Two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie Award winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon) and Drama Desk Award winner Lila Neugebauer (The Waverly Gallery, 2ST’s Mary Page Marlowe) invite you to one helluva reunion in the darkly comic American family drama, APPROPRIATE.
It’s summer, the cicadas are singing, and the Lafayette family has returned to their late patriarch’s Arkansas home to deal with the remains of his estate. Toni (Paulson), the eldest daughter, hopes they’ll spend the weekend remembering and reconnecting over their beloved father. Bo, her brother, wants to recoup some of the funds he spent caring for Dad at the end of his life. But things take a turn when their estranged brother, Franz, appears late one night, and mysterious objects are discovered among the clutter. Suddenly, long-hidden secrets and buried resentments can’t be contained, and the family is forced to face the ghosts of their past.
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.
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.
General Rush:
Price: $45
Where: Belasco Theatre box office
When: When the box office opens on the day of the performance.
Limit: Two per customer.
Information: Subject to daily availability. The box office opens Tuesday through Saturday at 10 AM ET and Sunday at 12 PM ET.
Digital Lottery:
Price: $45
Where: rush.telecharge.com
When: 12 AM ET, one day before the performance.
Limit: Two per customer
Information: Tickets are subject to availability. Seats may be partial view. Winners will be drawn that same morning at 10 AM ET and then later that afternoon at 3 PM ET.
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