A Tale of Two Graveyards

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 'Appropriate'

Warning: This review of a current play (running through June 23) contains potentially triggering descriptions of racial violence. This review also contains plot spoilers.

Photo (of Appropriate’s playwright, director, and leads) via The New York Times

Much is made of a play’s opening line.

Consider the iconic “Who’s there?” opening of Shakespeare’s five-act exploration of identity, paranoia, madness, conspiracy, and the supernatural in Hamlet, or the fatalistic “Nothing to be done” beginning of Samuel Beckett’s existential tragicomedy Waiting for Godot. A play’s first words often signal the thematic preoccupations to come… and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins knows this conceit well.

Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur Genius Fellow and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, is an avid student of drama. His play An Octoroon (2014) is a blistering dissection of 19^th century melodrama. His latest revival Appropriate, now on Broadway, borrows from realist and melodramatic American theatrical traditions that recall canonical plays by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Eugene O’Neill.

It's no accident, therefore, that Appropriate’s opening line— “What is that?”— is spoken by a white character breaking into an old Southern plantation home in the dead of night. Appropriate is a play about haunting: about rightful ownership, contested histories, and fraught afterlives. The play’s opening line (“What is that?”) refers to the deafening sound of cicadas as two characters creep up the family lawn and in through the window. To access the house, these characters must first pass through two graveyards: one containing the remains of illustrious white family members, and the other an unmarked burial site for slaves.

Here Jacobs-Jenkins establishes the central tensions of his piece. Appropriate’s figurative “first graveyard” is the formally recognized narrative we see unfold onstage: a story of three white siblings returning home to sort through possessions after their father’s death. It is a personal family drama of bitterness and resentment, typical of American realist theater. Appropriate’s figurative “second graveyard” is the unacknowledged yet politically deafening narrative beneath: a story of slavery, white supremacy, and neglect.

This structural duality is evident in the play’s title, which can be read in two different ways. Appropriate as an adjective describes the first narrative: “suitable or fitting for a particular purpose, belonging to or particular to a person.” Appropriate as a verb describes the second narrative: “to take possession of, without permission or consent, to seize.”

… Are you with me so far?! The play is dense, provocative, and layered— in short, it’s classic Jacobs-Jenkins. With Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins offers audiences two stratified plays and demonstrates how these two plays— like the graveyards within— are buried together in the same contested terrain.

Appropriate is itself an excavation: one that unfolds as the white Lafayette family holds an estate sale to literally and figuratively purge the clutter amassed by their late hoarder-of-a-father. Toni (Sarah Paulson), Bo (Corey Stoll), and Frank (Michael Esper) gather to clean out their father’s home before they “put it up for auction.” Sorting through their father’s possessions, they discover an album filled with lynching photographs of Black people. The three siblings (and their partners and children) are forced to reckon with the ugly truth they’ve unearthed: “whatever the case, he didn’t deal with it and now he’s dead, so it’s our problem.”

Each sibling responds to the album’s discovery differently— and each response exemplifies a different attitude towards America’s legacy of white supremacy. Toni defends the memory of her father at all costs and refuses to entertain the idea of his latent racism (“name one instance of our father’s prejudice”). Bo acknowledges his father’s racism, yet he also attempts to capitalize on his racist legacy of violence and exploitation for financial gain (“I mean, those things were antiques! They were valuable!”). Frank, filled with guilt and shame, seeks forgiveness to expunge the sins of the past— without any real personal or collective responsibility (“I’m a different person now! Why won’t you let me be different?”).

Everyone in Appropriate is tainted by this familial legacy. Every single character onstage touches the album at some point in the play, including the family’s young children. Despite many disastrous attempts to “deal with” the photos— including selling them at a private auction and drowning them in the estate lake— several photos are smuggled out by Bo’s teenage daughter and Toni’s teenage son (“they’re worth money”). Due to the lack of any meaningful reckoning with what the photos mean, the family curse endures; passed down to the next generation as the Lafayette children distribute their “inheritance.”

Many reviewers have pointed out that Appropriate’s appropriate casting amplifies its overarching themes. In her review for The New Yorker, Helen Shaw writes:

“Some of the added drive comes from a sly use of star casting. Natalie Gold plays Rachael, Bo’s harried wife, and Gold’s other recent role, as the ex-wife of Kendall Roy, on ‘Succession,’ clings to her character here like a shadow. There are echoes, too, in this huge, haunted house, of Paulson’s much lauded work on ‘Ratched’ and ‘American Horror Story,’ and of Stoll’s performance as a sneaky billionaire on ‘Billions.’ All three are associated with certain pulpy portraits of American rot, which adds an extra valence to the allegory. This character-by-association trick also works for Elle Fanning, who plays Frank’s twenty-three-year-old fiancée and hippie-dippie enabling sprite, River. From her first entrance, River has the air of a Machiavel, charged with the afterimage of Fanning’s role as Empress Catherine in ‘The Great.’”

Yet these performers also carry associations from other narratives of family conflict. Recall Paulson’s turn as cousin Michelle in that infamous, jaw-dropping episode of The Bear’s second season, featuring a family reunion as rancorous as the one in Appropriate. Or Stoll’s embodiment of the embittered elder brother in This Is Where I Leave You: a story of a dysfunctional family sitting shiva after their father’s death. Even Elle Fanning’s portrayal of the waiflike Princess Aurora in Maleficent overlays her “sweet girl” character River in Appropriate, as well as both characters’ unexpected cunning. All of these residual associations work in the play’s favor— the play’s performers, like its characters, must tow the stories of their past.

At the end of Appropriate, the Lafayette siblings attempt to purify the story of their relationships with one another. In her desire for a functional, loving family narrative, Toni insists: “We don’t seem to be on the same page, memory-wise. We can’t seem to get our stories straight […] Put me out of my misery because I don’t like myself in these stories— in whatever stories you’re telling.” These attempts to rewrite the Lafayette family history parallel efforts to whitewash the legacy of slavery from the Lafayette family home.

But the Lafayette siblings aren’t the sole narrators in, and of, Appropriate. Jacobs-Jenkins employs an all-white cast to illuminate the negative space occupied by the play’s invisible Black characters. The playwright frequently invokes the supernatural to introduce themes of resurrection and reparation (“‘I’m sorry’ is one of the oldest rituals we have” / “Sometimes a place can have its own spirit. A house this old can hold all sorts of things— not just ghosts— bad energies, memories.”). The white Lafayette patriarch is an obvious specter that haunts both the house and the play (“Maybe he wanted us to let it go”). Yet the plantation’s unavenged slaves also seem to communicate through the home itself (“Maybe this house is trying to say something to us right now”). In one of Appropriate’s most rattling sequences, the youngest Lafayette child runs downstairs wearing a Klan hood found in his grandfather’s closet (“We’re playing ghosts!”). Throughout Appropriate, ghostly apparitions are mapped onto the all-too-real horrors of slavery and white supremacy.

With Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins lends new meaning to the supernatural references of traditional Western theater: from Hamlet’s ghost crying “Avenge me” to Suzan Lori-Parks refrain in Venus (“I regret to inform you that thuh Venus Hottentot iz dead … There wont b inny show tonite”). Jacobs-Jenkins’s previous work, including An Octoroon and The Comeuppance (which I wrote about in a previous Substack piece) fixates on the thematic implications of death, resurrection, and haunting in theatrical performance.

Steeped as he is in classical dramatic traditions, Jacobs-Jenkins demonstrates how theatrical conventions themselves can “speak for” the dead. For instance, Appropriate concludes with a mind-boggling scenic design sequence, in which the illustrious Lafayette home gradually falls into disrepair before the audience. Thunderstorms wear down the house’s structural integrity, windows are smashed by unseen trespassers, and eventually a massive tree sprouts up through the floorboards of the dilapidated home. A battered chandelier drops down from the ceiling; its hanging presence beside the tree visually fuses the house’s physical ruin with the house’s history of violence against Black people.

This entirely wordless sequence conjures what scholar Saidiya Hartman calls “the silence in the archive”: the chasm that represents the invisible record of American atrocities committed against Black subjects. In Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins practices what Hartman describes as an act of listening for the muffled “groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead.”

I believe that Jacobs-Jenkins is our greatest living playwright— not only because of his deep wells of dramatic knowledge, his unparalleled textual virtuosity, and his ability to walk the tightrope between comic and tragic registers, but also because he deploys theater as a medium for reckoning with sociopolitical challenges. In Appropriate, the mercenary Bo retorts: “Toni, do you have any idea how expensive it is to dig up a graveyard?” The play itself suggests that— on political and spiritual levels— it’s too costly not to begin digging. As American citizens, we have no chance at an integrated, familial future if we do not acknowledge and atone for the egregious sins of our past. We can start that process by doing what the Lafayette siblings could not: sitting in the discomfort of seeing ourselves and our grisly history.

Appropriate runs through June 23^rd, 2024.

Photo via The New York Times

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