Photo by Alec Hosterman

Appropriate: A Review
by Craig Challender

First, absolute darkness. Then, the cicadas. Especially (and only) the cicadas, trilling “loudly, insistently, without pause” at the opening of Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s challenging, award-winning drama Appropriate, playing this weekend at the Waterworks Theater. Light trickles through an upstage window giving onto a “large, very disorderly room in an old plantation house somewhere in Arkansas”: a visual backstory of impacted love and grievance that makes this play compellingly watchable.

Antoinette (Toni), Beauregarde (Bo), and François (Frank/Franz) Lafayette have arrived to settle the estate of their just-deceased father and split the inheritance. The play’s three acts, titled respectively “The Book of Revelations.” “Walpurgisnacht,” and “The Book of Genesis,” indicate just how difficult, yet potentially hopeful, claiming that inheritance will be.

For starters, each of the middle-aged siblings bring their own heavy baggage to this house. Toni is going through a divorce, has a fraught relationship with her teenage son Rhys (who has problems of his own), and feels overburdened in her role as executor. Bo fears he’s about to lose his job because of a corporate closure. His wife Rachel, drained by mothering two hyperactive young children, resents Toni’s bossiness and being called “Bo’s Jew wife” by her late father-in-law. Frank is the classic ne’er-do-well, version 2.0—drug addiction is just one of his problems. He has brought along his decades-younger girlfriend, River, who’s trying to straighten him out.

A volatile mixture indeed, brought to a flashpoint when the children discover a couple of jars filled with weirdly gruesome artifacts, and especially an album filled with violent, racist photos. What to do with them? It’s only later that the Lafayettes discover that there’s not just one “graveyard outside stinking up the property,” but a second, in “that little clearing in the woods where all the slaves are buried.”

A sterling cast meets the demands this play makes. Leigh Lunsford is a revelation as Toni, ferociously berating her brothers and Rachel, yet piano-wire tense and open-sore vulnerable. Listen to her soft “Daddy . . .” that ends the first scene; it forecasts her “Think whatever you want about me now, but Daddy held me. He knew me—more than I’ll ever know me” near play’s end.

Erik Varela is Toni’s match as Bo. His masterful slow burns early on heat up and eventually boil over as he tells his sister: “Even your own son doesn’t want to be around you, Toni! . . . You’re like-like—poison right now! You’re toxic.” His breakdown at the end of the play is wrenching—and we can’t stop looking.

Sarah Varela as Rachel undergoes perhaps the greatest transformation. At first a wary sidelines observer, she is the first to be appalled by the album’s pictures, and by Act 3 becomes a compact cluster bomb of abusive language directed at Toni and Bo: “Your whole family is crazy! Your brother threw himself into a goddamned lake, he was so crazy! And, in fact, it’s infectious! Your family makes me crazy!”

Eric Hooper is not only making his Waterworks debut as Frank; it’s also his first time on stage in 15 years. One would never know it, though, as he provides much-needed comic relief in his awkward attempts to apologize and interact with his family. However, it’s his long monologue in Act 3 that crystallizes much of what Appropriate is about: “. . . there was the lake and it seemed to be telling me ‘Go on in. Go in and cleanse yourself . . . So I did. . . . I took everything . . . and I left it there . . . I washed us clean.”

Logan Schock is excellent as Rhys, Toni’s troubled son. Even more effective than his gruffly reluctant responses to her are his reactions to what he sees and hears. His scene with Frank, where Frank is trying to convince him that “YOU . . . are not your urges,” is priceless.

Grayson Clabo is equally good as Ainsley, Bo and Rachel’s ten-year-old son. He’s in perpetual motion and has not a word of onstage dialogue; but look at his eyes as they tick-tock back and forth while he sits trapped on a sofa as his father and aunt verbally pummel each other above him.

Interestingly, it is the young women that give this play its moments of insight and hope. Audrey Kott is perfect as rebellious, inquisitive Cassidy, Bo and Rachel’s thirteen-year-old daughter. It is she who intuits the cicadas’ significance: “How do the baby cicadas learn the song? . . . Their parents are dead, but they have this memory of a song that they think is just a part of them.”

Jordan McPherson, in her Waterworks debut as River, is a bright, unspoiled spot of hope. Her clinging support of Frank is touching. And her comments about pain—“We can’t go back and change the past—we can’t unhurt each other, we can’t unfeel feelings”—eerily recall Abraham Lincoln: “We cannot escape history. . . . The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.”

Kudos to the entire Waterworks creative team. Director Sean Dowse’s precise blocking and his choreographed overlapping of the dialogue create a rhythmic flow of emotion and information. Billy Tucker’s massive, brooding set makes the run-down mansion real, and makes possible the characters’ constant movements up and down, in and out. Mike Montgomery’s and Howard Fischer’s light and sound designs, ably carried out by Geraldine Mongold and Brad Cone, plunge the audience into the Lafayettes’ world. Barbara Cone’s costumes are spot on. And Marlow Walters has expertly choreographed the climactic brawl in Act 3.

Appropriate’s final performances will be this weekend, on February 21 and 22 at 7:30 p.m., and an extra matinee show (not originally advertised) February 23 at 2:00 p.m. You can buy tickets at http://www.waterworksplayers.org/buytickets .