King, the accomplished performer from TV’s Mike & Molly and A Series of Unfortunate Events, is making her Broadway debut in the new comedy Chicken & Biscuits by Douglas Lyons and directed by Zhailon Levingston, now playing at the Circle in the Square in Midtown Manhattan. In the show, King plays the pivotal character of Baneatta Mabry, whose father has recently died, and, along with her husband, she is leading the arrangements for the funeral service and family repast. This means Baneatta needs to worry about old grudges with her sister (played by Ebony Marshall-Oliver) and new surprises with her children (Alana Raquel Bowers and Devere Isaac Rogers).
Rounding out the cast are Norm Lewis (Baneatta’s husband, Reginald Mabry, a pastor of the local church), Michael Urie, Aigner Mizzelle and Natasha Yvette Williams. Of course, the audience members at the Circle in the Square, who sit around the thrust stage, are invited to the funeral and repast as well, and although it’s a somber moment for the Mabry family, there are many laughs along the way.
“For me, I’ll tell you, I am a PK,” King said in a recent phone interview. “I’m a PK, so I’m a preacher’s kid, right. So all of this stuff is how I grew up. When my dad preached, he was a pastor, we all had to sing everywhere he went. It was all about the service. It was all about the first lady, the pastor, the pastor’s kids. For me, I can name you all of these people at the church I grew up in, so it’s familiarity for me. And when do I get a chance to see us on Broadway? So I was truly blown away by this script because it’s the church I grew up in. When my sister came to see it — she flew in from St. Louis, and she came to see the show — and she said, ‘You could have wrote this. You could have wrote this.’ I said, ‘You could have wrote this, too.’ She said, ‘Oh my God, it was so good. I couldn’t believe it.’ But I’m so familiar with these people; that’s what really blew me away that we get to see ourselves on Broadway.”
The family at the center of the story is struggling with many different issues and events from their past. Rogers’ character of Kenny Mabry, for example, is gay and bringing his white boyfriend (Urie) to the service. This doesn’t seem to sit well with Baneatta, but Aunt Beverly is all too happy to welcome Kenny and his boyfriend to the family. Conflict ensues, often with hilarious one-liners.
“We’re working six days a week, so we are immersed in each other,” King said about how this family feels like a family. “Unlike Los Angeles where we work five days a week, we go home, we have our life for two days and then come back. We are immersed in this script and in this project, and we’re working long hours.”
During rehearsals, the cast worked from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. King would arrive for breakfast with some cast members, and then they would work for several hours. They enjoyed some lunch together and then worked some more, constantly toiling over the 100 minutes of dialogue and how their characters were linked. The rehearsal days finished with some dinner together or perhaps the company heading out for a Broadway show. They stuck with one another because that family feeling needed to be re-created on stage, and it needed to feel authentic.
“We are literally immersed in each other’s lives, and the miracle is everybody is wonderful,” she said. “Everybody is really grateful. Everybody wants to be here. I am blown away at the gratitude in this cast. Like I was saying to them, ‘I never worked so hard for this little money in my life. I ain’t never, never worked this hard for this little bit of money. I don’t know how you all do it. I don’t know.’ But don’t forget, I lived here 10 years, and I wanted to do Broadway so bad. But it didn’t happen, and then when I moved away, I stopped singing. And I only focused on my acting career, and that’s when my TV and film took off. So the fact that I then took my mind off theater; then here I am back doing Broadway.”
Chicken & Biscuits is one of the first plays to open on Broadway after the industry was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. King said she is especially happy that this comedy has made it to the top of the theater world. The show is centered on a Black family, and the setting inside a church is important for King. These characters remind her of her own childhood, and now she feels seen and represented (finally) on Broadway.
“Every night it’s going through my mind, whooo, we’re doing this, we’re doing this, we’re doing this,” King said. “I want to be on the stage, yet there are nerves. I just go to the gratitude and oh my God we’re doing this, we’re doing this, and I give thanks. I thank the universe, I thank God, I thank sweet Black baby Jesus, honey. I thank everybody who allowed me to get here, any spirit on this planet that allowed me to get here. … I too am so grateful to be right here, right now with this experience. That’s why I went to college and majored in theater because I wanted to do a Broadway show.”
King added: “There’s nothing like the applause. There’s nothing like hearing that audience clap for you. There’s nothing like looking into the eyes of an audience member or seeing people laugh. When my sister, Ebony Marshall-Oliver, says, ‘Oh shit, oh shoot, I mean shoot. Oh shoot. My bad. That’s my bad,’ when she says that in that church, those audience members they all but scream for her and then laugh because they’re so embarrassed for her. But you can tell the ones who go to church, and you can tell the ones who don’t go to church. So, for me, I tell you, I’m filled with so much gratitude every night and so much joy to get to do this. To come back here and to survive a winter, oh my God, you have to know that I love the theater.”
The actor, who has also appeared in The Hangover, the Transformers franchise and Pineapple Express, said that her character is a mixture of her mother, grandmother and stepmother. That personal connection matters to her, and she is so delighted to be exploring this woman night after night.
“We get to be seen,” King said. “We get to be heard, too. Our stories are valid, too. We count. We matter. We are here. Of course, it’s special. Of course, it’s something I’ll never forget as long as I live because we matter, too.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Chicken & Biscuits, starring Cleo King, is now playing on Broadway at the Circle in the Square. Click here for more information and tickets.
