STAGE WEST: "Appropriate" at the Old Globe

Left to right: Daniel Petzold, Maggie Lacy and Steve Kazee in "Appropriate."                 Photo by Jim Cox

            Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Appropriate” is not a haunted-house drama. Or is it?
          When the extended Lafayette family in the wake of their patriarch’s death descends upon the rundown Arkansas plantation mansion in which he resided the horrors come quickly. First, the discovery of a photo album containing graphic images of lynchings along with a few other “artifacts” in jars that suggest a history of violent racism.
            Second, there’s the horrible family itself.
            The eldest of the Lafayettes, Toni, is raging with anger and bitterness over the many ways in which life has turned against her, all while trying without much luck to be a mother to a troubled teenage son. She’s been named the executor of her father’s estate, the disposition of which has brought her estranged relations to Arkansas.
            Among them is middle brother Beauregard (“Bo”) from New York with his wife and two children, a lot of impatience and no small resentment over Toni being executor. 
            Youngest brother Frank, the acknowledged family f-up, shows up with a much-younger fiancée who’s right out of the Transcendental Granola Catalog. Frank, now calling himself Franz, brings with him a lurid past that includes alcohol and drug abuse and a sex-crime conviction.
            The premise is that the surviving Lafayettes are there to hold an auction and an estate sale to pay off their father’s debts and collect (if not split up evenly) whatever’s left.
            Then the photo album enters the picture.
            The Old Globe Theatre under the direction of Steve H. Broadnax is staging this absolutely wrenching production of “Appropriate,” which last year won the Tony on Broadway for Best Revival of a Play.
            I can’t remember the last time I experienced a dramatic production as unsettling and frequently unpleasant as this one while at once being completely engrossed. Talk about a train wreck you can’t turn away from.
            The battling Lafayettes and those attached to them (Bo’s pugnacious spouse Rachael, Frank’s “enlightened” partner River, Toni’s sulking, self-pleasuring son Rhys) in no time flat turn the magnificently brooding set designed by Arnel Sancianco into an arena of verbal and even physical assault. What the damning photographs mean, what they say about the family patriarch, and what the hell to do with them is only half of the no-holds-barred conflict. The other half is the sibs’ wars with each other, on multiple fronts.
            Toni, played with sheer ferocity by Maggie Lacey, careens from being attacker to martyr and back again. I could sense the recoil in the Globe audience. What would this character say or do next?
            Steve Kazee’s Bo tries to play peacemaker until he no longer can; for a while he’s the only remotely sympathetic sibling, but ultimately his greed will tamp down any sympathy for him.
            Frank (played very much on the razor’s edge by Daniel Petzold) is at the plantation ostensibly to make amends, as his AA or NA rehabilitation would dictate, for the many hurts he caused family members he hasn’t seen in years. He will soon be consumed by the toxic mood, bleak environs and by his demons that can never be stanched completely.
            One yearns for even a moment of genuine tenderness among this bunch but it is elusive if not impossible. Bo and Rachael’s 13-year-old daughter Cassie is the drama’s one guileless character, though I wouldn’t call her innocent.
            The strength of Broadnax’s direction is taking a play that is easily two and a half hours long and, calling upon the skill of a tremendous cast and prizefight pacing, never letting the action and physicality written into the play wane, no matter how talky – let’s make that shouty – the proceedings become.
            The atmospherics at the Globe create a suffocating ambience something like an amalgam of the end of days and “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” Besides Sancianco’s set with its winding, dusty staircase, worn furniture and conspicuous chandelier, the shadowy lighting by Alan C. Edwards and the ever-audible sound of cicadas outside the mansion (design by Curtis Craig) manifest a forlorn and dreary inner world just made for stark confrontations and terrible secrets.
            “Appropriate” has all that -- and an ending you won’t soon forget.
            “Appropriate” runs through Feb. 23 at the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park.