Review: Complicated APPROPRIATE at Trinity Rep

APPROPRIATE is a show that manages to be both genuinely funny, but also somewhat hard to watch. At its core, it's about family, legacy and secrets, but it manages to become something much larger and more complicated and messy than that. Author Branden Jacobs-Jenkins manages to punctuate moments of extreme discomfort with the perfect injection of levity to avoid this turning into something that is exclusively difficult to watch, and excellent performances from Trinity resident actors Phyllis Kay, Fred Sullivan Jr. and Angela Brazil keep the dark narrative compelling even when it's squirmingly uncomfortable.

At the family estate in Arkansas, the Lafayettes have gathered to pack up their dead father's possessions and try to sell the house in order to pay off outstanding debts. Oldest sister Antoinette "Toni" and brother Beauregarde "Bo", have brought their families, while youngest brother Frank has shown up unannounced with a fiancee' named River. As they sort through their father's belongings, old grudges resurface and previously unseen possessions of their father's start to create a fuller picture of the person he may have been inside.

APPROPRIATE manages to cram a lot of issues into a three hour play, and most of them feel organic and believable. Unfortunately, the first act, starts to just feel like a group of people yelling at each other, which is essentially what it is, with not quite enough relief. It's a testament to the excellent acting in this production that the audience can be left feeling so emotionally invested in the lives of people we have just met, but it's also mentally exhausting after a certain point, which may be why the choice was made to break up the acts so frequently by moving around set pieces and interjecting musical stings.

Phyllis Kay is exceptional as foul-mouthed Toni. She is both hateable and loveable--often at the same time, and she manages to really convey both in actions and dialogue why she is the way she is, and how she, and the rest of her family became who they are. Despite the fact that her character frequently causes the drama and ratchets up the tension among family members, she still has some of the funniest lines, which are delivered with perfect timing.

Similarly Fred Sullivan Jr. manages to deliver some hilarious lines and reactions, while maintaining a slight edge of malice and desperation. The juxtaposition of the way he acts toward his wife Rachel (played by Angela Brazil) and children, and the way he acts in tenser moments with Toni where he's describing his personal stake in selling the house is on par with his performance from last year's To Kill a Mockingbird, where he delivered lines as one character and then crossed the stage to become another. Never does it seem like he's acting, he just perfectly embodies the many different faces that people have to show to the world.

Angela Brazil does phenomenally well with a character who seems underwritten. She's a mother of two kids, Jewish and from New York, which the author seems to think is enough for the audience to just extrapolate everything else about her. In Act III, she has an impassioned and hilarious soliloquy about her kids, husband and how she's raising "winners", which had the audience breaking out into applause, but what she actually said didn't really jibe with anything we had learned about Rachel up to that point. Her character is so underdeveloped that it seemed like just easy, lazy writing to bring the audience to this cliched conclusion.

At the heart of this play is the notion that people have many different sides and beliefs and faces they present to the world, but the playwright seems to want us to take the character of Rachel and just distill her down to a pile of stereotypes. Brazil does an admirable job with a flimsy foundation, but upon reflecting on all the characters in this play, most of the women are just playing tropes--the caretaker, the mother and the savior/muse, and the men are much more complicated. The character of Toni gets the most development, but she's only defined by her relationships to the men in her life, and how she's sacrificed for them, while they haven't done the same for her.

APPROPRIATE is certainly a complex look at family and relationships, but sometimes feels like it's trying to do too much half as well as it could. The somewhat rote character development is mostly drowned out by skillful actors who are a pleasure to watch, but the overwhelming tension at times can be jarring to watch. This is certainly a play that makes one think.

Performances run October 6 -November 6, 2016 in Trinity Rep's Dowling Theater. Tickets are available at www.trinityrep.com, by calling (401) 351-4242 or at the theater's box office at 201 Washington St., Providence.

From left to right: Phyllis Kay as Antoinette "Toni" Lafayette, Alec Weinberg as Rhys Thurston, Emeline Easton as Cassidy "Cassie" Kramer-Lafayette and Mauro Hantman as Franc?ois "Franz/Frank" Lafayette. Photo Mark Turek.

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