Broadway is striving to encourage young Black directors and find a new, more diverse audience. These are crucial goals. But the way to achieve them is not for the old Broadway hands (of all races) merely to step out of the way, offer up the space and disappear. Making a play work for the commercial stage is a tricky craft that has to be learned. Those experienced hands have got to stick around and help these vital new voices. Had that happened at Circle in the Square Theatre, "Chicken & Biscuits," the struggling new Broadway play by Douglas Lyons, might not have baked for close to 2 hours and 15 minutes without an intermission. Scene for the Broadway show "Chicken & Biscuits." (Handout) If you're engaging an audience in some profound and riveting experience, a concept so intense and immersive that you fear the audience's loss of concentration, you can ask them to sit for that long and maybe you'll be fine. But "Chicken & Biscuits," which was directed by Zhailon Levingston, is not such a show. It's a warm-centered farce, a traditionally structured comedy wherein the members of a flawed but loving Black family gather to bury their patriarch, and in so doing find out some unexpected truths about themselves. This is a long-standing formula in the theater, variously recalling Horton Foote's "Dividing the Estate," Larry David's "Fish in the Dark," the immersive "Finnegan's Wake" and movies from "The Inheritance" to "A Madea Family Funeral" to "Knives Out." It's a popular device because death works very well in the theater. A funeral shakes things up, creates emotional stress and provides an excuse to reunite people who either didn't like each other much or had no idea about family secrets not yet fully buried. It can be moving or funny or (as in this case) try for both at once. But either way, people still have to pee. And, if thwarted by running time, try to pee they will. Thus, at the matinee of "Chicken & Biscuits" I saw, focus-pulling audience members started to rise from their seats well before the end of the show. And since Circle in the Square is a theater mostly in the round, that means everyone could see them looking for the door or even ending up heading backstage. As a one-act comedy, this show is some 45 minutes too long.