'Everybody'

Plays built around gimmicks are often more interesting as theatrical fillips than satisfying as artistic experiences—curiosities more than dramas.  That’s how I felt about Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody, a world première at the Signature Theatre Company until 19 March (an extension from the 12th).  Aside from anything else, this circumstance also means there are two ways to approach writing up the production: discuss the play as a script in performance and describe the performative game devised by the playwright and the director.  Just to make my task more complex, I’m going to try to do both here and hope I can manage to depict both to some degree.

Everybody, the second play of Jacobs-Jenkins’s Residency Five tenure which began with Appropriate in 2014 (see my report on 31 March 2014), started previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Irene Diamond Stage on 31 January and opened on 21 February.  (Signature’s Residency Five guarantees the writer three productions over five years.)  Diana, my STC subscription partner, and I went to Theatre Row to catch the performance on Friday evening, 24 February. 

Jacobs-Jenkins, now 32, has composed five previous plays, starting with Neighbors in 2010 (New York’s Public Theater), all of which have been produced Off-Broadway or in such prestigious rep companies as the Yale Repertory Theatre.  Among his awards and honors, the dramatist is a MacArthur (“genius”) Fellow (2016), the recipient of Yale’s 2016 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Drama), and a nominee for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (for Gloria, presented in 2015 by the Vineyard Theatre of New York City); STC’s Appropriate and Theatre for a New Audience’s 2015 An Octoroon both won Obies.  (A more extensive bio of the playwright appears in my report on Appropriate.) Everybody, Jacobs-Jenkins’s latest play, is a reworking of the medieval morality play Everyman (formally The Summoning of Everyman; anonymous, late 15th century). 

While Appropriate started its stage life at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays a year before its Signature début, Everybody is receiving its theatrical initiation in STC’s 294-seat proscenium house.  At 100 minutes, Everybody pretty much hews to the medieval original for its storyline, even occasionally quoting from a modern-English translation of its middle-English text—though most of Jacobs-Jenkins’s language is colloquially modern (and occasionally vulgar) for the most part.  (Many of the allegorical characters’ labels have been updated—“Goods” has become “Stuff,” for example.  “Everyman” was changed to “Everybody” for purposes of inclusivity: “This is the 21st century—we know there’s more than men among us,” as David Finkle—who also reviews for the Huffington Post—put it on the Clyde Fitch Report.) 

The gimmick is that among the cast of nine, five rotate in the role of Everybody; at each performance, she or he is selected by lot and the remaining four company members play the attributes Friendship and Strength; Kinship and Mind; Cousinship, Beauty, and All the Shitty Evil Things (that last is Everybody’s bad deeds); and Stuff and Senses.  Jacobs-Jenkins asserts that there are 120 different combinations that can happen (I don’t actually get this math), so the five castmates, of varied races, genders, and ages, have a lot of memorizing to do—essentially the whole play, but from five different perspectives, one for each character they could play (not to mention the subtle variations for playing against five different Everybodys).  By now, considering the law of averages, after over 25 performances, all the alternate Everybodys should have had a chance to do the role—not necessarily in all 120 variations of ensembles—but I was still astonished at how smoothly the cast pulled this off on what amounts to a moment’s notice.  Possibly as a result of this gimmick and director Lila Neugebauer’s staging on a set that looks like a section of an empty row of a theater auditorium, the seats facing the spectators—somehow nestled within a fairly packed one (yeah, I can’t explain that, either)—along with nooks, crannies, and aisles of the actual Diamond Stage, there’s a veneer of improvisation over the whole production—some of it built in and some organic. 

Just at curtain time, with the house lights still up, a staffer from Signature, dressed in an aqua T-shirt emblazoned with the company’s name (and “STAFF” on the back) and complete with headset and walkie-talkie on her belt, comes to the front of the auditorium just below the stage left corner of the platform to make the usual announcements about turning off cell phones, locating the fire exits, and opening candy wrappers before the show starts—except that the spiel is a lot longer and much more elaborate than the pro forma message.  This usher is far too voluble about the play and the performance, so it’s quickly obvious this is part of the show.  That’s because this usher (Jocelyn Bioh) isn’t on the staff of the theater; she’s a member of the cast of Everybody and she proceeds to explain the basic premise of the play, starting with its origins as the “oldest recorded play” in Western literature, derived from the Dutch morality play Elckerlijc, itself possibly adapted from “a Buddhist fable.”  (Yes, she gives a mini-medieval-lit lecture.) 

Bioh then transforms into God—just vocally—and calls on Death (Marylouise Burke) to summon Everybody to account for his life, and Death—“who fears no man,” as she keeps telling us (or her mortal charges . . . or herself)—goes into the house to confront the five actors (Lakisha Michelle May, Brooke Bloom, Michael Braun, Louis Cancelmi. David Patrick Kelly), seated around the auditorium, planted among the theatergoers.  (Because, you see, Everybody is one of us, any of us . . . all of us.)  They all protest that they’re unprepared for such an accounting as they gather at the foot of the stage at house right, where the usher/God had previously stood and continue to argue with Death. 

The usher—Bioh’s really less a mere usher than a house manager, a somewhat godlike figure in the theater—returns and explains that one of the five actors will be chosen by lot to play Everybody in the evening’s performance, and she spins a bingo cage loaded with (I presume five) ping-pong balls.  (Some reviewers suggested this process is rigged, but I don’t see why it isn’t legit.  Go know.)  The one to portray the title character this night was Kelly, an older man with receding, white hair that’s long at the back, and a long, white beard and full mustache that make him look somewhat like George Bernard Shaw.  (Hardly an appropriate image for an everyman—but, hey, what can you do?)  Through Death, God calls Everybody to his final accounting and he asks if he can have some time to find someone to go with him on this frightening journey . . . from which he’ll never return.  “Sure,” Death replies exuberantly, “if any were brave enough to come with you.”   

But after promising “literally go to hell and back” for him, Friendship, whose as glib and superficial as any generic fair-weather comrade, “flakes out” (the kicker here is “and back”!), as do Kinship and Cousinship.  Stuff is far more comforting, but is willing to go only so far, as are Strength, Mind, Senses, Beauty, Time (Lilyana Tiare Cornell, a girl of maybe 10), and, ultimately, Understanding (Bioh once again), who all abandon Everybody at grave’s edge.  (This is the way with dying, of course—all our attributes and faculties fall away as we approach the end.  My Dad used to like to joke, “If you can’t take it with you, then I’m not going!”  That didn’t work out for him in the end, however.)  Love (Chris Perfetti) alone is willing to go the whole distance—after he spends a few minutes humiliating Everybody as payback for not coming to him earlier—but this all leads to the unavoidable truth: Everybody (and everybody) dies alone.

Between the allegorical scenes in which Everybody confronts his various attributes to try to convince them to go with him into the grave, Jacobs-Jenkins has contrived black-out scenes in which Everybody seems to be describing a dream to the other members of his former group of actors.  We can’t really see anything—Kelly's dimly lit at the front of the theater but the others seem to be behind the scenes someplace—and the voices all emanate from the PA system so they sound disembodied.  (The voices may, in fact, be recorded.)  I never figured out exactly what Jacobs-Jenkins intends with this gambit, but it seems to have something to do with witnessing Everybody’s dying visions, as if the play were a terminal dream.  From my perspective, it conflicts with the allegory of the Everyman adaptation—though I’m not sure that matters much.

Neugebauer, whose previous productions of the Signature Plays and A. R. Gurney’s The Wayside Motor Inn Diana and I  saw at STC (reports posted on 3 June 2016 and 1 October 2014, respectively), stages Everybody throughout the auditorium with only a little of it actually on the stage—which isn’t even used extensively until the last scene; it’s no more than a runway for the rest of the play.  The only part of the play with a representative set, revealed above the row of 18 theater seats that occupies the stage’s apron when a black curtain is parted, comes at the end: scenic designer Laura Jellinek has conceived a gray, rocky hillside that looks like the slope of a dormant volcano into which has been dug a grave-sized, but apparently bottomless, hole into which descend Everybody, Love, and Death (the only one to come back up).  Except for this scene and one theatrically stunning bit (which I’ll get to shortly), the play is presented like a no-budget, student-produced show mostly performed either in black-out (yes, in the semi-dark) or with the house lights up.  (The lighting designer is Matt Frey, who also provides one elaborate light show with strobes and blinding spots.  I’m not sure what it was meant to impart other than sound and fury.)  

That one really impressive bit I mentioned earlier is a terrific dance-like sequence, choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly (to music and sound created by Brandon Wolcott), with two giant human-skeleton puppets that glow in a near black-out (so you can’t see the black-clad puppeteers inside the huge skeletons) that dance through the  house.  (Think Mexico’s Day of the Dead.)  The scene itself is ultimately an over-long digression, a set piece plopped in presumably to wake everyone (not to be confused with Everybody) up, but it’s theatrically stunning.  

As far as the acting goes, the cast is clearly an ensemble.  They’d have to be to get away with that casting gag.  The actors playing the attributes are all fine, but I can’t say anyone has a particularly hard row to hoe here—allegorical characters have little depth and all their appearances are brief and self-contained.  Kelly, as Everybody, has a little more work to do, and he carries it off it perfectly competently, even energetically; at one point, he’s challenged by Love to strip down to his underclothes and run several laps around the theater’s orchestra section.  Kelly’s the second-oldest member of the cast, after Burke; all the other actors are much younger.  This lends his portrayal of Everybody—Matthew Murray of Talkin’ Broadway called his performance “avuncular,” which I’ll accept—an extra frison of sympathy since death is so naturally associated with advanced age.  (Sorry, David—I’m even older than you, but it’s still true, I’m afraid!)  

As God and the usher, Bioh also accomplishes what she has to; her usher combines authority and a flippant jolliness.  Burke’s Death is entirely puckish—not a fearsome Mephistopheles but a slightly dotty angel (with a squeaky little baby voice) who might have been Clarence’s tutor in It’s a Wonderful Life (but far less sure of herself than Claude Rains’s Mr. Jordan is in Here Comes Mr. Jordan).  It’s an amusing and enjoyable performance, what the English would call an “old dear,” but finally more contrived than fitting.  The cast all do what they’re supposed to, no one missteps—but it’s all just lightweight.  There’s just no heft to anything.

Everybody is blatantly meta-theatrical—and self-referential.  Jacobs-Jenkins makes this clear in the program—which, to prevent too many spoilers, isn’t distributed until the audience exits the theater after the intermissionless performance—with the setting description: “The Irene Diamond Stage, The Pershing Square Signature Center, 2017.”  Along with the usher’s outfit, there’s also a mention in the play that the participants are all at the Signature Theatre.  (The seats across the front of the stage are identical to the ones in the Diamond’s actual auditorium.)  And let’s not forget that at the beginning of the performance, the usher points out that this is a play—adapted from another play, based on yet another play.  Theater as Russian nesting dolls! 

In the end, Everybody is more interesting than good, an idea with several built-in problems.  First, the basic idea: why retell this 600-year-old tale?  Does it need to be told again?  I don’t think so—although, maybe we do need to be reminded to be nicer and kinder during our lifetimes.  I just wonder if Every-whatever is an effective way of saying that to a 21st-century, Trump-era populace/audience.  Second, why make a new adaptation, rather than just presenting the original in a new production?  The play’s certainly open to all kinds of innovative staging interpretations and even “retranslation” from the original early English.  Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation isn’t sufficiently impressive to make the point new or relevant.  As my friend Kirk Woodward put it, “[A]llegory just isn’t a scintillating approach”—and once you’ve figured out the premise, the end is pretty predictable. 

The text and ideas aren’t above the level of a precocious undergrad college troupe.  The take-away is still that we all face death alone except for . . . well, Love in Jacobs-Jenkins’s new version.  (In the original play, it’s Good Deeds who accompanies Everyman to the grave.  I don’t really get Jacobs-Jenkins’s point of making it Love in Everybody.  Strikes me as self-indulgent.)  The ideas aren’t really new, just up-dated, mostly in language, but not content.  (Everyman is a Christian religious tract and its derivative doesn’t alter that.  It’s not even Judeo-Christian, much less ecumenical or pan-sectarian; it’s pretty straight-up Catholic, intended for a homogeneously Catholic viewership.)  Jacobs-Jenkins basically follows the plot and concept of the medieval original—old wine in new bottles, so to speak.  Maybe even just recycled bottles.  

Theatrically, the only new idea is the casting lottery at the center of the whole production concept.  Director Neugebauer, asserting that Jacobs-Jenkins always “knew he wanted some element of chance” to play a part in Everybody, said that she and the playwright didn’t want Everybody to be represented by “a single actor, who necessarily has an age, a gender, a race, a sexual orientation.”  They also contemplated “the notion that death could strike any one of us, at any moment . . . .”  I have to say, I didn’t feel anything in the performance so profound as that sounds.  Each of the scenes in which Everybody entreats his attributes to go with him on his final journey is pretty much the same as the others, so the whole evening becomes a series of minor variations on a repetitive theme.  Jacobs-Jenkins’s casting gimmick doesn’t alter that.

The only intriguing thing about the lottery gambit—to me, at any rate—is contemplating what the rehearsal process must have been like, with five actors all learning five different roles in different combinations and the whole cast running the show for each set of those five performers.  I can’t even begin to imagine it.  It’d be like a whole rehearsal period of endless replacement rehearsals.  Thank goodness, I’d think, the play’s only an hour and 40 minutes long—they could run it more than once each session with different actors in the alternating roles.  (The other four actors only have to learn one part and be prepared to play opposite a shifting cast of scene partners.  Only Death, however, really interacts with characters other than Everybody.)  But as far as the performances are concerned, I can’t see that this casting trick was at all significant.  (As one of my Rutgers teachers would say it’s “Hamlet on roller-skates.”)  The roles aren’t so complex or deep that one actor’s going to do anything substantially different from any other.  

The reviews of Jitney (the subject of my last play report, posted on 19 February) were close to unanimous—98% were positive and 2% (one notice) were mixed according to Show-Score, and all the reviewers essentially liked the same things and disliked the same things; they all had the same opinions about Wilson’s script and the acting and staging—but after this performance, I predicted that the reviews of Everybody will be all over the map.  The summary of the surveyed notices on Show-Score suggests I’m right about this (as we’re about to see).  

Based on 32 published reviews (as of 2 March) with an average total rating of 63, Show-Score tallied that 47% of the notices were positive, 31% were mixed, and 22% were negative.  63 is a low average among the productions I’ve checked on this site, but more significantly, the spread of review types is much more evenly dispersed than any I’ve encountered so far.  (There was only one 95, two 90’s, and three 85’s.  At the other end of the scale, there were three 35’s and three 45’s.)  All over the map it is, then.  (My survey will comprise 19 notices.  Many of the reviewers will have seen different combinations of actors and characters, all probably different from my own experience.)

Joe Dziemianowicz in the New York Daily News called Everybody a “talky, sometimes trying show” and remarked of the lottery that it’s “an interesting gambit, though more so for the cast than theatergoers.”  On NorthJersey.com, the website for the suburban Record of Bergen County, New Jersey, Robert Feldberg found, “There’s wit, humor and inventiveness in the play, . . . but pure allegory, with actors portraying generic figures and abstract ideas, is tough to keep aloft,” observing, “The point is elucidated at great length and with much repetition before” the play’s end.  Of the casting gag, Feldberg felt that “it must be an interesting challenge for the actors, but it comes across as an ‘in’ thing, of little matter to the audience.”  The New Jersey reviewer concluded, “‘Everybody’ descends into tedium well before it ends.” 

In the New York Times, Ben Brantley felt that “the seriously talented” Jacobs-Jenkins “seems to be running (and writhing) in place in” Everybody and the Timesman quipped that the play’s “prevailing tone” is “self-consciously whimsical and repetitive.”  Brantley’s assessment of the production was: “Much painstaking rehearsal and synchronization of cues, for the tech crew as well as the performers, has gone into ‘Everybody.’  Yet it still feels like a work in progress, waiting to be sharpened into focus.”  The review-writer suggested, “Perhaps this is appropriate to the idea of life itself as a perpetual work in progress,” but  added, “Still, there’s a sense of sustained thumb-twiddling that starts with the script.”  Each of Everybody’s encounters with his attributes “feels oppressively the same.”  In the end, Brantley concluded:

The entertainment value of “Everybody” as an acting exercise would probably be enhanced if you could see, well, everybody playing Everybody.  But that would require buying many tickets and sitting through many, many hours of people translating medieval ontology into arch latter-day vernacular, saying what is essentially the same thing again and again and again.

The Village Voice’s Miriam Felton-Dansky, labeling Everybody “intriguing, moving, and sometimes disappointing,” decided that Jacobs-Jenkins and Neugebauer are “reveling in allegory’s unabashedly presentational quality, and implicating spectators at every turn.”  Though director Neugebauer “stages the piece with precision and humor” and assembled an “excellent ensemble,” Felton-Dansky concluded, “It’s hard not to wish Jacobs-Jenkins had trusted his material, and his audience, a little more.”  In the New Yorker, Hilton Als felt, “Thinking about the original script while watching Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation is like listening to an expert d.j. play two records at once, and at different speeds.”  With Everybody, Als believes, “Jacobs-Jenkins has written a play about love—or, rather, a play that shows how impossible it is to write about love—” a subject the New Yorker journalist thinks “cannot be explained”—“and it fills the heart in a new and unexpected way.”  He was very taken with the dancing skeletons, which Als described as “electrified by eternal being.”  Going far beyond anything I took from the interlude, the New Yorker review-writer continued:

Those skeletons reminded me of Antonin Artaud’s writing from Mexico, where he did so much of his thinking about the theatre.  In a 1936 lecture, he noted, “For me, the essence of Surrealism was an affirmation of life against all caricatures.”  And it was in this surreal moment that, in my mind at least, all of us sitting in the theatre abandoned the beings we were supposed to be and became atomized into this lovely, wordless physical manifestation of a feeling that Jacobs-Jenkins couldn’t control with his considerable intellect but allowed to dance free in his considerable heart. 

In New York magazine, Jesse Green asserted, “The play is trenchant, certainly, and often quite moving,” but objected that “all [Jacobs-Jenkins’s] substitutions [have] the effect of turning the meaning of the play inside out.”  Noting that “Everybody is basically about the fear of death . . . .  Everyman is about the horror that awaits us after.”  Green continued, “Without dramatizing sin, you can’t have the Everyman plot . . . .  Without a common faith system, you can’t have the Everyman motive of correction.  All Jacobs-Jenkins can do with this marvelous dinosaur bone is shellac the surface with sarcasm and lower our expectations.”  In the end, the New York reviewer wrote, “Everybody offers only its destabilization, and a decidedly weak-tea moral.” 

                                           

“Apart from the cast’s charm and visual coups engineered by director Lila Neugebauer . . ., the 100-minute experiment feels overlong and talky,” reported David Cote in Time Out New York.  With the black-out interludes and other insertions, “the extra verbiage blunts any philosophical edge.”  Like me, the man from TONY found that “a ‘faithful’ revival of this theatrical fossil” was unnecessary but that “I’m not sure this slangy, digressive gloss adds much substance.”  Cote concluded, “Stranded between cosmic earnestness and a collegiate urge to interrogate weird old texts, Everybody has trouble holding onto a fixed identity.”  Marilyn Stasio of Variety advised of working with ancient sources, “Something is inevitably lost in adapting the material for a modern audience that has outgrown its fear and awe of hellfire and damnation.  But the story retains some power on a human level, and Jacobs-Jenkins plays up the randomness of death and the universality of the human condition” via the casting lottery. 

Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter put in his “Bottom Line”: “This ambitious production proves too self-consciously theatrical to be emotionally involving.”  He explained, “Despite clever moments, Everybody . . . proves a trial to sit through.”  Furthermore, the HR reviewer observed, “For all its artistic ambitions, Everybody turns out to be confusing and disjointed, filled with stylistic diversions that more often than not prove underwhelming.” Scheck caviled that the actors “sometimes have trouble with their lines” because of the casting gimmick (something I didn’t encounter, by the way), and except for a few stalwarts, “the ensemble is uneven at best.”  Neugebauer “does her best to involve the audience”; finally, however, “Everybody fails in its goal to make its themes universal and its centuries-old inspiration feel contemporary.  In the end, its overemphasis on self-conscious theatrical flourishes proves more distancing than immersive.” 

On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer asserted that “the witty and inventive Jacob-Jenkins has put his own comic spin on” Everyman, which with the “versatile” cast and Neugebauer’s direction “manages to be a very much ‘now’ production.”  The CU reviewer labeled the play and production “cheeky, provocative and laugh-filled” and reported it’s “all very clever and audience involving.”  She concluded, “It should be said, however, that this whimsical sort of satire isn’t everyone’s coup-de-comic-riff.  For this viewer the humor ran thin early on, picked up with Burke’s arrival, but ultimately left me less satisfied with Everybody than the author’s previous plays.”  On New York Theater, Jonathan Mandell affirmed of Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation, “The idea here is inspired, and the world premiere production at the Signature can be inspiring; it even provoked some reflection on my own mortality.”  But though the play “can also be very funny,” Mandell deemed that “both the playwright and director Lila Neugebauer seem hell-bent on deliberately ‘destabilizing’ the story, making it less accessible.”  The cyber reviewer further complained, “The playwright also gives his characters too much to say that is digressive, repetitious or overlong,” asking, “What is the message here—that life is difficult and dreary, so this show will be too?”  His conclusion?  “The result of what seems to be a kind of creative over-thinking, though, is that unlike the aim of its 15th century source, ‘Everybody’ is not for everybody.”

Full of “admirable experiments,” Everybody, according to TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart, “is at turns ambitious, witty, and a bit dull.”  The casting lottery, Stewart found, is “the most innovative aspect of this surprisingly tepid treatment of the story.”  Despite what the TM reviewer felt was “convincing” acting, he judged that “solid performances still don’t fully rescue the play from its didactic origins.”  He asserted, “Dress a medieval morality play up in 21st-century slang and it comes off sounding like a skit for incoming college freshman performed by the resident assistants of purgatory.”  Of Neugebauer’s staging, Stewart affirmed that “it is often very impressive,” but also noted that it never “quite rises to the tone set in” the early moments of the performance.  Stewart concluded, “Jacob-Jenkins cannot be accused of deviating from the morality play form to push his own agenda, but we really wish he would.  It would make for a far livelier and more challenging night at the theater.”  Characterizing the play as “a pretty raucous comedy that can remind us just how foolish, selfish, and childish people can be” on Theater Pizzazz, Brian Scott Lipton summed up his theater experience at Everybody by saying, “As much as I enjoyed most of the play, it can feel long.”

PJ Grisar decribed Everybody as “a rare play that uses theater, both its history and its practical reality, to make theater” on Stage Buddy.  Even with its “remarkable” cast, though, Grisar warned that the play “risks becoming, as it self-describes at one point, a ‘theater in-joke’”; nonetheless, our Stage Buddy deemed, “Everybody may be all things to all people, but I can’t imagine anybody not enjoying themselves and thinking a lot about it after they’ve been ushered off.”  (Maybe Grisar can’t, but I can . . . .)  On New York Theatre Guide, Tulis McCall wrote that Jacobs-Jenkins “pulls [Everyman], kicking and screaming, into a contemporary setting” to create Everybody.  She contended that the playwright “has created another circuitous and intriguing route for us to follow” and “takes no prisoners.  You either keep up with the pace or you fall off the wagon train.”  McCall observed, “One gets the feeling that Jacobs-Jennings doesn’t care either way because his eye is locked onto the trail ahead.”  Even though the “ensemble is consistent and tight,” McCall found that the “tale itself turns out to be unremarkable, which is disappointing.”  The NYTG reviewer summed up her assessment:

The journey of Everybody is clear, but it is interrupted by the whispers in the dark, the appearance and disappearance of the odd character, and of course the character raffle that begins the tale.  These elements feel unnecessary and border on being gimmicks.  They clutter our field of vision/concentration/spiritual connection.  They only serve to make the piece too clever by half and thus dilute the proceedings.

Matthew Murray contended on Talkin’ Broadway that Jacobs-Jenkins’s “highly egalitarian, contemporary retelling” of Everyman “wants to push as many of the original’s buttons as possible, while also offending as little as it can get away with.”  He had a problem, however, with Jacobs-Jenkins’s (and, really, Neugebauer’s) approach to the adaptation of the “unapologetically Catholic view of life, the universe, and everything” that is Everyman, particularly with the casting of Burke as Death.  “A production that makes you long to jump into the grave alongside her [Death], though, is somewhat missing the point,” proclaimed Murray.  “Okay, it’s a lot missing the point.”  In Everyman, Death “is the terrifying enemy; God is the only one who can save us,” instructed Murray, but in Everybody, “Death acts and sounds like a better traveling companion than He does.”  Furthermore, the TB blogger explained, God, despite Bioh’s efforts, “feels designed as a non-presence throughout.”  Murray felt that “neither [Jacobs-Jenkins] nor his director, Lila Neugebauer, can overcome this fundamental flaw” at the core of the play.  Declaring that “Everybody doesn’t do much more but crumble in slow motion,” the cyber reviewer concluded that “when you’re not focusing on how to make your experience better because Death is reminding you of how great it already is, the message that comes through doesn’t remotely seem like one anyone would want to send.”

Dubbing the play “fun and breezy” with “a tad of zaniness,” Michael Dale explained the show on Broadway World this way:

In its day, EVERYMAN scared good Catholics onto a righteous path.  In director Lila Neugebauer’s slick and irreverent production, Jacobs-Jenkins seems more content with riffing on old-time religion by replacing the fear of God with the humorous acceptance of life’s disappointments.

But, of course, that may be the point in only one of the production’s 120 variations.

Steven Suskin suspects that descriptions of Jacobs-Jenkins Everybody “might well leave you feeling a bit hesitant about an evening’s proffered entertainment,” but on the Huffington Post, the reviewer countered, “Get over it, and get over to . . . Everybody.  This is theatre rather unlike anything you might have seen.”  Suskin labeled the play “unusual, unconventional and eye-opening” and warned that, like Everyman, it’s “no barrel of laughs, being a morality play about death,” adding, “but it is not only provocative and involving, it is also funny.  Wildly funny, in fact.”  Director Neugebauer “does a wonderful job,” reported the HP review-writer, and “the cast does wonderfully well.”  As a conclusion, Suskin recounted a brief anecdote about Bioh’s usher’s preamble at the top of the performance, after which “a patron behind me blurted out ‘I hope the play is as good as she is.’  As it turned out, Jacobs-Jenkins and his Everybody is very good indeed.”

On radio station WNYC, a New York City outlet for National Public Radio, Jennifer Vanasco asserted that the casting lottery “gives the play an impromptu, seat-of-the pants energy that’s combined with a meditative, repetitive quality that adds heft and makes ‘Everybody’ feel almost like a religious ritual.”  “There’s a sketched-in plot,” noted Vanasco, which “might all be a dream—or it might not.  Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins hints, but doesn’t tell.” 

'Appropriate'

This season at the Signature Theatre Company has been a different experience for me.  For a combination of reasons, first the constitution of the schedule as an All-Premiere Season made up of plays by various writers rather than a series from one playwright and, second, because my companion, Diana, and I booked Horton Foote’s The Old Friends before we settled on our subscription, not only were all the plays new ones in New York, but many of the writers are artists whom I’ve never encountered before or with whom I only had minimal experience.  Will Eno (The Open House, reported on ROT on 16 March) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins are entirely new to me, despite their track records and reputations.  So when Diana and I met at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row for the evening performance of Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate on Friday, 21 March, I had no idea what I was about to see.  As I’ve explained in the past, I avoid reading reviews until after I’ve had my own say—except for the New York Times notice because it’s delivered to my apartment.  In this case, however, the reviewer was Ben Brantley and, as I’ve also said before on this blog, I more often find myself on the opposite side of the opinion spectrum from Brantley than not, so I basically only noted that he gave Appropriate a rave notice and left it at that until I saw the production for myself.  So, here we go.

STC’s New York première of Appropriate, directed in the Alice Griffin Jewelbox Theatre, the miniature proscenium house at the Signature Center, by Liesl Tommy, started performances on 25 February and opened on 16 March; it was originally scheduled to run until 6 April but has been extended through 13 April.  The play’s world première was at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville from 5 March  to 7 April 2013 and then it had a dual opening in Washington, D.C., at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company from 4 November to 1 December 2013 (also staged by Tommy), and in Chicago at the Victory Gardens Theater, 15 November through 14 December 2013 (directed by Gary Griffin, who helmed the ATL début as well).  The play was developed with Tommy and shown in staged readings at STC as part of Jacobs-Jenkins’s Residency Five stint, and he’s said he did substantial revisions in the spring of 2013 between the ATL début and the D.C.-Chicago presentations. 

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins lives in Brooklyn now, a playwright, dramaturg, and performer.  His first full-length play, Neighbors, was produced by the Public Theater’s Lab program (première, 2010), L.A.’s Matrix Theatre, and Boston’s Company One; the play received its UK première at the HighTide Festival in Suffolk last May.  His other plays include The Change, Face #1-3, Thirst, Zoo, Heart!!!, and Content.  As a performer, he’s also half of the duo enemyResearch, with whom he’s created and performed in Garbage, Schechnershirts, and The Amateurs.  Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays have been seen at Prelude, CUNY’s festival of new theater and performance, in 2008 and ’09; the Public Theater; New York Theatre Workshop; Soho Rep; P.S. 122; Ars Nova; Dixon Place; Providence Black Repertory; Chicago’s Links Hall; the McCarter Theatre in Princeton; the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles; Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis; Boston’s Company One; Theater Bielefeld in Bielefeld, Germany; and the National Theatre in London.  He’s a former NYTW Playwriting fellow, an alumnus of the Hemispheric Institute's EMERGENYC Program, as well as a member of the Soho Rep Writers/Directors Lab, the 2009 Public Theater Emerging Writers Group, and the Ars Nova Playgroup.  The young writer’s a 2009 Princess Grace Award winner for Playwriting and the 2009-10 Dorothy Streslin Playwriting Fellow at Soho Rep.  He also spent a year in Berlin, Germany, on a 2009 Fulbright Fellowship and he’s the winner of the 2013 Sundance Theatre Institute Tennessee Williams Award.  He’s working on a commission from Lincoln Center Theater/LCT3 and Yale Rep just announced that his newest play, War, will début there in November.  Appropriate was a finalist for this year’s Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History. 

Jacobs-Jenkins, who is black, is a man who apparently doesn’t like to be specific about his age—back in 2010, he told New York Times reporter Patrick Healy “he was in his mid-20s”—but should be about 29 now by my calculation.  Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Jacobs-Jenkins graduated from St. John’s College High School (“half military, half Catholic”), one of the oldest schools in the city, as valedictorian of the class of 2002.  His mother, a lawyer and one of the first African-American women to hold a degree from Harvard Law School, and his father, a dentist who worked in the Maryland state prisons, weren’t patrons of the theater, but they took him to see Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Studio Theatre when he was 14 and the experience made a lasting impression on him.  Jacobs-Jenkins proceeded to Princeton University for a 2006 undergraduate degree in anthropology and followed that with an internship at the New Yorker, then New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for a masters in Performance Studies, including courses in the Department of Dramatic Writing. 

Jacobs-Jenkins has “this vivid memory” of the Studio’s Godot.  “I had no idea what I was looking at,” the writer says now, “but it was doing something to me.”  Besides being “this moderately opaque piece of existentialist drama,” the teenaged playwright-to-be found that “two black actors had been cast in the lead roles,” a decision by director (and Studio Theatre founder and then-artistic director) Joy Zinoman that stirred a lot of controversy in the Washington press and among the Studio’s audiences.  It also brought a cease-and-desist order from Samuel Beckett’s estate, which also objected to “the kinds of improvisations that would have driven Beckett up the wall.”  The casting “had managed to ‘racialize’ Beckett in this bizarre way” and Jacobs-Jenkins found himself “completely riveted.”  The young teen felt that “the ‘race-blind’ concept was rubbing up against all these questions of being and language and modernity and abstraction in a strange way that I was probably responding to on some subconscious level.” 

The incipient dramatist spotted the name of a former grade-school classmate in the Godot program and says, “I thought, if he can do it.”  When he got to high school, young Jacobs-Jenkins began auditioning for plays and in his senior year, he actually performed the role of Vladimir in Godot, “which,” he recalled, “was a disaster.”  He continued to act at Princeton, but he says he got tired of being “conceptually cast,” playing roles where his race was a factor in the decision.  He was taking courses in fiction writing, focusing on short stories, but when he was told he couldn’t take any more creative writing classes, he turned to playwriting.  The responses he got when he read his scenes, unlike any he got from his prose—his professor told him, “I think you’re a playwright and I think you should deal with that”—led him to NYU and the Department of Dramatic Writing. 

In all of Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays, the writer uses “blackness as a ‘material.’”  Neighbors had black characters in blackface “perform the once-familiar, now-shocking gestures of minstrelsy.”  An Octoroon (premières in April at SoHo Rep) is an adaption of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 melodrama, The Octoroon.  In Appropriate, there are no black characters, “[b]ut the subject is unmistakably the elephant in the room.”  The estranged members of the white Lafayette family return to Arkansas and the derelict plantation that was their former home to dispose of the possessions of Ray, their recently deceased father and grandfather, in an estate sale and sell the property to cover his debts.  First to arrive is the youngest son, Franz (formerly Frank) and his young girlfriend, River—who’s sensitive to spirits.  Joining them are sister Toni, the oldest sibling, and her teenaged son, Rhys, followed by Bo, the elder brother, his wife, Rachael, and their two children, 8-year-old Ainsley and precocious 13-year-old daughter, Cassidy.  (I continue my accidental string of performances with boy actors.  This makes four.  Though Rhys, about 18, is played by 23-year-old Mike Faist, Ainsley is portrayed by Alex Dreier, 10, who has no lines but performs a chilling and emblematic visual moment in the play.  Appropriate is my only show so far this season with a female juvenile, though.)  

Among the hoarded mementos and junk, the family finds an album of photos of dead black people, all apparently lynched.  The discovery sends the family into paroxysms of fractious confrontations, forgotten histories, and guilt.  Jacobs-Jenkins sees Appropriate as the last in a “sequence” that includes Neighbors and An Octoroon.  Like those plays, he says, Appropriate is “concerned with genre and the act of seeing—the moral question inherent in it—and what exactly is American about American theatre.”  He names Horton Foote, Sam Shepard, and Arthur Miller as writers he admires, and plays such as Dividing the Estate, Buried Child, Cherry Orchard, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as works that helped inspire Appropriate. 

According to his interview in the STC subscriber magazine, Jacobs-Jenkins affirms that when he started writing Appropriate, “I ended up deciding I would steal something from every play that I liked, and put all those things in a play and cook the pot to see what happens”; he acknowledges that his characters are all related to ones from the family plays he named.  (I had begun to wonder, before I saw the play, if the Jacobs-Jenkins’s title was meant to be the adjective a-PRO-pree-at, “suitable to the social situation,” or the verb a-pro-pree-ATE, “to take possession of.”  I’ve concluded that the writer intends it to be ambiguous; Jacobs-Jenkins has spoken of “appropriation” and the theater posted definitions of both senses of the word outside the Griffin.  The introduction to the STC interview with the playwright asserts, “Jacobs-Jenkins quietly imbues the topics of history, belonging, ownership, and appropriation with even greater power.”  The Lafayette siblings act ”inappropriately” throughout the play, and the photos they discover and the family history are evidence of the white establishment “appropriating” African-American culture, history, and suffering.) 

In the New York Times, reviewer Ben Brantley praised the way the dramatist “honors the time-tested recipes of those who have gone before him,” exclaiming, “[W]hat a difference a chef makes.”  Unhappily, I think Brantley’s overstated the case.  Jacobs-Jenkins’s idea may sound interesting, using recognizable memes from great writers of the past both as an homage and as a dramatic lift to help the audience slip more easily into the playwright’s world, but what ends up happening is start-to-finish déjà vu, a feeling that we’ve seen this all before.  Diana compared it to series TV, familiar situations and pedestrian writing that doesn’t elevate the drama above the predictable and expected.  (Elisabeth Vincentelli described Appropriate in the New York Post as “the kind of show where a character making an ominous discovery exclaims ‘Oh my God,’ followed by a dramatic blackout.”)  I wouldn’t state it as harshly as Diana, though.  I give Jacobs-Jenkins a great deal of credit for trying the idea and applying it to an ambitious point.  Except as parody, it probably wouldn’t ever work to borrow (dare I say ‘appropriate’?) so extensively from well-known (and often beloved) tropes in the hopes that you can détourne them for your own purposes, and perhaps Jacobs-Jenkins should have seen that earlier in the process, but I won’t dismiss his attempt to go this route. 

The writer’s ambitious idea is to look at racism in America not through the eyes and lives of those who experienced it themselves, or inherited its repercussions generations after slavery and Jim Crow, but through the lives of the supposedly privileged white Christians who have reaped the whirlwind from the white-supremacy wind their ancestors sowed.  The Lafayette family was dysfunctional long before they discovered Ray’s stash of lynching photos, but the recriminations and bitterness is redoubled when theories start to be put forth for where the pictures came from and whether Ray was actually involved somehow in the horrors they depict—and then who can profit from them now and how.  The tender threads that held the clan together at all—none of the siblings live in the same town and even their own families are in precarious shapes—are virtually ripped out and the fabric of kinship lies in shreds like the rest of the old man’s detritus.  The photos and the plantation connect the Lafayettes to their family history.  Until they find the pictures and questions start to be asked—at first, and most pointedly, by the family outsiders, River, the fiancée, and Rachael, the wife—Toni, Bo, and Franz never even questioned the implications of the old house, whose grounds include an unmarked slave burial ground as well as a family plot, or their family’s history in it.  What Jacobs-Jenkins seems to be saying is that, even if none of them, as Bo rants in frustration, had actually discriminated against anyone, let alone lynched anyone, their unreflective acceptance of a past in which their society and their forebears—all those generations of Lafayettes buried in the plot just outside the window—had perpetrated, echoes down the generations.

Jacobs-Jenkins has contrived that among this family, Toni is divorced and angry, and her son, who now wants to go live with his father, has just come off a period in juvenile detention for selling drugs at his Atlanta school.  Toni, who’d been principal of the school, lost her job over the affair.  Franz had once been convicted of sex with a minor—a girl nearly the same age as his niece Cassidy—and has had problems with drugs and alcohol.  Off the grid for 10 years, he moved from town to town so often that, now in Portland, Oregon, no one could locate him to tell him about his father’s death and the funeral, which he missed.  Franz’s current girlfriend is much younger than he and seems flaky to his sister and brother (though she may be the most grounded one in the group).  Bo’s problems may be the most complex: he doesn’t seem able to commit to anything, even defending his wife against an attack by his sister—he just doesn’t want to get in the middle of anything.  But he feels as if he’s the one bearing the financial responsibility for the plantation and his late father’s care while his job back in New York is in danger because the magazine where he works is downsizing.  Rachael, Bo’s wife, is not only an outsider (she’s from Brooklyn), but she’s a Jew (and, yes, the “K” word gets tossed about) and there are suggestions that Bo married her in part because of her outsiderness.  (I believe that Toni’s response to Rachael’s Jewishness and Bo’s defensiveness about all the evils perpetrated on all minority groups in this country’s history—disease-infested blankets given to Indians even gets a mention—and even Franz’s status as a sex-offender are all meant to be surrogates for the racism Jacobs-Jenkins is addressing but which his characters avoid confronting.  The message: A bigot is a bigot is a bigot.  They don’t discriminate among flavors of prejudice.  Bigotry is bigotry.)  The discovery of the photo album didn’t make this family a mess, but the gruesome pictures serve as a catalyst for the explosion that may have been inevitable as soon as Toni, Bo, and Franz came together in their old home. 

Though Jacobs-Jenkins doesn’t state this theme in the text of Appropriate, it’s what I feel he’s trying to get at.  His vehicle may be flawed and the baggage this characters bring to the situation, not to mention the appropriations the playwright’s taken from Williams, Miller, and the others, may be getting in the way of clearly communicating his point, but I credit Jacobs-Jenkins with an intriguing and worthwhile idea to examine.  Appropriate is only his third full-length play, the second to get a full staging (An Octoroon was presented in a flawed early form at P.S. 122 in 2010, but the revised version gets its première next month) and the writer isn’t yet 30, so I’ll take this production as an encouraging and interesting stage in his maturation and watch where he goes next.  At Princeton, Jacobs-Jenkins recalls, his playwriting teacher, the screenwriter and playwright Neal Bell, told him, “I think you should keep writing plays.  You’re doing something really complicated.”  Now, maybe that’s a little heady to tell a college writer, but I’d accept the assessment now—even if the dramatist’s reach may still be exceeding his grasp.  There was too much that was thought-provoking and promising in Appropriate for me to dismiss Branden Jacobs-Jenkins out of hand. 

The script aside, Liesl Tommy’s production of Appropriate was well conceived and executed.  I don’t know Tommy’s work, but she’s been working both here and in regional rep companies for some time.  A native of Cape Town, South Africa, Tommy has also taught in schools such as NYU’s Tisch, Juilliard, and Brown University.  She worked with Jacobs-Jenkins on the development of Appropriate during his STC residency and staged the Woolly Mammoth production that followed the ATL première.  The playwright didn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination, spelling out almost every emotion and impulse, but Tommy got the actors all to pull it off as if it were the most natural of behaviors.  In her hands, the Lafayettes may be tightly wound but they manage to be believable, not to say always rational, individuals, though it wouldn’t be hard to turn them into clichés.  The production runs two hours and twenty minutes (including one intermission), but it didn’t seem long despite the sometimes predictable nature of Jacobs-Jenkins’s dramaturgy.  Tommy keeps the spinning, overloaded play focused and fluid.  She couldn’t change the melodrama into anything more substantial, and she couldn’t give the play a final resolution that Jacobs-Jenkins didn’t write, but she did keep everything from whirling off into space, which it came close to doing more than once.  (In act two, there’s a total melee, choreographed by fight directors Rick Sordelet and Christian Kelly-Sordelet, in which nearly everyone, including the women and teenaged Rhys—who makes a flying leap at his uncle Bo that attests to his chops as an acrobatic dancer late of Newsies—takes a very active part!  It’s the family-play equivalent of a barroom brawl.)

The costumes of Clint Ramos nicely capture each character’s nature without blaring it out (the characters do that rather enough themselves), but the indisputable star of Appropriate’s physical production is Ramos’s scenic design, especially as lit by Lap Chi Chu.  The Griffin’s small playing area is completely filled with the living room interior of the Lafayette plantation, with a loftily high ceiling and a long staircase to the second-floor landing at the back.  The living room in turn is completely filled with the collected remnants of the dead man’s life of hoarding—clothes, old toys (Bo pulls out a wooden sled that looks like it might have come from the set of Citizen Kane), discarded furniture, books, and assorted junk covering every bit of floor, every surface, and every nook.  (Show Business’s Amy Stringer remarked on “the exquisite detail.”  Think Collyer Brothers.)  The house itself is decomposing like the family ancestors in the graveyard outside.  It’s not haunted, Franz assures River after they climb in through a window—but it looks as if it ought to be.  And of course, it is—although the spirits might be more attached to the people than the place.  Maybe both.  The house is so decrepit that at the end of the play, after everyone has fled, leaving it to the ravages of time, the set literally falls apart piece by piece.  The implication is too obvious, like much of Jacobs-Jenkins’s script, but the stage effect is stunning as ceilings crumble, paintings fall off the walls, and a chandelier drops.  (Phantom of the Opera has only a falling chandelier; Appropriate has an entire house!)

Chu’s lighting, which ranges from shadowy and haunting to glaring and hot like a giant interrogation spot, only enhanced Ramos’s picture.  The wall sconces glowed barely orange, providing an eerie glimmer until the rest of the lights are brought up; outside the windows, instead of moonlight or a wash of dappled sun though old trees, are a bank of spotlights shining in through the floor-to-ceiling windows as if the inhabitants of the plantation were under scrutiny by some unseen observer. 

Once again the Signature has produced a true ensemble performance, engineered by Tommy.  The characters are hardly folks I’d like to spend much time around, although River, the latter-day hippie, isn’t as hard to take as the rest if you can get around her new-ageyness, but the cast portrays them impeccably.  (Brantley said the characters are “all both unlovable and impossible not to identify with,” though I don’t entirely buy the second assertion.)  Johanna Day’s Toni is a bitch on wheels from her first entrance pretty much until she leaves the stage, but she mixes her acerbic wit with a touchy defensiveness that makes her human (if not quite sympathetic).  Her one moment of near-empathy—although she has to imagine her bothers dead to get to it—is carried off with more conviction than a less resourceful actor probably could muster; it almost doesn’t fit, but Day finds the connection in the memories she’d like to have.  Bo’s noncommittal aloofness and Franz’s man-child oddness are nicely portrayed by Michael Laurence and Patch Darragh; as hard as the characters are to take—I really just wanted someone to smack them both upside their heads and knock some common sense into them—the two actors catch the brothers convincingly. 

As the women in the two brothers’ lives, Sonya Harum’s River and Maddie Corman’s Rachael both clearly demonstrate their outsider status, Harum by simply not meshing with the family dynamic so . . . well, dynamically, and Corman by exhibiting a palpable animosity for Toni (and later for Ray) that seems both deserved and a little contrived.  (It’s actually Rachael herself who first invokes the “K” word, though Toni picks it up readily.)  The children are hints of what will become of the Lafayette clan down the generational road, and it’s still cloudy.  Rhys has already made bad choices but Faist makes him seem unfinished and a little diffident.  Away from Toni—and we have no idea what kind of man Derek, his father, is—he may have a chance to sever the tether to the Lafayette ghosts.  Precocious young Cassidy keeps reminding us that she’s “almost an adult,” and Izzy Hanson-Johnston makes her smart enough that we can just believe she, too, might be salvageable—once Rachael is back in New York safely away from the other Lafayettes.  Her little brother, Ainsley, is less of a full-blooded figure, and Dreier is called on to do little more that be a ball of energy tearing around the old homestead—which he does with terrific verve. 

It may well be that Tommy’s staging has papered over many of the faults of Jacobs-Jenkins’s script, but in my experience, most of the time that that happens, there’s something in the play on which to anchor the production.  That’s why I’ll take the STC presentation of Appropriate as an indication that this writer has a lot to offer and soon may be making a mark on U.S. stages.  (In Entertainment Weekly, Stephan Lee posited that this may be “a star-making production for” the playwright.  I’m not prepared to go that far.)  Jacobs-Jenkins already has an ear for speech, even if his dialogue can border on cliché, and his characters, if derivative, are vivid and lively.  He has a way of making them play off of one another that creates a world on the stage, but he hasn’t learned yet that less can be more, explaining everything, but saying little in the end—which, by the way, contains no resolution either to the questions raised by the photos or to the rifts in the family.  We do know that Rhys is going to live with his father, starting a new chapter perhaps, but the only other indication of a potential future is that both Franz and River have taken new names: Franz used to be Frank (apparently for François) and River was born Trisha.  New identities may suggest a new start, and Franz insists he’s not the same person who led his earlier, troubled life.  Nonetheless, as Timesman Brantley put it, when Appropriate ends, the Lafayette children “are, if anything, more confused than when it began.”  The decay of the house set may be Jacobs-Jenkins showing us what he sees in the Lafayette future, but it’s not in the play.

The press response seemed to be split; I came down in a sort of center position, finding flaws in the vehicle but promise in the ideas and Jacobs-Jenkins’s talent and ambition.  Reviewers appear to have either embraced the dramatist’s effort or dismissed it.  The Post’s Vincentelli felt that “while there’s very little that’s fresh in ‘Appropriate,’ the show’s still a fun ride” because “everything is amped up for gleeful maximum effect” by “Tommy’s energetic direction.”  Asserted the Post reviewer, “Subtle this is not, but Jacobs-Jenkins pushes all the buttons very efficiently” and Vincentelli concluded, “‘Appropriate’ proves that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel—you just have to make sure it turns smoothly.”

In contrast, the Daily News’s Joe Dziemianowicz opened his notice with: “There’s probably a worthwhile, if well-worn, story of unwanted and inescapable family legacies lurking in . . . ‘Appropriate.’  Too bad the virtues of this comedy-drama are hidden in director Liesl Tommy’s miscalibrated production.”  Dziemianowicz also wasn’t impressed with the performances, calling the acting “cartoonish, unconvincing and, finally, inappropriate.”  Ultimately, the Newsman concluded that “the play strives for a significance that remains elusive.”  The Times’s Brantley, however, called Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate “his very fine, subversively original new play . . . under the astute direction of Liesl Tommy.”  The play’s style, Brantley asserted, “is piercingly clear, with carefully drawn characters who speak in crisp and fluid dialogue” which has been “smoothly acted” by the ensemble. 

In “Goings On About Town,” the New Yorker called Appropriate “a sprawling, Shepardesque play . . . that slyly approaches its huge subject.”  Jacobs-Jenkins and “his expert cast take care with the many familial relationships,” said the New Yorker writer, “and the young playwright has found a way to teach without preaching, leaving the ending, true to life, wide open.”  In an astute comparison of three of STC’s current productions (Appropriate, David Henry Hwang’s Kung Fu, and Will Eno’s The Open House; see my ROT reports on the last two on 11 and 16 March) and an invocation of Leo Tolstoy’s admonition that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (it’s from Anna Karenina, 1873-1877), Jesse Green at New York magazine decided that the family members in Jacobs-Jenkins’s play “make the other clans look like Cleavers, and make you want to wield one.”  Green asked “Is Appropriate a comic tragedy?  A tragic comedy?  No, just a mess, undercooked and overexplained” and it’s “as overstuffed as the house.”  (Green added that “at least the house gets cleaned during the action.  The play just gets more cluttered.”)  The actors, said the man from New York, must “hack their way through the emotional underbrush” and the playwright never “finds ways to seduce us into accepting his creatures as real and even attractive.”  Green concluded by declaring, “Fortunately, people like that don’t live in real houses.  They live only in theaters, and you get to leave them there.”  In the Village Voice, Alexis Soloski described Jacobs-Jenkins’s writing style as “a fluid naturalism that seems to want to break into something grander,” but noted that in Appropriate “only the play's beginning and ending veer toward the symbolic.”  Soloski further noted that the playwright’s “characters speak vivid, self-aware dialogue,” though “the script wouldn't benefit from a more direct swing at its subjects.”  Tommy’s staging “too often trades messy horror for clean comedy” as the script “does call out for a more substantial kind of reckoning.” 

In the theater and entertainment press, Amy Stringer proclaimed in Show Business, “Everybody drop what you’re doing and go see this play immediately,” calling Appropriate an “enthralling play, expertly directed by Liesl Tommy.”  Stringer even warned theatergoers that the experience “will quite possibly leave you with your jaw on the floor, clutching the person sitting next to you.”  Of Jacobs-Jenkins’s dialogue, the Show Biz reviewer reported that “the thought behind each line is so well-articulated that almost nothing seems wasted or superfluous” and, aided by Tommy’s direction, the writing “takes the production to another level of realism.”  In her final analysis, Stringer insisted that “the way that every element of this play comes together . . . makes [Appropriate] a production that deserves to be seen.”  In Entertainment Weekly, Stephan Lee reported, “There's so much to look at on [the] Signature Theatre stage during Appropriate, yet so many of the play's major drivers remain totally unseen.”  The play, wrote the EW reviewer, “is . . . primarily a family drama rooted firmly in reality, but the ominous setting lends it the look of a horror show or ghost story—which, in some ways, it is.”  Lee felt that Jacobs-Jenkins’s “verbal artillery,” which “infuses the script with unforced, viperish humor,” is also “often jarring, but the show stops just short of over-indulgence.”  Describing it as “an uncommonly deft dramatic and technical achievement,” Lee reported that the play “speeds along” despite its length because of both Jacobs-Jenkins’s writing and Tommy’s “taut direction.”  Time Out New York‘s David Cote characterized Appriopriate as “a racialized, faintly mocking riff on the Dark Family Secrets genre so well defined by Albee, Shepard and, more recently, Tracy Letts.”  Finding the plot “a contrived exposé of attitudes” by “tedious and grating characters,” the man from TONY declared, “It’s potentially rich material, but the young Jacobs-Jenkins can’t write character or dialogue as well as the sources he’s synthesizing.”  Cote felt that “despite a talented cast and Liesl Tommy’s straight-faced direction,” the reviewer-writer kept “waiting for the narrative or aesthetic strategy to twist into something truly novel or perverse.  It never does.”  The TONY reviewer’s “bottom line”: “This family isn’t dysfunctional enough.”

In the on-line press, Elyse Sommer proclaimed on CurtainUp that the Lafayettes’ “problems and long festering resentments could keep several psychotherapists busy for years.”  Sommer characterized Appropriate, a “Southern Gothic serio-comedy,” as “both a comic variation [on] Tracy Letts's August: Osage County . . . and a subtly original and funny yet serious take on this dramatic genre” to which Jacobs-Jenkins “adds an ironic piquancy.”  The CurtainUp review-writer asserted that the playwright subverts “this essentially familiar setup” by the way he “builds the ever escalating conflicts . . . with humor and skillful character development,” creating “believable, nuanced” figures instead of “the caricatures they could easily be.”  Sommer concluded that the “disturbing yet entertaining play,” composed         “[w]ithout preaching” by Jacobs-Jenkins, “can still have the power to surprise and impress.”  In her New York Theatre Guide review, Tulis McCall, acknowledging that she “may be in the minority,” complained that the narrative is too diffuse because “Jacobs-Jenkins doesn’t choose one character to pull the plot along.”  “No single person,” McCall explained, “has a goal around which the story is built.”  The cyber reviewer further asserted, “The writing in the second act borders on sophomoric,” and she lamented that despite Tommy’s “very fine direction,” Ramos’s “killer set,” and “excellent performances,” she was disappointed because “instead of being pulled into the Lafayette family basement, I was left out on the front lawn, asking the same question that Bo asked: Is there a point to all this?”  McCall nonetheless felt that Jacobs-Jenkins “is an adventuresome chronicler” and admitted that she “look[s] forward to more work from” the playwright. 

Talkin’ Broadway’s Matthew Murray reported that “Jacobs-Jenkins demonstrates a compelling storytelling skill” and “skirts the line between the necessary and the uncomfortable, raising questions most of us would prefer were not asked in real life.”  Still, Murray felt, the playwright “plots a bit broadly, leaving certain elements and events looser than is absolutely ideal,” namely, “too many of the characters are saddled with too many crippling problems . . . and a number of events in the second act . . . do not ring true.”  The TB reviewer found, “Ultimately, alas, neither does the production, as Jacobs-Jenkins’s intense and surprising writing is never matched by what we see onstage,” for which Murray blamed Tommy, who brings “an acrid stuffiness about the proceedings that slows down the action and keeps much of it from being either tense or convincing.”  He summed up that “everything plays just a little too fake,” including, the review-writer added, the actors.  Murray’s final judgment, however, is quite positive, finding that Appropriate is “a vivid vivisection of white guilt given physical form, and a fascinating investigation from an African-American playwright who’s once again unleashing his distinctive voice and outlook.”  On TheaterMania, David Gordon called Appropriate “[a] great concept gone wrong” because Jacobs-Jenkins’s “idea is just so good that the decision to mash up hoary old theatrical tropes to tell his story is massively disappointing.”  Gordon lamented, “The performers try valiantly to find the heart within each role,” all of whom, the reviewer asserted, were “a group of archetypes.”  He further averred that Tommy's direction is “[m]ore detrimental” because it’s “tonally confusing and infuses a play that doesn't seem like a dark comedy with grimly comedic elements.”  The production, however, “is stunning to look at” with Ramos’s costumes and his “set eye-popping in its scope and messiness,” as well as Chu’s lighting and the sound design of Broken Chord.  “Ultimately,” concluded Gordon, “Jacobs-Jenkins’ message is obscured by his insistence on sticking to something so conventional.  What could have made a significant impression on the American dramatic canon lands with a mere ho-hum.”