Appropriate

Out and About

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a theater review.

Best,

Sam

APPROPRIATE

Written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Lila Neugebauer, with Sarah Paulson as Toni

An intelligent, capable play — and it’s great that something as uncomfortable, as squirm-inducing as this, made it onto Broadway. 

The sense with Appropriate is that it’s two very different plays superimposed on top of each other. One play is the hallowed American theatrical tradition of gathering a large family in a room and having them scream at each other. The other play is the sort of mute witness of the photographs — photographs of lynchings that are discovered in the home of the family patriarch as his children are preparing for the estate sale. 

If you think the play is brilliant, it’s that that is the story of white America — of one domestic crisis after another and, meanwhile, a complete unwillingness to deal with race and the legacy of slavery. If you think the play doesn’t quite work, it’s that the two plots don’t exactly latch onto each other. 

I guess I would split the difference — and every time I think about the play, I seem to land in a somewhat different place. I do think that it represents necessary redemptive work to the American theatrical tradition — it’s like all the familiar tropes from Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, et al, are there, but they’re understood to be a hyperactive form of denial, with the real action the gradual coming-to-grips with the fact of the photographs, the way they sink into the subconscious of everybody present, and the way the horror of them gets discreetly passed down to the next generation (the children stealing glances at them, the children an act later pretending to wear Klan robes, the teenager masturbating with the book of photographs open in front of him). And Jacobs-Jenkins is such a cunning playwright as to systematically block all attempts at redemption — the American fail-safe of confessing and hugging just doesn’t work here. Franz shows up determined to make amends, determined to redeem the whole family — and attempts to do so through a very American mix of evangelical fervor and New Age psychobabble. “Go on in and cleanse yourself. Cleanse yourself. Wipe it all away,” he reports of a voice speaking to him. “So I did. I took everything — all my pain, all Daddy’s pain, this family’s pain, the pictures — and I left it there. I washed it away.” To which Toni, the play’s chief protagonist and Franz’s dragon sister, responds by bursting into laughter — everybody has just discovered that the photographs are worth a lot of money, and Toni knows enough about life to realize that confession and forgiveness have no meaning at all. “How exactly was it supposed to end Frank?” she says a bit earlier in the play. “You apologize and we all hug it out. How stupid do you think we are?” 

That’s great writing — sharp and tragic. But, on the other hand, the play is beset by a number of technical problems that make it somehow less than the sum of its parts. It’s badly misnamed.¹ The real main character is a book — not any of the people we’re watching. The real setting is the slave cemetery in the back of the house, not the living room where we find ourselves. The most dramatic scenes all happen offstage. The critical character in the family is the father, who is dead at the start of the play and whose personality we never get a clear sense of: the driving plot point is uncovering whether the photographs are his, whether he was a racist, and if so to what extent — but it’s difficult to care about any of that since we know nothing about him. 

In the absence of any real answers about the father or the book of photographs, center stage is taken by Toni, spitting venom in all possible directions like she’s understudying for Violet in August: Osage County. The issue, though, is that, with Violet, we understand why she’s behaving in the way that she is: she’s unhinged by grief after the suicide of her husband and that makes her rip apart all the polite lies and hypocrisies that have been protecting the family up till that point. It’s not really clear what Toni’s fury is rooted in. There’s her grief for the loss of her beloved father (but it’s obvious that she’s been toxic since long before that). There’s the loss of her job, her son’s stint in juvenile detention, her divorce — but all of these seem like plot points that Jacobs-Jenkins jury rigs in order to explain Toni. (The other characters seem to be equally mystified by her — which, by the way, is almost always a bad sign in writing — with her brother Bo exclaiming, after one outburst, “Can you even see yourself right now? You’re disgusting. You’re a disgusting mess.”) And then there’s the best explanation for Toni’s mania, which is the feminist reading — that life piles enough pressure on women that sooner or later the explosion is inevitable. This comes through in the scene of Franz’s attempt at forgiveness and amends, with Bo gracefully accepting Franz’s apology and Toni, to everybody’s amazement, holding out and then witheringly stating her case. “You didn’t lose the hours,” she says. “I took care of our father when [Franz] ran away. So guess what? That apology isn’t for you to accept. That forgiveness isn’t for you! It’s for me! It’s mine!” 

All of this is wandering very far from the photographs, and America’s racist legacy, and the overarching point of the play. The best scene, in fact, has nothing to do with any of the play’s main themes. It’s Toni breaking through to the essence of River, Franz’s blissed-out girlfriend. “I think I just figured you out. You’re one of those Sweet Girls,” she says, and continues: 

I wonder if I used to be one of you. I think I remember running around being sweet and 23, thinking I was going to save everyone and love them into submission. God. But you know what happens to Sweet Girls? Life gobbles you up — faster than the other girls. And why? Because we run around putting a target on our backs, looking so tasty, sprinkling our sugar all over the world’s shit. But let me tell you know what no one ever told me. You don’t get an unlimited supply. That sugar is gonna run out. So don’t be in such a hurry to waste it on Frank. 

This is wise and cruel and lived-in — and you can almost sense Jacobs-Jenkins worrying that he’s indulged himself too long and needs to return to tying up his disparate plot points. Which is a real chore. In the end, the whole throughline of Franz and River doesn’t really pay off — he’s revealed to have done something truly unforgivable, something that’s well past the point of crying and confessing and that speaks to a rot at the core of him, and then, inexplicably, River seems to forgive him. “We’re working it out,” Franz says of their offstage reconciliation. Toni’s disappearing act — with its nod to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf — is also a bit underwhelming. The kids don’t have much of a storyline of their own — they’re just there to be corrupted by the photographs and the pillowcases. And, ultimately, the complicated domestic drama notwithstanding, the play’s real arc comes down to the light-and-sound show that’s the coda — all the generations of the house, the ruin and remodeling, and the book just there, as silent witness of the crime that can never be washed away. 

1. I stand corrected! See comments.