261. APPROPRIATE
A stage filled with the accumulated junk of a lifetime
greets the audience attending Branden Jacob-Jenkins uneven but frequently
compelling new dramedy, APPROPRIATE, at the Griffin Theatre in the Pershing
Square Signature Theatre. (It premiered at Louisville’s Humana Festival and was
also produced by the Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago.) Soon they will be
confronted by a lifetime of another kind of accumulated junk, the ill feelings harbored
by each member of a dysfunctional family for one another. As in plays by such
well-known dramatists as Horton Foote and Tracy Letts, these feelings emerge when
the family in question, the Lafayettes, assemble at their southeast Arkansas ancestral
home one summer night to divvy up the estate left by their late father, Ray.
Ray was a Collyer brothers-like
hoarder over the past two decades of his life, so designer Clint Ramos (who
also designed the costumes)—and a busy prop coordinator—has fun filling up the decrepit
plantation mansion with all the detritus he collected; Ray’s oldest child, Toni
(Johanna Day), has been carrying everything down from the second story bedrooms
into the living room to make sleeping space upstairs for her arriving brother
and his family, and to prepare for the estate sale that’s planned
to help pay off their father’s debts and provide some income for his
descendants. Here, surrounded by the piles of toys, boxes, linens, family
portraits, knickknacks, clothes, books, and other family debris, the sparks of
familial angst begin to fly as brother Bo (Michael Laurence), expected, and brother Frank
(Patch Daragh), unexpected and now calling himself Franz, appear.
Bo is accompanied by his
13-year-old daughter, Cassidy (Izzy Hanson-Johnston), who keeps insisting that
she’s “almost an adult” when her parents try to stop her ears and eyes from
things being said and shown; his 8-year-old boy, Ainsley (Alex Dreier), running
riot through the rotting old house in his Spiderman pajamas; and his whiny
wife, Rachael (Maddie Corman), whom Toni can't stand. Frank, a convicted pedophile striving to reform,
arrives uninvited) with his 23-year-old hippie girlfriend,
River (Sonya Harum), who mingles New Age comments with intelligence and good
intentions (both her parents are lawyers). Filling out the picture is Rhys
(Mike Faist), Toni’s teenage son, who got in trouble for selling drugs, which
led to his mother’s dismissal as principal of his school.
Toni, who can’t keep her bile
down, is unhappy at Rhys’s decision to move in with his father, who recently
walked out on her. The rising pile of emotional crap in her system comes
spewing forth once she has her family as targets, and she’s especially pissed
off by Rachael, who claims that an overheard reference to her by Ray as “Bo’s
Jew wife” marked him as an anti-Semite. When the
going really gets tough, the volcano erupts and a second act donnybrook
of epic proportions (terrifically staged by Rick Sordelet and Christian Kelly-Sordelet)
spreads a torrent of kicks, punches, and hair-pulling lava all over the stage.
The house itself is a character
of sorts, and gets to do some show-offy acting of its own, as are the
summertime cicadas—an insect that emerges only every 13 years—whose insistent
and eerie chirping (sound design by Broken Chord) is heard in the darkness for
a long stretch before the play proper begins; their slightly scary presence remains a
constant, even earning a place of honor in the dialogue.
Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins, an African-American
playwright lately gaining much attention, throws these people together in a
first act filled with vitriolic confrontations and recriminations based on the
revelation of one family issue after the other, but the catalyst for the
greatest amount of anger and bewilderment is the discovery of an album owned by
Ray containing vintage photos showing black people being lynched. Ghosts of the
past haunt the place, which is right next to a cemetery, with a slave burial
ground also close by, thereby complicating the prospective sale of the house,
whose proceeds the family has been looking forward to. Those graveyards may be causing more damage even than that.
The family considers
itself anything but racist, and struggles to tie their memories of their father
to anything that would explain his possession of the album, the possibility of
selling it, although the sudden appearance of little Ainsley in a KKK hood he found would seem to settle matters regarding Ray's inclinations. Nevertheless, when the album turns out to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to interested
collectors, it acts as a stimulant to the otherwise self-righteous Bo, whose New
York job in magazine publishing is beginning to look iffy. We see how, despite
all of Bo and his family’s disavowals of racism, the idea of making a bundle by
selling these horrific pictures for someone’s private entertainment seems
completely reasonable to them.
The first act is filled with
lots of shouted recriminations, but Act Two, which begins after the set has
been cleared of most of the junk, leaving what remains neatly arranged, is
quieter and not as interesting, although it’s also when the big fight breaks
out, among other disturbing events (such as Frank accidentally seeing Rhys
masturbating and thinking his turn-on is the album). But it does give us a
chance to see the family in a more restrained mood (if only temporarily) and to
listen to their problems (including Frank’s desperate attempt to change the
course of his life) without holding our ears.
Under Liesl Tommy’s swiftly paced direction,
the acting, even when loud, is generally convincing (I liked Johanna Day’s feisty
Toni best), although the characters are mostly unlikable. They walk a fine line
between being recognizable human beings and Southern Gothic grotesques and,
especially in Act One, their constant acrimony makes them boorish to the point
of boredom. My companion (a veteran actress) noted, interestingly, the lack of
connection the actors had with the assortment of family items surrounding them.
Everything was just “there,” without any visceral connection to it. Still,
there’s a certain fascination in watching such people interact, especially when
each of them is able to find some justification in their behavior, no matter
how distasteful or ludicrous it may appear to observers.
When the last character has
exited, the play is not yet over, as ghostly presences (hinted at earlier) take
control of the house, and, in several brief sequences separated by blackouts, make
themselves known as the joint begins to crumble before our eyes. The special
effects (aided by Lap Chi Chu’s lighting) are well done, and add a theatrical
fillip to the performance.
APPROPRIATE may not be to
everyone’s taste, but to someone who’s sat through 260 productions thus far
this season, it makes for a much more appropriate theatrical experience than
the vast bulk of what’s been out there thus far. Even the cicadas seemed to realize this.
