Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is known for pushing audiences to the limit – and ‘Appropriate’ is no different.
Anyone who saw his last show, An Octoroon, will appreciate that you don’t see his plays for a rolling-in-the-aisles comedy experience. Jacobs-Jenkins challenges the status quo and asks essential and challenging questions from the moment the lights come up.
At the outset, Appropriate looks like it could be about to unfold like a par-for-the-course family drama. But this is not a play to relax into – it is full of broken-family tropes, from paedophilia, to anti-semitism, to dark family secrets. The play zeros in on the Lafayette family, who have gathered to auction off the family home – a creaking Arkansas plantation house, that comes complete with an onsite cemetery where slaves were buried.
Three siblings converge on the house to prepare it for sale: Bo arrives from New York with his two kids and Jewish wife Rachael; recently divorced older sister Toni comes saddled with teenage son Rhys; and ex drug-addict Franz, who arrives with his new Reiki-trained healer fiancee River, enters the house through a pushed-up sash window.
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Older sister Toni – played brilliantly by Monica Dolan – feels like she has held the family together for decades. She hysterically defends their father, even when disturbing items – photographs of lynchings and a box-full of test-tubes filled with African-American body parts for example – are found in the attic.
The three siblings are haunted by both their father’s death and the possibility that his past held darker, more awful secrets than they knew. “He was of a different time” repeated by big sister Toni in an attempt to excuse her father.
Appropriate, written in the same year as An Octoroon, in 2014, addresses serious issues but is also crammed with dark-humour, such as when a mass-family brawl is broken up by a child running through the room wearing a KKK-hood.
As with a ‘regular’ parlour-room drama, the character’s motives unravel as the play begins, but in Appropriate, the stakes shoot from 0-100 in moments. Ola Ince’s production is extraordinary because the groundwork is laid so beautifully, and Jacobs-Jenkins’ script lets the family burn.
Just when you think a situation resolves, someone else ignites a different row. At one point there is an audible groan from the audience when Toni calls Rachel a ‘Shylock’ after being challenged to do so. The watching audience recognises the family dynamics and patterns so well that we know how certain statements will go down – like a lead balloon.
At times the characters’ constant flaws can feel relentless. Each has a neat backstory that appears at just the right moment to cause another crisis in the play. But at the Lafayette Plantation, there’s a story fizzing to come out, and the pace is fast and witty enough to stay gripped for the entire show.
Appropriate runs at Donmar Warehouse until October 5.
Words by Eleanor Ross.