‘Appropriate' play at Seattle Rep almost achieves greatness
Theater review
Not enough sage grows in this world to clear the Lafayette house of its skeletons both literal and figurative. Perhaps the cicadas, screeching outside like strings in a horror movie, clued you in.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' play "Appropriate," directed by Timothy McCuen Piggee, transports us to the swampy, buggy South, by way of the Seattle Rep stage. The soaring, multifloor set, by Carey Wong, reveals a once-splendid Arkansas plantation now teetering on the edge of dilapidation.
In this 2024 Tony Award winner for best revival of a play (while technically that was its Broadway debut, a high-profile 2014 off-Broadway debut nudged it into the revival category), the three Lafayette children may once again be sharing physical space in this family manse, but they're all living in their own realities.
Eldest child Toni (Jen Taylor) is a surly, desperate dragon in denim overalls. Bo (Tim Gouran) is a middle-manager type of middle child, a peacemaker who built his life in faraway New York. Franz (formerly known as Frank, played by Billy Finn) is the quintessential baby of the family, who's been who-knows-where and whose transgressions, depending on who you ask, make him far worse than a euphemistic "screw-up."
These three, full of self-pity and self-regard in varying proportions, have assembled along with Bo's wife, Rachael (Angela DiMarco), their two children, Toni's son Rhys (Jonas Winburn) and Franz's fiancée River (Sophie Kelly-Hedrick), a Portland vegan who looks and sounds exactly as you'd imagine.
They've gathered on the eve of the estate sale that will liquidate their father's assets (of which there are many; daddy was a hoarder).
Many more assets are in play - love, forgiveness and family connection, in addition to money - but when a book of truly horrific old photos crops up, another family heirloom suddenly takes precedence: legacy.
Are these simply historical artifacts? Proof of evil at the family's core? Valuable collector's items?
The family considers all of these viable options, but don't expect many gory details because these people (which is not to say this play) can opt out of caring too much about the specifics, beyond how the photos could impact them.
Because the real question is: Was daddy a racist and a bigot? Maybe he didn't even know these photos existed! Rachael can attest that her father-in-law was an antisemite, but even an overheard remark (daddy once referred to her as "Bo's Jew wife") isn't enough for Toni.
Enter the cries of "it was just his generation" and "you can't blame people for the ways they were raised."
Pointed fingers become personal attacks that descend into fistfights as these crabs in a pot tear at one another. Toni may be crab-in-chief but everyone falls prey to the subconscious scorekeeping that infects families. Who is owed, who is owing? And more importantly, how susceptible are any of us to excusing the actions of family, desperate for roots that anchor us rather than rot out from under our feet? Moral gray areas are fine, as long as they're on our turf.
Is Appropriate hard to watch? Yes. Is it laugh-out-loud funny? Also yes. That dissonance is a feature, not a bug. This is not a play about how people should behave; it's about how this family did behave.
Oddly, the writing is so good that I almost needed less of it. It's a long play, but Jacobs-Jenkins paints such a clear and varied portrait of this poison leeching through generations, a slow, DNA-drip of hatred, that we get the picture pretty quickly.
Perhaps that feeling of extraneousness lies more with the production rather than the script, because ultimately, despite complex writing and very strong performances (particularly from the three Lafayette siblings), my feelings toward each of the play's characters changed very little over the course of the evening.
Everything, from sets to costumes to performances, veered ever-ever-so-slightly toward caricature, and much of the acting feels like acting just as the set looks like a set, however beautiful. Even lighting, when deployed to spotlight an old-timey portrait in a very meaningful way, can facilitate these heavy-handed impulses.
And these impulses seem to suggest a foundational mistrust in the material or in the audience to understand (or try to understand) who these people are, no matter what we think of them and what they have done (or not done).
Capped off by a strange, unsuccessfully surreal coda at the play's end - a breakdown so silly and stodgy it felt more "The Play That Goes Wrong" than powerful symbolism - events finished with an unfortunate whimper, rather than a bang. To be fair, this ending is near-impossible to stage as written, and while a literal interpretation is hardly necessary, gesturing at its big passage-of-time ideas rather than going full throttle hardly seems worth the energy.
That these issues feel worth mentioning explains (hopefully) how very close this production is to greatness. The opening-night audience howled with laughter, which, given the play's circumstances, is a disorienting and horrifying experience that I expect will elicit all kinds of emotional responses. Given another week or two to simmer, I think the play's complexity may only increase, and I wouldn't miss the chance to sample it.
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