Family dysfunction meets racial amnesia in Appropriate, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ savage drama, now on tap at the Taper after runs in Louisville, Sundance and New York. The three-act play is set in a plantation house in southeast Arkansas where the Lafayette family has gathered to divvy up what’s left of the long-squandered estate.
It seems that recently deceased Grandpa Lafayette ran the huge house into the ground despite being a Harvard-trained lawyer and a local big-shot. The news that he was also bi-polar—and a secret member of the KKK—comes as a surprise to most of the family, the playwright would have us believe.
That is just one of the many contrivances in Appropriate, which takes place in mid-summer when the cicadas are going crazy in the trees outside, raising an ear-splitting din which becomes an over-used symbol (nature gone wild) as the story unfolds. The ex-cotton plantation was large enough to have its own lake and two cemeteries, in one of which five generations of Lafayettes are respectfully buried. The other holds the remains of the plantation’s former slaves, and is, of course, unmarked and forgotten, especially by the living family members. What forces these obtuse people into even thinking about the plantation’s tainted history is the discovery of Grandpa’s secret photo album, which contains ante-bellum snapshots of blacks being whipped and even lynched by the local populace. Good old Grandad also collected slave body parts, which he pickled, put in jars, and stored in his study. To go with that caricature, Jenkins gives us a gallery of broadly drawn characters, which includes Toni (the remarkable Melora Hardin), the eldest and sharpest-tongued sibling; her alienated son Rhys (Will Tranfo); her resentful brother Bo (David Bishins) and his Jewish wife Rachel (Missy Yager). Also prominent is the family’s prodigal son Frank (Robert Beitzel) and his New Agey girlfriend River (Zarah Mahler). Frank, who prefers to be called Franz because he’s trying to start a new life for himself, left home because he was not only a drunk and a drug addict but a pedophile (though he really only committed statutory rape with an under-aged girl). The cast also includes some children: 13-year-old Cassie (Grace Kaufman), the only sympathetic member of the family; and Ainsley (Liam Blair Askew), Bo and Rachel’s young son, who has a nice bit when he makes an entrance wearing Grandpa’s KKK hood. Most of the play is taken up with family squabbles, one of which turns violently comic a la August: Osage County, the others of which, alas, become tedious, especially over the long, three-act haul. Playwright Jenkins tries hard to make us think about race, history, and the destruction of the American Dream. He makes many telling points and writes a number of scathingly funny and satirical scenes but, spurred on by his over-indulgent director, keeps going over the top in this well-meaning but ultimately irritating and unsuccessful play.
