Thursday, March 27, 2014

261. Review of APPROPRIATE (March 26, 2014)


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.
 
 
From left: Johanna Day, Michael Laurence, Patch Daragh, Maddie Corman.

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.