Review: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "Appropriate" at St. Louis Tennessee Williams Festival

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Plays at COCA through September 27

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The stage is filled with a gorgeous, sensuous set. A decaying plantation house, presented only in fragments—windows, shutters with peeling paint, a dramatic high staircase. Above and behind there are swaths of Spanish moss—that icing on the visual cake of Southern landscapes. It’s perfect! Kudos to scenic designer Matthew McCarthy .

The house lights are out. The stage is still dark. And then there are the cicadas!! These sonorous insects sing an ocean of song. It comes from here, there, everywhere—starting and stopping, swelling, fading. This chorus conquers this house and all of us. Throughout the play it accompanies the troubled souls we watch—never quite disappearing. I grew up with such a sound at bed-time, and I simply adore it. In this treatment sound designer Mary Robinson perfectly captures the expressed intention of the playwright, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins .

This is all so very appropriate for the play Appropriate , which is now playing in the Berges Theatre at COCA as part of he Tennessee Williams Festival.

Jacobs-Jenkins is a more than promising young American playwright. His career is bespangled with awards including a Fullbright to Germany, a McArthur fellowship, a Pulitzer, an Obie, a Tony and many others. So this guy’s got the goods! I first saw Appropriate at the Humana Festival in 2013, and I was impressed. In 2022 I saw this playwright’s Everybody (a modernization of the medieval Everyman ) and I left the theater saying to myself, “THAT is what theater is for!” Yes, he’s got the goods!

In the stage-dark of this large room a window opens. A head pops in. A man and a young woman climb in. These are Frank Lafayette and his hippie girl-friend River.

Three Lafayette siblings and their families are gathering at the old plantation house to settle the affairs and estate of their father, who died recently. This is such a dreadfully familiar dramatic trope: Family resentments, betrayals and hostilities drift through the air; accusations are flung in all directions; horrid old family secrets are unearthed; perhaps a few fisticuffs? (You know the program.) Today this premise is so common it has become almost the default premise for plays. This premise is as tired and worn as the paint-shabby premises into which Frank and River climb. But … this is such a brilliant playwright; let’s give him a chance.

Casting is near perfect. It includes some of the very finest actors in St. Louis.

Odds and ends of furniture and various junk clutter every corner. Grandpa was a hoarder.

This is (of course) a casually dysfunctional family. The dialogue is filled with fruitless hostility and sometimes artificial anger. Toni, in particular, indulges in arbitrary shouting. And in this production every use of the words “f***” or “c***” is sledge-hammered, rather than being employed naturally.

But the structure of this family—the complex sibling relationships and history—are deftly revealed and explored by the playwright.

Eventually a great shock occurs. While sorting through the heaps of junk, someone finds A VERY OLD photo album—a great collection of photos of lynchings! And as if this weren’t ghastly enough, there are Mason jars full of pickled anatomical souvenirs of lynchings. The family is torn apart by the obsessive (and somehow silly) question: “Was Grandpa a racist?” Rachael responds to the album by very correctly clutching her pearls and panicking lest her precious daughter should see such things. (Perhaps that’s the meaning of the title? What is the “Appropriate” response to a discovery like this.)

Now Grandpa had been a highly respected Washington lawyer. He was even viewed as a possible candidate for the Supreme Court. After retiring to the old Arkansas home even his black caretaker described him as “the nicest gentleman”.

Lynching is a shameful episode in American history, arising after the Civil War and flourishing almost as public entertainment for decades. It spiked when men came back from World War I. The returning soldiers resented black competition for jobs. The most notorious incident was the labor riot and massacre in Elaine, Arkansas, in1919—the largest lynching in history. Lynching pretty much died out after World War II.

So playwright Jacobs-Jenkins properly placed his play in Arkansas. But Grandpa would have been a mere child when lynching was in the headlines. So that photo album? Who collected it?

History haunts us. The cicadas whisper it to us. There are two graveyards on the old estate—a white one, where all the stones are toppled, and a slave one, where there never were any stones. Both of them murmur their thoughts on the family.

There are many good scenes in this play—and a few awkward ones. Late at night, River and Cassidy contemplate the photo album. This is so intimate, so real. And Cassidy shows a lovely precocious cynicism when she wants to upload these pictures to Facebook.

The actors playing Cassidy and Rhys give strong performances, but they are both about five years too old for these roles. This, alas, tends to preclude sine if the adolescent innocence their scenes should have.

Joel Moses has the most challenging role as Frank (or, as he now prefers, “Franz”). He does beautiful work in all, but his middle-of-the-night scene with his nephew Rhys is impossibly awkward. Frank interrupts Rhys in a moment of late-night self-pleasure. Frank launches into a weird, quite unnatural monologue on the dangers of irregular sex and his own involvement in it. This is simply poor writing. No man would talk like that. It’s an impossible speech.

And later, after Frank has baptized himself in the lake, he has an amazingly long monologue about his spiritual rebirth. Here the rest of the cast is simply standing there like fence-posts, which makes Frank’s speech even more difficult to deliver realistically.

There is a scene where the antagonism devolves into an all out bar-room brawl, with everybody hitting and wrestling everybody. The audience (admirably) laughed. I was reminded of the gratuitous physical fight between mother and daughter in August Osage County.

There’s a unanimous adult agreement that the “appropriate” thing to do with the album is to destroy it. But … Bo finds that the photos may be worth really big money (six figures) to “special collectors”. What path is “appropriate” now? This moral dilemma is not quite sufficiently explored by the script.

The very final moments in this production are profoundly wrong. After all the accusing and forgiving, the illusions and rationalizations, the shocks and revulsions—after these troubled souls have left the stage to go back to their everyday lives—we are subjected to a montage of recorded clips from radio and TV about the history of lynchings, the oppression of blacks, the civil rights protests. It’s one quick headline after another—a parade of overlapping outrages and demonstrations. It’s a lecture—a mini-documentary—rather as if presented by the old March of Time. This is certainly not in the script! It’s been added by the director—and it amounts to vandalism to Jacobs-Jenkins’ script. High above the fragmental walls is a draped banner with the words “We the People”. In one corner, partly hidden by other junk, is a “Colored Only” sign. None of this is specified by the playwright. These patently political touches simply do not belong in this intimate piece about how a family deals with guilt, stress and shame.

Nevertheless this is a fine and interesting production of an excellent (if imperfect) play. It is directed by Benny Sato Ambush.

(I’m not sure, though, that it has much to do with Tennessee Williams .)

It continues at COCA through September 27.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/st-louis/article/Review-APPROPRIATE-at-St-Louis-Tennessee-Williams-Festival-At-COCA-20260920)._