If you grew up with it, there’s something inherently nostalgic about the sound of cicadas. The incessant chorus, once every 17 years, conjures something primordial, unsettling, country, past. Appropriate, the excellent production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play at the Helen Hayes Theater, plunges its audience into that portal at the show’s onset – all darkness and trilling racket. The sound design, lush and unnerving, is controlled by Bray Poor and Will Pickens.
We emerge into one of the most cluttered, almost cozy, stage set-ups I’ve seen – a cluster of lamp stands, a pile of old TVs, a defunct crockpot, buckets of board games, mountains of books on the stairs, the old mansion living room of a hoarder. Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, Andrew Moerdyk and Kimie Nishikawa, known as the multidisciplinary collective dots, did the fascinatingly detailed scenic design. And into the vortex of dysfunction that is the Lafayette family reunion on the eve of an estate sale at their late patriarch’s decaying plantation home in Arkansas, summer 2011, when Jacobs-Jenkins first began writing the play.
Appropriate, directed by Lila Neugebauer, plays as part family sitcom, part sibling death match, part sociopolitical commentary. The playwright’s first original work on Broadway after a half-dozen New York productions, this play, staged off-Broadway in 2014, remains a nimble, deft and highly entertaining work, one that twists the nostalgia of homecoming – the instinct to protect a legacy, however fraught; to gloss over the past, however painful; to bend a collective past into whatever story works best – to successful tragicomic ends.
The youngest son, Franz (Michael Esper), has been away so long he forgot about the cicadas; his eldest sibling, Toni (Sarah Paulson, the top reason among many to see this play), barely recognizes him. She lives in Atlanta with her angsty teenage son Rhys (Graham Campbell) and is licking her wounds as primary caretaker of their long-ailing father. Toni is a particularly resonant creation, the type of woman whose font of effort has curdled into resentment. Part of the play’s delight is relishing Paulson’s delivery of some truly scathing burns, particularly to Franz and his much-younger girlfriend River (Elle Fanning, echoing her archly comedic turn in The Great), an aspiring hippie with hair feathers – or as Toni, ever sharp and unforgiving, calls her, a “walking rape fantasy”. Credit to costume designer Dede Ayite – River does seem like a 2011-ish hostel creature.
It being a family reunion, everyone has competing motivations, compelling cases to make and grievances to lodge. Toni wants credit, obedience, control and also maybe to turn back the clock. Franz, a long-lost addict with a sordid past, wants forgiveness. Middle child Bo (Corey Stoll), now a wealthy New Yorker, wants to wash his hands of the business (also, money). His wife Rachael (Natalie Gold, known for playing the long-suffering, underused Rava Roy on Succession) wants to give a contrived family/southern history lesson to her two sheltered children, 13-year-old Cassidy (Alyssa Emily Marvin) and eight-year-old Ainsley (Lincoln Cohen and Everett Sobers). Cassidy, experiencing her first crush, wants to be treated like an adult. Rhys, a self-described “fuck up”, wants to be left alone.
All of this is succinctly and deftly rendered, the material for an enjoyable slugfest of slights and fights; the first act of what amounts to a 2hr 40min show (including intermission) whizzes by, a thrill of discomfort, laughs or both. And it is deeply complicated by the discovery of some dark family secrets – Confederates in the attic, horrifying relics of Jim Crow and especially an album of damning photos which pass among the family like a hot potato, wreaking havoc in its wake. Toni is particularly indignant in the face of evidence that her father, a DC circuit judge bred in the Jim Crow south, was racist, or that it was his fault. Paulson makes this not only believable (of course – we know this response) but understandable, human, even funny. What could be, in another actor’s hands, too withering and wearying becomes, with Paulson’s blend of straitened anger and disappointment, fascinating. Toni is frequently wrong, often deluded, a black hole of short-sighted suffering, but she is never dismissible, never fully a joke.
The same could be said for the rest of the family, who each have the capacity for cruelty, inflicted or tolerated, as well as kindness, none of whom ever fully reckon with the revelations. They find their escape from it. From the minute the photos are found, the Lafayettes circle the drain of misunderstandings, resentment and denial, in ways I do not in any way want to spoil and which drew consistent, mostly earned laughs until a somewhat bald resolution, of sorts, and a haunting coda. “Do you believe there’s a danger in knowing too much?” says Cassidy, tossing away the horror of the photos for connection with her cousin. For this family’s well-rendered self-conception, absolutely, in ways that are scathing, moving and funny at once.
