Appropriate
Opening Night: December 18, 2023
Theater: Helen Hayes Theatre
Website: 2st.com
It’s summer, the cicadas are singing, and the Lafayette family has returned to their late patriarch’s Arkansas home to deal with the remains of his estate. Toni, the eldest daughter, hopes they’ll spend the weekend remembering and reconnecting over their beloved father. Bo, her brother, wants to recoup some of the funds he spent caring for Dad at the end of his life. But things take a turn when their estranged brother, Franz, appears late one night, and mysterious objects are discovered among the clutter. Suddenly, long-hidden secrets and buried resentments can’t be contained, and the family is forced to face the ghosts of their past.
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December 18, 2023
Rereading my scathing review in light of what is obviously a rave today, I am forced to grapple with my own past, and the play’s. It would be easy to say that the difference between then and now is the heavy rewriting Jacobs-Jenkins has done in the interim. And certainly, comparing the two scripts, I see the clearer dramatic architecture and sharper point-of-view that a playwright in his prime, at 38, can impose.
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December 19, 2023
When plays demonstrate as much merit as “Appropriate,” it’s difficult to identify which star in director Lila Neugebauer’s galaxy shines brightest. Is it Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ masterful script, laced with insightful irony and biting prose? Is it scenic design collective dots’ lifelike erection of the aging home, littered with racist relics? Or is it the hypnotizing synergy of this ensemble, all of whom balance the horrible actions and the redeeming hearts of these human beings with ease? Yes to all.
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December 18, 2023
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Appropriate,” now playing on Broadway, is a searing narrative about family ties, past hurts and unbridled pain. It’s a shocking play centering on legacy, race and the fragility of memory.
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December 18, 2023
A blistering family drama directed by Lila Neugebauer (easily matching her exemplary work in 2018’s The Waverly Gallery), Appropriate is a wicked cacophony of nerve-wrenching mystery, old resentments and laugh-out-loud comedy – the latter all the more remarkable coming, as it does, within a story about the darkest horrors of America’s legacies.
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December 18, 2023
In the sensitive hands of director Lila Neugebauer and her top-notch cast, these people are complicated and they’re blinkered, monstrous and pitiable, trying and failing, not individually hateful and collectively matured in a slow cooker of unexamined bias and malice.
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December 18, 2023
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play Appropriate, premiering on Broadway in a spellbinding Second Stage Theatre production after an off-Broadway run nearly a decade ago, is an astonishing work of American fact and fiction.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 18, 2023
Appropriate, which first bowed off Broadway in 2014, has all the hallmarks of a great American drama — and then some.
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December 18, 2023
Of course, historical baggage comes with the heirloom furniture, as becomes all too clear in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriate, now making its jaw-dropping Broadway debut with Second Stage at the Helen Hayes Theater. It is easily the most electrifying Broadway play of 2023 — something I didn’t expect from a drama that received mixed notices when it first performed off-Broadway in 2014.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 18, 2023
Not since Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s “August: Osage County” has Broadway seen such a blistering display of ensemble acting as there is to be found at Lila Neugebauer’s ruthless and riveting production of “Appropriate,” Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ ironically titled play about a combative, wounded and self-loathing family who rip each other into little pieces over their dead patriarch’s legacies.
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December 18, 2023
The rotten apples don’t fall very far from the dead tree in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s great family comedy “Appropriate.” First seen in 2014, the play receives its belated but totally riveting first Broadway production, which opened Monday at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater.
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December 18, 2023
This is also a play, directed by Lila Neugebauer, of interweaving layers and intentions: a raucous, argument-filled family drama meets comedy, and a pointed indictment of racism meets ghost story. There are no visible ghosts, but the past vibrates meaningfully in each scene.
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