‘Appropriate’ Broadway Review: Sarah Paulson Rattles The Rafters Of History In Powerhouse Production
deadline.comPay attention to those loud, annoying cicadas – they seem to have a story to tell. At least they do in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins superb, marvelously performed Appropriate, the Second Stage production opening tonight at the Helen Hayes Theater with one of the best casts – headed by an astonishing Sarah Paulson – on Broadway.
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.
Legacies that, as Appropriate so effectively demonstrates, can’t stay buried for long, despite all best efforts. Like those cicadas, which we’re reminded stay underground for 13 years before invading our surface turf, hate, along with secrets and grudges, has a way of making itself known.
Set in the summer of 2011 – before Black Lives Matter, before white America had even begun to absorb the vocabulary of cultural appropriation – Appropriate brings together a mostly estranged trio of siblings as they reconnect to deal with their late father’s estate – a former plantation home in Arkansas, no less, a massive, deteriorating house occupied by various and extended members of the Lafayette family for many, many generations.
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