Review: APPROPRIATE at Olney Theatre Center
Olney presents an ambitious and sprawling family drama with Appropriate
I like to cook. It’s been one of my hobbies most of my adult life, and I’ve grown a lot in my skill over the years with much practice. My wife often lovingly teases me about all the space my cooking instruments take up in our kitchen storage spaces. Like most things, there’s been quite a bit of trial and error involved.
One of the finer points of the culinary arts that, for some reason, took me some time (and some gentle teasing from my housemates at the time) to master was understanding that there’s a range of settings with the burners on the top of the stove. This sounds incredibly basic, but younger me seemed to understand just two settings: very hot or turned off. You can imagine the error in the “trial and error” I mentioned earlier. To illustrate this, I’ll paint you a quick picture. Any time I wanted to make a sauce, or anything with a decent amount of liquid involved, I ended up with a scorched mess in the pan with streaks of whatever substance I was attempting all over the stove and/or kitchen walls.
Now, as an older, wiser (debatable) man, I understand that good sauce takes patience. Slow and low will reveal stunning results. However, another important lesson is that very hot still has its place. Both cooking methods can produce good dishes, but it’s a matter of knowing when to use them at the right time. It depends on the story you want to tell….er….the dish you want to make.
I don’t bring this up because I confused this review with my personal kitchen blog. I bring this up because Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s APPROPRIATE, like me in college, takes the “very hot” route with its storytelling. It’s dangerous and reckless and splatters its drama all over the inside of the sprawling but dilapidated Arkansas plantation home. No slow and low here, even though the runtime is ironically just a little over two-and-a-half hours.
The drama spills over the frying pan, and it’s relentless. By the end, the audience is just as exhausted as the players on stage, and we can’t help but feel like there’s a big mess to clean up still. However, unlike my novice exploits in my college dorm’s kitchen, the final dish still somehow comes together, and it’s darn near Michelin quality.
Jacobs-Jenkins high heat drama tells the story of a surviving family in the latter stages of clearing out and selling the patriarch’s home in rural Arkansas. The once sprawling plantation has been in the family for seven generations, but with their late father’s passing, the time has come for the adult children to sell the home.
Though the home is deeply ingrained in the family’s story, in a myriad of ways we come to find out, none of father’s surviving three children has any interest in keeping the property. Now cluttered and falling into ruin, the house is more of a burden than an asset, and the only person who seemed to have any affinity for the property is now dead and gone. In fact, only one of the three children spent any significant time there at all.
Toni (Kimberly Gilbert), the eldest of the three, has been appointed executor of her father’s estate and is doing her best to manage the affairs. However, she seems to have bitten off more than she can chew as she’s certainly got no shortage of challenges in her own life. A recent divorcee and single mother, her son Rhys (Cole Alex Edelstein) provides all the wonderful challenges of raising a teenager who’s navigating his own plentiful struggles. Whether it’s her son or her siblings, Toni constantly finds herself thrust into the caretaker role and never seems to volunteer for the responsibility either. She’s often putting others in front of her own needs, and as she remarks to another character, she never seems to save enough “sugar” for herself.
Bo (played by Cody Nickell), the middle child of the group, arrives with family in tow - his wife Rachael (Dina Thomas) and his two children Cassidy (Kirsten Cocks) and Ainsley (David Snyder). They’ve turned this sombre affair into a family road trip through the South to explore Bo’s heritage - a nice thought on paper but fraught in reality. Having distanced himself and started a life in New York City, Bo seems at first to be the most removed from the property and the family. His family takes on this attitude, and they collectively approach the situation and the house as complete strangers interacting with something so foreign and other.
The youngest sibling is Franz (Jamie Smithson), who arrives at the home first with his much younger girlfriend, River (Brigid Wallace Harper). A prodigal son of sorts, he’s disappeared for nearly a decade with very little contact with the other siblings, so his return is shocking on many levels. Ready to make amends as part of his alcohol and drug addiction recovery, he hopes to achieve not only some kind of reconciliation but a way forward with his siblings. However, as is often the case with families, it’s not quite as he would hope.
In the aftermath of their father’s death, the house serves as a beacon to the siblings as they each return to the place of their roots. The house becomes a painful reminder of so much - a reminder of the grief and mourning of their father and of their childhoods that they wish to leave behind.
To complicate matters further, the house comes to symbolise not only the father but also all the painful and wretched secrets that are revealed as the play unfolds. To summarise those secrets would spoil the appetite of future audiences, but suffice to say, each sibling’s course is altered by the revelations. Not to mention that each sibling brings with them their own baggage, both literally and figuratively.
If this sounds like a dense drama with lots of moving parts, that’s because it very intentionally is. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s work is bold and ambitious, and his sprawling script and threads of familial drama are perfectly in theme with the vast plantation home interior created by Scenic Designer Nadir Bey. It’s hard not to be reminded of the Southern family dramas of Williams and Faulkner or the more modern works beyond the South like those by Arthur Miller, August Wilson, and Tracey Letts.
An ambitious piece requires bold casting choices, and Olney’s production delivers in spades. As the default matriarch of the surviving family, Kimberly Gilbert delivers a visceral performance as Toni. In Act II especially, Gilbert bares Toni’s soul and guides us through her insecurities, faults, and everything in between. The intensity of her performance is a bit jarring and perhaps out of place in Act I, but one can easily forgive these moments when considering the weight of Act II’s dynamism.
As the middle child, Cody Nickell is exceptional as Bo. The character is a classic middle child - often forgotten, diplomatic with both siblings, and trying to find where they fit. Luckily for us, Jacobs-Jenkins gives Bo an intriguing character arc that doesn’t fully form until the play’s epilogue, and Nickell handles this journey with skill. As Franz, the youngest sibling, Jamie Smithson perfectly balances the character’s brokenness with the serio-comic side to deliver a nuanced performance that makes the audience lean a little closer when he’s on stage. He steals Act II during the play’s climax, and he brings an honesty to a character that could very easily lean into caricature.
Each sibling brings at least one family member along for the ride, and Jacobs-Jenkins takes up ample space filling in these secondary but critical characters. Toni’s troubled, delinquent son, Rhys, is played by Broadway veteran Cole Alex Edelstein. Edelstein takes on one of the more challenging roles for a teenager here as Rhys battles his own demons from substance abuse to sexual identity, all while dealing with the trauma of his parents' divorce and troubling family history. He’s often playing opposite Cassidy, Bo’s daughter, played by Kirsten Cocks. A student in Olney Theater’s Musical Theatre Intensive Camp, Cocks is challenged by the play’s mature subject matter, but she displays advanced acting chops with the role. Cocks undoubtedly has a bright future ahead, and she more than holds her own alongside several DC stage veterans.
Cassidy’s younger brother, Ainsley, is played by the energetic David Snyder, who plays a brief but important part in the proceedings. Audiences should note that the roles of Cassidy and Ainsley are shared with Ruby Spencer (Cassidy) and Bennett Johnstone (Ainsley), portraying the youth roles at certain performances.
As Bo’s wife and Cassidy’s mother, Dina Thomas is a great fit for the role of Rachael. A neurotic control freak, Thomas’s Rachael struggles to keep an appropriate distance from complicated family matters among the siblings, and her personal tension with each turns up the heat throughout the play. Thomas nails the upper-middle-class, NYC mom, and she’s a great balance to the more reserved nature of Nickell’s Bo.
As Franz’s girlfriend, River, Brigid Wallace Harper is the definition of a bleeding-heart, old-soul, wise beyond her years. Interested in the energies and supernatural forces present at the 7-generation-old house, Wallace Harper’s River is both a lesson on radical empathy and a satire on Pacific Northwest crunchy granola types. She’s a fascinating ingredient to add to the pan.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s APPROPRIATE is not for the faint of heart. It’s heavy, painful, funny, violent, and dense. It takes the drama of family dynamics that would normally be stretched over the course of months and years and reduces it down to two-and-a-half hours. It’s the kind of play that will make you think your family isn’t so bad after all. You may cry, you may laugh, or you just might come away angry. These are not characters who change for the better, and it’s a bold play because some of the characters end up just as unlikable as they began - and that’s the point.
Like a person learning how to cook, you rarely ever make a mistake-free dish, and the recipe rarely looks like the picture in the book. Real life, and real cooking when you’re an amateur like me, is a product of the unexpected that got incorporated along the way to make us who we are. These characters are flawed and imperfect, and it’s refreshing to see that dramatised on stage. While slow and low is often a good strategy in cooking, don’t forget that high heat isn’t always bad. After all, who’s ever complained about a tasty stir fry?
APPROPRIATE is directed by Jason Loewith, who also serves as the organization’s Artistic Director. As mentioned, the sprawling set was designed by Nadir Bey. Other members of the creative team include: Danielle Preston (Costume Designer), Max Doolittle (Lighting Designer), Matthew M. Nielsen (Sound Designer), Casey Kaleba (Fight & Intimacy Choreographer), Erika L. Placencia (Production Stage Manager), Samba Pathak (Assistant Stage Manager), Hallie Gordon (Senior Associate Artistic Director), and Jerid Fox (Director of Production).
APPROPRIATE runs from now until April 19. The play runs approximately 2 hours and 35 minutes with 1 intermission.
Photo: Kimberly Gilbert as Toni (foreground), Jamie Smithson as Franz, and Brigid Wallace Harper as River, in "Appropriate" at Olney Theatre Center.
Photo Credit: Teresa Castracane Photography
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