Broadway Play Review— Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Appropriate” with Sarah Paulson

Appropriate

Written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins; directed by Lila Neugebauer

Performances through June 23, 2024

Belasco Theatre, 111 West 44th Street, New York, NY

appropriateplay.com

The cast of Appropriate (photo: Joan Marcus)

In the tradition of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tracey Letts’ August: Osage County, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate is an overlong but often viciously entertaining family saga.

After their father dies, the grown Lafayette children wage a battle royale over what’s left of his estate and his legacy. Oldest sister Toni (Sarah Paulson), former vice-principal; middle brother and NYC media maven Bo (Corey Stoll); and younger brother and prodigal son Franz (Michael Esper) have a relationship that’s precarious at best and violently antagonistic at worst, and it all comes to a head under the roof of their childhood home, a former plantation in rural Arkansas.

Toni, who has spent the last several years being her father’s nurse while drinking herself into a stupor, has an 18-year-old son, Rhys, who was the cause of her dismissal from her position at school. Bo arrives from New York with his wife Rachael and children, young son Ainsley and teenage daughter Cassidy (who has a crush on her older cousin Rhys), in tow. And Franz (who enters by crawling through a window late at night) comes with River, his much younger girlfriend, who props up his damaged psyche without knowing the full truth behind his estrangement from the family.

Throughout Appropriate—a multi-purpose title, it turns out—Jacobs-Jenkins slyly echoes and updates Albee and Letts by adding overt racism to an already toxic stew of addiction, pedophilia, alcoholism and anti-Semitism. While rummaging through their father’s massive horde of belongings, the kids find albums containing graphic photographs of lynchings. (There’s already been discussion of the graves of the enslaved that are by the lake that’s on the property.) The already colossally dysfunctional Lafayettes must now confront something about their father and family that they’d rather sidestep: did their father simply collect such horrific photos or did he take part in what the photos record? (Later, Bo discovers they might be worth a lot of money, which introduces another moral dilemma.)

As they start to wrestle with this unwanted revelation, Jacobs-Jenkins tweaks them (and the audience). The first act ends with Ainsley running down the stairs, a white pillow case that has eyehole cutouts over his head, like a Klan hood—his appearance shocks the adults, already yelling at and fighting one another, into stunned silence. Although too on the nose, such a sight makes dramatic and comic sense in this context, unlike the end of the play, when Jacobs-Jenkins truly overplays his hand.

A tentative truce called, the exhausted Lafayettes leave the house, making way for the ultimate coup de theatre to unfold. In the space of a few minutes, we watch years—possibly decades—go by as the vacant house is partially reclaimed by nature: a large tree takes root, a window is broken, the chandelier falls to the ground, a bookcase collapses. It’s a brilliant effect—and sublimely spotlights the extraordinary technical design (set by dots, lighting by Jane Cox, sound by Bray Poor and Will Pickens)—but it’s unnecessary underlining after what we’ve witnessed the previous 2-1/2 hours.

Director Lily Neugebauer adroitly paces the complicated plot and character arcs so they unfold as naturally as possible, and she shepherds her actors to persuasive performances perfectly pitched between realistic and hysterics. Graham Campbell, Alyssa Emily Marvin and (the evening I attended) Lincoln Cohen are believable as the messed-up young Lafayette cousins, while Natalie Gold beautifully captures Rachael’s simultaneous uneasiness with the Lafayettes’ history and protectiveness of their own family. Only the resourceful Ella Beatty is hampered by the play’s most stereotypical role; it’s as if River came straight from a roadhouse company of Hair.

The adult Lafayette siblings are played with great gusto by Michael Esper (Franz), Corey Stoll (Bo) and especially Sarah Paulson, whose formidable, steely Toni has no fucks left to give. Paulson’s tremendously affecting, often hilarious portrayal appropriately anchors Appropriate, which, though overlong and repetitive, is a rare example of an intelligent and incisive play inhabiting Broadway.