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NEW YORK — Not since Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s “August: Osage County” has Broadway seen such a blistering display of ensemble acting as to be found at director Lila Neugebauer’s ruthless and riveting production of “Appropriate,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ ironically titled play about a combative, wounded and self-loathing family who rip each other into little pieces over their dead patriarch’s legacies.
Sarah Paulson, the lead performer, is on fire all night long here, torching not just anyone lucky enough to share Second Stage Theater’s production with her but half of the open-mouthed audience. When the likes of Michael Esper, Corey Stoll, Natalie Gold, Graham Campbell and, yes, Elle Fanning rise to meet her with every fiber of their consciousness, it’s a sight to behold.
Few scenarios are as rewarding in the theater as great actors playing deeply entwined characters whose tolerance for each other’s manipulations ran out years ago, and that’s exactly what you get here for two hours and 40 minutes.
Believe me, time races by. You won’t take your eyes off the destructive action for a section.
Have you seen that episode in Hulu’s “The Bear” when a family dinner turns into a forked battle? Paulson was in that justly famed episode, which is no coincidence. And that’s exactly the level of absurdly intense anguish you get to watch here. Only it’s live and in person, and it goes on all night.
So what, precisely, has been passed down to this extended family of Lafayettes? An old plantation house, located not in the Deep South but in unfashionable southeast Arkansas. The estate now needs dividing between distrustful siblings, long a fertile theme for dramatists from Anton Chekhov to Horton Foote, but anything these characters attempt in the present is undermined by their stratospheric level of collective baggage, a legacy rooted in all-American racism, antisemitism and cruelty.
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Although revised for this first Broadway production, “Appropriate” is set in 2011, which is about when Jacobs-Jenkins wrote a play first developed at Chicago’s Victory Garden Theater. I first reviewed it in Chicago back in 2013 and struggled at times to embrace its veracity. Not this time. “Appropriate,” which I predict will be an unexpectedly big hit for Second Stage, has aged like moonshine, its bitterness and rankle now perfectly matching the American moment.
Theater Loop
The three siblings here are Toni (Paulson), the one who did all the familial work and paid the price of personal loneliness and alienation from son Rhys (Campbell); Franz (Esper), a self-designated victim who has shown up at the estate sale with his hippy-dippy enabler girlfriend River (Fanning), ill-equipped for time among cannibals; and Bo (Stoll), the sibling with the seemingly normal professional life with wife Rachael (Gold) and a couple of kids, one of whom (superbly played by Alyssa Emily Marvin) sees far too much for her own good.
They bash away at each other even as they discover one more awful thing after another about a dead relative, who hit hate in plain sight, unseen.
The appeal here partly is schadenfreude and partly relief at however dysfunctional one’s family may be, this crew is worse. Most people will recognize family members who’ve dug in so deep, they can’t forgive. But Jacobs-Jenkins was also writing about America itself, suggesting that even white people have paid an intergenerational price for the atrophied Confederacy and the moral rot of slavery.
There’s compassion, too, as everyone tries to find their own way out of this toxic room, as designed with hidden horrors by the collective known as Design by Dots. Any door or window will do, as long as it is not the one marked, facing up to the truth and your role therein.
At the Hayes Theater, 240 W. 44th St., New York; 2st.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
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