Had the playwright, director, and creative team of “Chicken & Biscuits” taken a cue from their “Oklahoma” colleagues who occupied the same Circle in the Square Theatre space in 2019-2020, they might have inserted a break into their play’s overlong 120-minutes and served a small portion of chicken and biscuits to the members of the audience. This would have enhanced the flavor of Douglas Lyons’s “Chicken and Biscuits” considerably.

The eight skilled members of the cast of “Chicken and Biscuits” work individually and as an ensemble to maneuver their way through the twists and turns in a day in the life of the extended Mabry-Jenkins family gathered to honor and celebrate the life of the family’s patriarch Bernard Jenkins the father of Baneatta Jenkins (an upstanding and stern Cleo King whose character is also quite uptight and stubborn in her religious ways). Reginald Mabry (a family peace-making ball of love Norm Lewis), Baneatta Mabry’s husband, has replaced Bernard as pastor of St. Luke’s Church in New Haven, Connecticut. This is Reginald’s first sermon at his new assignment and his nervousness is matched only by Baneatta’s anxiety after receiving an unwanted phone call.

The typical pre-funeral commotion segues into matters involving two individuals: one a surprise guest related to Baneatta’s unwanted phone call; the other, the Mabry’s son Kenny’s (a proudly queer, cowering in the presence of his mother Devere Rogers) longtime Jewish boyfriend Logan Liebowitz (a neurotic and dramatic Michael Urie), the only white guest at the funeral.

We meet Kenny and Logan as they rideshare to the funeral from Manhattan. Key to this sub-plot is whether Kenny’s mother Banaetta will finally accept Logan as part of the family instead of deliberately calling him by any name except his own and treating with nothing other than indifference. Receiving more attention than perhaps needed is the arrival of “missing sister” Brianna Jenkins (a lonely and abandoned NaTasha Yvette Williams), Baneatta and Beverly’s half-sister through an affair Bernard had decades ago. Kept a secret by Banaetta because her mother told her “That girl ain’t your blood,” Brianna tracked Bernard down so she could know more about the father she never knew.

Confession, forgiveness, and redemption enkindle reconciliation and acceptance around the repast of – what else – chicken and biscuits. However, far too much time is spent on the action around the acceptance of Brianna Jenkins. Not enough time is spent on the family’s acceptance of Logan, which in the play seems nothing more than a forgone conclusion.

Logan’s chat with Kenny’s father occurs far upstage amid center and downstage busy dialogue. Beverly Franklin’s (a savage, classy, not so bougie, but definitely ratchet when necessary Ebony Marshall-Oliver) daughter La’Trice (a nosy, loud, in everyone else’s business but her own, and sarcastic to the bone Aigner Mizzelle) convinces Logan to ask the Rev. Mabry for Kenny’s hand in marriage. This poignant exchange, one of the script’s better written, gets lost in this weakly stage scene.

Dede Ayite’s costume design clearly delineates the generations within the Mabry-Franklin extended family as does Nikiya Mathis’s hair/wig and makeup design. As efficient as Adam Honoré’s lighting design and Twi McCallum’s sound design (Mother Jones’s remix of “Amazing Grace” on loop!) are, neither can enhance Lawrence E. Lawrence E. Moten III’s oddly disappointing set design.

Zhailon Levingston stages “Chicken & Biscuits” as a television sitcom series replete with blackouts to separate episodes. His direction just skirts the edges of authentic farce which might better have served the playwright’s script and provided a more perfect repast meal.

Overall, Douglas Lyons succeeds in providing a humorous, mostly genteel, glimpse into one Black extended family’s journey through the maze of pervasive whiteness, family skeletons-in-closets, intra-family squabbles, the conservative edicts of the church, and classism. The playwright fares less well in presenting these important issues as unique to the extended Black family he introduces us to.