Branden Jacobs-Jenkins invites you to look.
The playwright, a two-time Pulitzer prize finalist and MacArthur “genius” fellow, is marking his Broadway debut with the return of his acclaimed play Appropriate, back in New York nearly 10 years after its premiere.
“It’s been kind of an amazing experience. It’s so rare to have something that you’ve done get a glow-up,” Jacobs-Jenkins told the Guardian in a phone interview.
With an all-star ensemble including Sarah Paulson and Elle Fanning, Appropriate follows the bitter Lafayette siblings as they reconvene at the home of their recently departed patriarch. While clearing out their childhood home, a former Arkansas plantation, they uncover a kaleidoscope of family secrets.
Though set in 2010, the play is itself a living, punctual work. Bigoted characters, particularly the children, are given additional meaning in a post-Trump administration world.
The play is about the act of looking back, of witnessing. The Lafayette siblings, and their children, each take turns looking at, squirming at and attempting to hide their family history.
But for Jacobs-Jenkins, the play, especially a decade on, has ushered in a personal reflection on how his life and artistry has evolved. Directed by Lila Neugebauer, a friend of Jacobs-Jenkins since 2013, Appropriate invites Jacobs-Jenkins to trace his own journey, which he recounts with an enthralling, sincere and detailed spirit.
Amid many life developments, parenthood proves to be one of the biggest changes for Jacobs-Jenkins, now a father to a three-year-old.
“I understood the siblings, the parents, in a deeper way,” Jacobs-Jenkins said. “Just having had the experience of what it is to love an innocent, unknowing, new human being so deeply.”
Additional time with the material has also allowed him to tackle storylines that his younger, 27-year-old self simply ran out of time to address. But overall, amid a bushel of accolades, Jacobs-Jenkins said the biggest shift career-wise had been the ability to fully embrace himself as an artist.
“I’ve stopped needing to ask for permission, honestly, stopped wanting to ask for permission,” Jacobs-Jenkins said.
Appropriate is many things. It is a family drama. It is a hilarious allegory. Like much of Jacobs-Jenkins’s work, Appropriate includes a command of bold imagery and language, where characters treat inherited violence with a searing casualness but also as a ticking bomb. All these elements have become part of Jacobs-Jenkins’s signature, yet evolving, style.
Across a bounty of plays, Jacobs-Jenkins has dissected identity, tribalism and broader questions of humanity with anthropologic precision. His work attempts to “stimulate people into a greater understanding of who they were and what they were”, he said.
Of his influences, he counts “everything happening off-off-Broadway [in] the 70s and 60s,” including work by the playwrights Sam Shepard and Adrienne Kennedy. He is also deeply affected by a litany of Black visual artists: Kerry James Marshall, Glenn Ligon and Adrian Piper, to name a few.
“I became obsessed with reading their interviews and notebooks and things that kind of talked about their process, because I wasn’t seeing that kind of thought in the theater,” Jacobs-Jenkins said. “I was connecting so intensely to it as a human.”
He also named the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and the playwright August Wilson as impactful, specifically Wilson’s goal of approaching his work with an “anthropological eye”.
“Coming across those two ideas made me go, ‘Wait, what if I have a different strategy when it comes to how I think about my creative work,’” Jacobs-Jenkins said.
Jacobs-Jenkins’s methodology has clearly proven successful. But despite major recognitions, he said being on Broadway didn’t feel like a given. “The culture I was coming up in [was one] where that just wasn’t happening if you were a Black artist,” he said.
To be at that stage, especially with such a subversive work, is a complicated experience for Jacobs-Jenkins. On one hand, he fully recognizes Broadway as an “important cultural marker”.
“My mom and aunt knows what Broadway is. When I was out here making performance art, my elementary school principal came to a performance and was like, ‘Oh, when will we see you on Broadway?’” he said.
But he is acutely aware of the theater industry’s frustrating treatment of Black artists, particularly its reductive tokenization.
“I think my career was based on making people uncomfortable who want to do that,” Jacobs-Jenkins said of flattening labels. “[But] if they can’t figure out how to like, talk about artists as artists, rather than tokens, then like, what are we out here doing?” he added.
The theater industry is still rife with false expectations around work by Black artists, he said. Beliefs that shows by Black artists will close early, the slotting of those plays in the fall, eons before award voting takes place. “Once you see how the sausage gets made, it’s hard to be obsessed with sausage,” he said.
But amid those concerns, Jacobs-Jenkins recognizes the “radical” nature of Broadway, specifically when it comes to audiences arriving to his plays.
“People are showing up with no context for the play. They don’t know what it’s about. They don’t know what or who I am. And, watching them go on this ride has been very special,” he said.
Jacobs-Jenkins also added that Broadway had the ability to attract a phenomenal ensemble of actors, as seen in Appropriate. Gushing about the cast, he highlighted the work of Paulson, who stars as the eldest Lafayette sibling.
“She’s unafraid to play something ugly,” he said of Paulson’s raw depiction. “That bravery to me is what actually defines an artist. And, that’s why I think it’s so cool to work with her,” he added.
With Appropriate’s opening night near, Jacobs-Jenkins lives in the experience as a “blessing”, especially backed by such a thrilling ensemble.
“This is such a gift, [especially] getting to see audiences on this level,” he said.
