Photo courtesy Wooly Mammoth Theatre Company.
In 2002, when I was 18, I went to see an exhibit of lynching postcards and photographs at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta, called Without Sanctuary. (It’s now a book, with accompanying essays by Hilton Als, Congressman John Lewis, and others.)
At the time, although I knew about slavery and Jim Crow, it was as if I had never truly grasped the brutality and evil of those words before. The pictures in the exhibit resembled pictures from the Holocaust. I remember feeling like my stomach had been ripped out of my body, leaving me unsure about whether to vomit or cry, so I mostly just stood there in shock at the nonchalant way these grinning white people posed next to the burned corpses left hanging there, grotesquely, from telephone poles and tree branches, just as Billie Holiday sings about in the haunting song, “Strange Fruit.”
I remembered that exhibit, and my reaction to it, while watching Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ searingly funny, painfully accurate play about denial in white identity, Appropriate, now being staged at Woolly Mammoth Theatre (it premiered at Humana Festival this past spring).
The Lafayettes, Toni (a divorced mother with an off-the-rails teenage son) and her brother Bo (clearly wearing the “success of the family” mantle), return with their families to the old family home in backwoods Arkansas, a sinister place they have all escaped geographically, though not, it seems, psychologically. To say that this is a dysfunctional family is an understatement (one brother, played by a wildly excellent Tim Getman, is referred to by his siblings as “Frank the family pedophile.”)
Charged with sorting out their recently deceased father’s possessions and selling his estate—a crumbling plantation that looks, thanks to Mountaintop Set Designer Clint Ramos’s impressive imagination, like an episode of Hoarders crossed with Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte—they immediately set into the kind of petty squabbling that ensues among families that only see one another in the case of a death or a wedding.
Things take quite a twist, however, when they begin to uncover the nasty relics that Big Daddy left behind, particularly an album with photographs of, as one character puts it bluntly, “dead black people.” Lynching photos. Lots of them. And it keeps getting creepier.
In Appropriate, you don’t see the photos. You don’t need to. All of the reveals in this show, under Lisel Tommy’s direction, are done by inference and implication, letting us as viewers unreel the onion ourselves. And boy, the more you peel, the more it reeks.
Tellingly, none of the Lafayettes receives the photo album in the way that is, well, “appropriate,” i.e. with repulsion and horror at the unapologetic torture and murder of fellow human beings, as well as the systematic, institutionally sanctioned injustice that they represent.
Instead, their reactions are self-centered: How will this affect me or my idea of my father or my ability to sell this house? Can we make money selling these “antique” “collector’s items?”
Toni (played by Deborah Hazlett as a powder keg just waiting for a match) even suggests that maybe someone else left the album there and their father didn’t know about it. The most bullshit-free response comes from Cassidy (Maya Brettell), Bo’s adolescent “OMG”-spouting daughter, who asks without irony, “Am I supposed to be upset?”
Throughout the play, the characters walk a tightrope between hopeless narcissism and depressing insight. It’s the narcissism that’s most hilarious, with laugh lines like, “What are you? The forgiveness police?” and “Nah. What is she gonna do? Kill herself? She’ll be back.”
A nice touch—and this was probably deliberate—is the occasional nod to Tennessee Williams-style soliloquy (after all, who is more obsessed with the damages wrought from the southern past), as when all of a sudden Toni breaks out with a speech about the downfall of being a “sweet girl.” “You know what happens to sweet girls? Life gobbles us up,” she says, channeling Blanche DuBois. “We run out of sugar.”
(Cassidy also breaks out an intense speech about cicadas, out of the blue, too. Those insects are what provide the awesome, swampy soundtrack.)
Another title for Appropriate, could have been “Southern Gentility,” the mask of niceness that hides behind it a whole lot of angry ghosts.
The all-across-the-board knockout cast (seriously, everyone does brave, credible work: Beth Hylton, Josh Adams, David Bishins, Cole Edelstein, Caitlin McColl, Eli Schulman) makes this worth patronizing on its own. But it’s also important, I think, when we continue to see this kind of racism-denial resurface, over and over, just about every week. Where? Oh, I dunno…sometimes in certain references to “gagging” in certain columns by supposedly liberal columnists.
We continually fool ourselves into thinking that our terrifying past doesn’t still affect our present misconceptions about race and ourselves.
Tomorrow’s performance will feature a talk after the show with Dr. Harvey Young, “a nationally recognized scholar of race and performance.”
Appropriate runs through Dec. 1 at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre. You can see a schedule and buy tickets here.
