Two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and Obie Award winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon) and Drama Desk Award winner Lila Neugebauer (The Waverly Gallery, 2ST’s Mary Page Marlowe) invite you to one helluva reunion in the darkly comic American family drama, APPROPRIATE.
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 (Paulson), 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.
Appropriate is a masterwork the likes of which crop up a handful of times per generation. Jacobs-Jenkins has crafted parallel statements on our relationships to ourselves and our families, convenient narratives and difficult truths, and ownership and entitlement, tied together by a profound clarity regarding the self-cannibalizing exploitation engendered by a pathological need to profit at all costs. Saluting the greatest works of modern theatre and the darkest lessons of human history, it deftly ties together the disparate strands of a country beholden to a state of perpetual haunting.
There is, strangely but maybe tellingly, very little reflection of the racist history staring the Lafayettes in the face, or what their responsibility should be toward it. Instead, the family is stuck in the fault-line of the two meanings of the title of the play. The audience I sat among sighed at the characters’ insensitivity and myopia, and their ability to say and absolutely do the wrong thing, or ignore what is right in front of them. Appropriate shows how the persistence of racism and prejudice does not just come down to the practice of overt racism, but the practice of unthinking, lazy, deliberate ignorance.
General Rush:
Price: $45
Where: Belasco Theatre box office
When: When the box office opens on the day of the performance.
Limit: Two per customer.
Information: Subject to daily availability. The box office opens Tuesday through Saturday at 10 AM ET and Sunday at 12 PM ET.
Digital Lottery:
Price: $45
Where: rush.telecharge.com
When: 12 AM ET, one day before the performance.
Limit: Two per customer
Information: Tickets are subject to availability. Seats may be partial view. Winners will be drawn that same morning at 10 AM ET and then later that afternoon at 3 PM ET.
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