Douglas Lyons’s “Chicken & Biscuits,” at Broadway’s Circle in the Square theater, is a savory comedy served with a hefty side order of sentiment. It’s a mostly successful combo plate, even if the play’s buoyant humor tends to recede in the later scenes, as the tensions among three generations of an African American family are smoothly settled.
The setup is a familiar but reliably fertile formula: the gathering of a family with various bones to pick over. The occasion here is in fact the funeral of the family patriarch, Bernard, or B as the family all called him, the beloved pastor of a popular church in New Haven, Conn. Presiding over the services is his son-in-law, Reginald (Broadway veteran Norm Lewis), who has inherited the pastor’s robes and responsibilities.
