The play is Howard's first.[1][2] It was workshopped in 2019 with Page 73 during a summer residency and with Collaborative Artists Bloc.[3]
Plot
The plot centers on the Tucker family, three generations of women grappling with their personal choices.[4][5][6] Characters include Mama, the family matriarch, Nelly, a 17-year-old who lives with Mama, Mama's 30-something daughter Lillian, who is visiting with her preteen daughter Li'l Mama and her son Junior, who does not appear in the play.[7] It takes place in Mama's kitchen.
Mama is making a stew for a church event later in the day that is very important to her, and the rest of the family is helping or keeping her company in the kitchen. The women are all stressed for various reasons—Mama because of the event and her health issues, Lillian because she is having marital issues, and Nelly because she is pregnant—and they bicker, sometimes comically. A loud bang is heard outside the house while all but Mama are sleeping, and Lillian, Nelly, and Li'l Mama run outside, concerned about Junior, while Mama, still inside stirring her pot, resigns herself to the worst. The play ends with the audience believing he has been shot.
Reception
In a review for Vulture, Helen Shaw wrote, "Howard moves from broad strokes to ontological bewilderment almost before you know it...makes us hear hundreds of years of pain, knocking to be let in."[1] For the Los Angeles Times, Charles McNulty wrote, "Howard has written a kitchen-sink drama with a difference. "Stew" is more concerned with pattern than plot. History is tracked in its path of repetition. The everyday sorrows, disappointments and hopes of three generations of Black women are chronicled. So too is their stamina to survive a world of economic hardship, emotional neglect and chronic violence."[8]Elisabeth Vincentelli, writing in the New York Times, said "Howard can be a little heavy-handed when alluding to cycles that keep repeating: the marital frustration, Tucker women getting pregnant at 17."
The play was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.[9][4] In 2023 Boston.com named it one of seven theatre performances to see that summer.[10]
