Review: APPROPRIATE at Coal Mine Theatre

If you call to book a ticket to Coal Mine’s brilliant production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ APPROPRIATE—and you should do so immediately, because this searing, complex work is a must-see—you might stumble over the pronunciation of the show you’re trying to order. Is it appropriate, as in the proper or fitting actions to take in a particular circumstance? Or is it appropriate, as in to steal for oneself, to take something without permission and claim it as your own? The answer, shown through a complicated family saga with rotten roots, is that it’s both.

As the play begins, you’re plunged into darkness as the sound of cicadas (sound designers Deanna H. Choi and Michael Wanless) resonates, louder and louder, until it becomes nearly unbearable. The cicadas, which emerge only every 13 or 17 years when mature, are a force of nature; their drone and scattered bodies are inescapable reminders of a past most would rather leave buried. (I still have unpleasant memories of their arrival from my freshman year of undergrad, which is where, full disclosure, I first met Jacobs-Jenkins, working on a number of his early shows.)

This buzzing past comes back to haunt the Lafayette household, as a broken family attempts to reunite over a father’s failed dream after his passing.

The head of the Lafayette household was a Harvard-educated lawyer, but bought a plantation in Arkansas in his later years in the hope of turning it into a bed-and-breakfast while caring for his youngest son, an addict and drug dealer later charged with paedophilia. Now Frank (Andy Trithardt) is back in the dead of night with his hippy-dippy girlfriend River (Alison Beckwith), claiming reform after years of no contact. He’s confronted by eldest child Toni (Raquel Duffy), who’s tired of being an endless font of emotional labour and misery between her divorce and job loss, the estate’s executorship, and the struggles of her own son Rhys (Mackenzie Wojcik)—which bear marked similarities to Frank’s.

Meanwhile, Bo (Gray Powell) is every inch the middle child, his desire to be the peacemaker warring with his prickliness in being attacked from both sides, while he tries to keep everyone focused on the most important thing: the sale of the house and the money everyone will get from its inheritance. The house seems both huge and uncomfortably full of family members. Bo’s wife Rachael (Amy Lee) and kids Cassidy and Ainsley (Hannah Levinson and Ruari Hamman) ramp the tension up to 11, with Cassidy’s middle school crush on her cousin making everyone uncomfortable.

And that’s all before Ainsley finds the photo album with disturbing images of lynched Black people, which calls the Lafayette patriarch’s legacy and the family’s inheritance into question.

In Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays, there’s always some form of lurking threat; no matter how realistic the characters and situations are, they’re surrounded by an uneasy feeling of almost supernatural, mystical danger. This danger creates a sense of tension that never lets up through the play’s almost three-hour runtime, the gothic horror of the situation amplified by its length and expansiveness. In a play about the spectre of slavery, lynching, and appropriation, the lack of Black characters forms a notable and deliberate vacuum, a major source of the unease. The reminder of their photos (and of a graveyard on the family’s property), however, serves as a constant presence, ripping the family apart, like a tell-tale heart buried under the floorboards but still beating.

In director Ted Dykstra’s superb production, the moral decay of the characters gets an expert reflection in the physical decay of the surroundings by set designers Steve Lucas and Rebecca Morris. Lucas’ lights flicker and household objects seem to move of their own accord—one extended silent scene, in particular, is spellbinding in its creepy technical wizardry. There’s so much going on in the set and in the action, the overstuffed piles of memorabilia in the living room demanding attention, that you may only slowly become aware of the more disturbing pieces, like the Confederate flag that’s propped precariously near the door of a room leading offstage.

These subtle but stark touches contrast more and more with Toni’s desperate attempts to insist that their father was a good man, her excuses ringing painfully familiar to anyone who’s ever heard someone describing a family member as “a product of their time” or being “just how they are.” How much, the play asks, are we responsible for the sins of the past? How likely are we to inherit these beliefs and behaviours, just like we inherit houses and knickknacks?

Toni’s early denials of her father’s inability to be a closet racist due to his liberal leanings have roots in her desire to reclaim a childhood state of being known and being innocent, a time of happy memory that’s the last thing not poisoned by her current suffering and disgrace. Duffy is marvellous, face twisting with rancour and hurt as she lashes out again and again in the face of mounting evidence that her happy memories might be made from the pain of others. How, her bitterness seems to say, can she be benefitting from appropriation if she’s in so much pain?

Her main target is Bo’s Jewish wife, whose prim façade and hyper-liberal concern for her children’s diversity training come from her feelings of being othered by the family, and brings further evidence that Papa Lafayette may not have been as revolutionary as the general who shares the name. Lee is dynamite, subtly exaggerating her mannerisms and the prosody of a New York accent more and more as she becomes increasingly excised from the family, before self-consciously sobbing that she despises the stereotype they’ve forced her to become.

Jacobs-Jenkins’ script is rich with detail and satire, giving us characters that are types but well-drawn and shaded, so that everyone a chance to stand out. A sensitive, warm portrayal by Beckwith means that River has emotional depth wrapped in her annoying New Age cliches, attempting to get the navel-gazing family to stop and think about anything beyond themselves, while never questioning where the spiritual traditions she draws on comes from.

Frank, or “Franz” as he now calls himself, is a bullshit artist who has even convinced himself of his own sincerity and desire to reform, but prioritizes long, heartfelt speeches and showy gestures over the hard work to change his behaviour and accept its consequences. Both sensitive and shifty, heartfelt and oily, Trithardt can win and lose your sympathy at alternate moments; he has a misguided and misinterpreted heart-to-heart with Wojcik’s Rhys that uses dramatic irony to its full, hilarious impact.

Bo initially seems the most together of the siblings, until Powell suddenly shows the cracks in his precarious situation, going from snappish businessman to small child seeking reassurance. Fittingly, each pushes and pushes further and further past the boundaries of appropriate behaviour, making wild accusations and even resorting to violence.

And far from being the innocents their parents perceive, Cassidy and Rhys, each the approximate age of a cicadal cycle, share a surprisingly dark outlook on life shaped by constant exposure to social media. Levinson sits disturbingly stone-faced as the middle schooler snaps photos of the album with shocking callousness to share for clout, the first to ponder if it might make them some extra cash.

It's at this point that the satire ramps up to full force, as each character sees the photos as a opportunity to fix what’s wrong: an existential threat, a bundle of cash, a chance to reform.

What hangs heavy in the dusty, buzzing air, though, are the silenced voices of the people in those photos, unable to have a say in whether they are hidden, sold, or eradicated yet again: one more step in the journey of appropriation.

Photo of Amy Lee, Raquel Duffy, Andy Trithhardt, and Gray Powell by Dahlia Katz

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