Appropriate Broadway Reviews

It would also be easy to attribute the improvement to Neugebauer’s direction, which is so smart and swift for most of the play’s substantial length that you feel gripped by storytelling without being strangled by argument. Her staging, on a towering double-decker set by the design collective dots, is also nearly ideal, accentuating (with the help of Jane Cox’s painterly lighting) the conflicts and alliances among the characters. And the daredevil cast, instead of reveling in falling apart, focuses for as long as possible on keeping it together. We thus experience, in the force of that repression, just how awful human awfulness must be if human will cannot ultimately corral it.

Pay attention to those loud, annoying cicadas – they seem to have a story to tell. At least they do in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins superb, marvelously performed Appropriate, the Second Stage production opening tonight at the Helen Hayes Theater with one of the best casts – headed by an astonishing Sarah Paulson – on Broadway. A blistering family drama directed by Lila Neugebauer (easily matching her exemplary work in 2018’s The Waverly Gallery), Appropriate is a wicked cacophony of nerve-wrenching mystery, old resentments and laugh-out-loud comedy – the latter all the more remarkable coming, as it does, within a story about the darkest horrors of America’s legacies.

Under director Lila Neugebauer, “Appropriate” creates one of the most engaging family dynamics presented on stage. The set, by multi-disciplinary collective dots, is highly effective: Packed full of boxes and trinkets, it’s a breath away from an episode of “Hoarders.” This adds to Toni, Franz and Bo’s feelings of claustrophobia. The intervals between scenes, however, plunge the audience into total darkness, surrounded by the shrill roaring of cicadas, creating an effect that’s more jarring than haunting. Additionally, with a runtime approaching three hours, even the humorous bits that slice through the heaviness of the material can’t save some of the overlong sections and monologues.

There have been dysfunctional family dramas as long as there have been plays. (After all, what would you call Medea?) But playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins definitely ups the ante in Appropriate, his searing 2013 play only now receiving its belated Broadway premiere in a galvanizing staging by Lila Neugebauer. Featuring a stellar cast headed by Sarah Paulson, Corey Stoll, and, making her stage debut, Elle Fanning, this Second Stage Theater production about a family with enough skeletons in its closet to fill a dozen catacombs makes an already powerful play even more powerful. It’s the standout of the Broadway season thus far.

If Jacobs-Jenkins has the answers (and one suspects he does), he’s not sharing them. He’s savvy—and gutsy—enough to let his audience decide. In a way, Appropriate is his most traditional play, a deliberate homage to such playwrights as Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Tracy Letts, who create the best, most completely unhinged characters. Since the play’s 2014 off-Broadway premiere at Signature Theatre, we’ve seen, among other works, his daring deconstructive Dion Boucicault riff An Octoroon, the modern-day morality play Everybody, and the post-pandemic millennial Big Chill–esque The Comeuppance. Yet it took an epic dysfunctional-family drama in order for Jacobs-Jenkins to finally find his way to Broadway. Seems appropriate, no?

Paulson’s performance begins loud and bitter, but ends soft and wounded. Neugebauer’s direction delivers the absolute reversal of that progression with Corey Stoll’s portrayal of the “successful” beta brother from New York City, Bo. Stoll remains quiet and extraordinarily reasonable, even when Toni takes the bait of his wife to deliver a slur on her Jewish heritage. And even when Rachel is freaking out over her two children (Alyssa Emily Marvin and Everett Sobers) having seen some racist artifacts in the vast mess that is her dead father-in-law’s house, Stoll’s Bo remains the still eye of the family storm swirling around all of them – until near the end. His late-in-the-play explosion, which is much louder than anything detonated by Paulson, provides the play’s comic high point.

There is, strangely but maybe tellingly, very little reflection of the racist history staring the Lafayettes in the face, or what their responsibility should be toward it. Instead, the family is stuck in the fault-line of the two meanings of the title of the play. The audience I sat among sighed at the characters’ insensitivity and myopia, and their ability to say and absolutely do the wrong thing, or ignore what is right in front of them. Appropriate shows how the persistence of racism and prejudice does not just come down to the practice of overt racism, but the practice of unthinking, lazy, deliberate ignorance.

Appropriate is a masterwork the likes of which crop up a handful of times per generation. Jacobs-Jenkins has crafted parallel statements on our relationships to ourselves and our families, convenient narratives and difficult truths, and ownership and entitlement, tied together by a profound clarity regarding the self-cannibalizing exploitation engendered by a pathological need to profit at all costs. Saluting the greatest works of modern theatre and the darkest lessons of human history, it deftly ties together the disparate strands of a country beholden to a state of perpetual haunting.

Raucous laughs. Loud gasps. Stunned silence. All turn out to be appropriate responses to “Appropriate,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ provocative play, now getting a belated – and yes, excellent -- Broadway production via Second Stage at the Hayes Theater.

Director Lila Neugebauer carefully threads the complexities of grief and racism with humor and lightness. The characters lob sharp-tongued dialogue (and a few punches) at one another. It’s a thrilling match.

Director Lila Neugebauer carefully threads the complexities of grief and racism with humor and lightness. The characters lob sharp-tongued dialogue (and a few punches) at one another. It’s a thrilling match.

If you grew up with it, there’s something inherently nostalgic about the sound of cicadas. The incessant chorus, once every 17 years, conjures something primordial, unsettling, country, past. Appropriate, the excellent production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play at the Helen Hayes Theater, plunges its audience into that portal at the show’s onset – all darkness and trilling racket. The sound design, lush and unnerving, is controlled by Bray Poor and Will Pickens.

“Appropriate,” the last play to open on Broadway in 2023 and one of the best-acted productions of the year, tells the story of a dysfunctional family who reunite after the death of their patriarch to auction off all his possessions, during which we learn little by little how messed up each and every one of the characters is. But Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ resonant play also in its own wry and sly way tells a dark story of race in America. If what’s going on beneath the mordant humor on the surface is not always clear, we’re given plenty of clues that encourage us to assume, and try to root out, a deeper meaning, starting before the first line is even spoken: Projected on the stage are six dictionary definitions of the word “appropriate,” including an adjective that means proper, and a verb that means to steal.

The incisiveness of Lila Neugebauer’s marvelous direction is most evident in her control of those three principals. Playing the eldest sibling, the archetypal older sister-caretaker of the family, Sarah Paulson is very alpha here. Pissed-off to the extreme, her Toni can’t take one more infraction from her two younger brothers (Corey Stoll and Michael Esper), and lets them and her sister-in-law, Rachel (Natalie Gold) know it in no uncertain and very loud terms. Paulson manages to find nuance in her almost nonstop screeching.

Clearly relishing their juicy roles, the dream cast has been impeccably directed by Lila Neugebauer, who burnishes the comedy and cruelty to a bright sheen. Her production would not cohere and hurtle as it does without its superbly unified design. The collective dots creates the perfect spacious, seen-better-days living room with genteel touches from the past. A pastoral mock-fresco adorns one wall, a vintage chandelier dangles from above and allows lighting designer Jane Cox the chance to cast its spidery shadow by the staircase. Cox lights nighttime scenes with intricate, textured dimness, pierced by the occasional smartphone or candle. The extraordinary soundscape by Bray Poor and Will Pickens amplifies and distorts a cacophony of cicadas between scenes, like voices of the dead clamoring for justice, punctuated by Cox’s brutal, horror-movie blackouts.