Is the title ap-PRO-pri-ate—as in, suitable, proper, correct, acceptable? Or ap-pro-pri-ATE, as in, to steal, seize, take without authorization?
Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins isn’t about to tell you. As you take your seat at the Hayes Theater, the multiple definitions of Appropriate are projected onto a scrim, ensuring that the title (and concept behind the title) stays top of mind throughout the high-octane two-hour, 45-minute drama, a knock-down, drag-out bout in which three siblings—Toni (Sarah Paulson, deliciously vicious), Bo (Corey Stoll), and Frank (Michael Esper)—snipe, claw, and sometimes literally punch each other into submission.
Also seated ringside for the prizefight: Toni’s son, Rhys (Graham Campbell), recently kicked out of high school for dealing drugs; Bo’s wife, Rachael (Succession’s Natalie Gold), or “Bo’s Jew wife,” as her just-deceased father-in-law called her; their kids, Cassidy (Alyssa Emily Marvin), who, she repeatedly insists, is “almost an adult,” and Ainsley (Lincoln Cohen or Everett Sobers, alternating), who’s absolutely not an adult; and Frank’s fiancée River (Elle Fanning, best known for Hulu’s costume drama The Great…, in a smashing stage debut), a bead-and-macramé-wearing hippie who attempts to bring the family together by cooking quinoaffles for breakfast.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Unsurprisingly, tension is high and tempers are flaring in the wake of the death of patriarch Ray; Toni, Bo & Co. have gathered to clear out the family home, which looks like something out of Hoarders: The Plantation Edition. (The magnificent Southern Gothic–style mansion, impressively grand yet showing subtle signs of fading and fracture, is designed by Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, Andrew Moerdyk, and Kimie Nishikawa, aka dots.) We quickly learn everyone’s place in the pecking order: Toni, the eldest, is the bully; she helped raise her brothers after their mother died. Bo, the middle child, is the fixer, perhaps because he’s a married father of two. Arriving uninvited and unannounced, Frank, the youngest, is the screw-up, who spent years of his life, and loads of the family money, drinking and getting high.
So what is the appropriate response when 8-year-old Ainsley innocently stumbles on a tattered album full of photographs of lynchings—or, as Cassidy calls them, “antique dead people photos”? (“I don’t want to be, like…an asshole,” Cassidy confesses to River, admitting that she’s not as upset as she knows she ought to be.) Is it Appropriate to call your sister-in-law a cunt—three times, to her face? Is it Appropriate if said sister-in-law called you a kike? And is it Appropriate to try to sell the aforementioned lynching photos if it means making hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars?
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?
Appropriate opened Dec. 18, 2023, at the Hayes Theater; transferred to the Belasco on March 25, 2024; and runs through June 30. Tickets and information: appropriateplay.com
