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An Estate That Divides: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate
Sarah Paulson is furious and fearsome in this Tony Award-winning play.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s writing lives entirely and electrically in the space of “and.” The cataclysms he builds toward are the result of simultaneous truths — every one of them unfaceable, identity-destroying, or even, in plain fact, fatal for someone — crowding and thickening the atmosphere like gas slowly leaking from a stove, until at last the igniter sparks. In from New York are the Kramer-Lafayettes: Toni’s brother Bo (a perfectly pitched Corey Stoll); his wife, Rachael (Natalie Gold); and their kids, 13-year-old Cassidy (Alyssa Emily Marvin, wonderful in her repeated frustrated howls of “I’m almost an adult!”) and 8-year-old chaos-rocket Ainsley (I saw Lincoln Cohen, who alternates with Everett Sobers in the role). Neugebauer understands that the layer Jacobs-Jenkins is adding to the conventional undulations of melodrama — a family with damning secrets, a haunted estate on the brink of loss, a plot full of gaspy twists — is to turn its stock cutouts into people, catastrophic failings and all.
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