PUTNEY — Apron Theater Company co-founder Hallie Flower feels a great responsibility in bringing a new work of theater to the area from a writer whose work she reveres.
On the first two weekends in August, Next Stage Arts Project and Apron Theater Company will present Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at Next Stage. Directed by Flower, this production will be the regional premiere of this play and the playwright's work.
According to Flower, Appropriate is an American family drama in the tradition of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, and Horton Foote. As in works by those authors, Jacobs-Jenkins' drama deals with the conflict when family members come together to discover some suppressed truths about their lives.
In Appropriate, as described in Next Stage's news release, “Every estranged member of the Lafayette clan has descended upon the crumbling Arkansas homestead to settle the accounts of the newly-dead patriarch. As his three adult children sort through a lifetime of hoarded mementos and junk, they collide over clutter, debt, and a contentious family history. But after a disturbing discovery surfaces among their father's possessions, the reunion takes a turn for the explosive, unleashing a series of crackling surprises and confrontations.”
“But this not your regular family drama,” Flower says. “It subverts the tradition in a lot of interesting ways. This play takes audiences expectations and keeps twisting them. You could call it the American family drama on steroids.”
'A vivid voice'
Playwright Jacobs-Jenkins was born in Washington, D.C., and graduated from Princeton University in 2006, with a major in anthropology. He earned a master's degree in performance studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2007. He subsequently taught playwriting at both Princeton and Tisch.
Jacobs-Jenkins became a member of the Signature Theatre Residency Five program in 2013. The program guarantees three full productions of new work. Appropriate was produced Off-Broadway by the Signature Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center, from March 16 to April 13, 2014.
He won the 2014 Obie Award for Best New American Play for Appropriate as well as for An Octoroon. His play Gloria was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Also in 2016, Jacobs-Jenkins was named a MacArthur Fellow.
“Jacobs-Jenkins is a very interesting and vivid voice now working in American theater,” Flower says. “His work has not been done in the area because our population, quite frankly. is not diverse enough.”
As an African-American playwright, Jacobs-Jenkins' work often deals with issues of racism in America. However, Appropriate was specifically written for white actors.
“The performing text of Appropriate is quite amusing because, rather than as in most plays where a character is simply assumed to be white unless otherwise stated, Jacobs-Jenkins explicitly denotes the race as white after his description of each character,” Flower says.
As the Los Angeles Times pointed out, “Appropriate is about a white family and doesn't include a single character of color, but it's nonetheless haunted by the legacy of slavery in the American South.”
Jacobs-Jenkins told the Times, “Part of it was thinking through how invisible can I make something like blackness and still have it charge the room, because I was noticing in these plays that I was reading, like Long Day's Journey into Night, or Death of a Salesman, or A Streetcar Named Desire, or Buried Child, race is there, but we're not reading it as there.
“And somehow when I write a play, it's already there. I was trying to figure out what I'm doing that's actually making you see that. ... I'm not doing anything! You're bringing your own weird feeling about what a story by a black artist is supposed to be.”
Persistence and luck
Flower has had her eye on Appropriate for a long time.
“I have been watching the project ever since it was in development,” Flower says. “I love this playwright and this play is a great family drama, something else I am very interested in exploring. In its original season at Signature, I was able to read the original manuscript.
“When I heard that Appropriate had become available for regional theaters, I started calling, and with persistence and luck, we were able to present the regional premiere of this important work in our area at ATC.”
The Apron Theater Company, founded by Karla Baldwin, Hallie Flower, and Carrie Kidd is Next Stage's “theater-company-in-residence.” Some past productions include Death of a Salesman, Wit, August: Osage County, and Mother Courage and her Children.
“ATC have wowed audiences with each production with outstanding casts, direction, sets, and technical production values,” says Next Stage Executive Director Maria Basescu.
“Now that we were able to do Appropriate, we suddenly found we had so little time to do justice to this complex play,” Flower concedes. “Appropriate is strange in a lot of ways. You would call it a realist drama, for the play invites you to inhabit the world it represents.
“Yet, at the same time, it subverts the traditional realist drama. Family dramas usually works through objects to discover dark family secrets and come up with a resolutions of sort. Here, there is a catharsis like in the classic family farm, but it turns out to be unusual and surprising.
“In Appropriate, the first act feels like the second. Yet Jacobs-Jenkins helps a director with his material. The playwright layers the drama in interesting ways. He provides a director excellent clues of how to present the play through the way he scores his script, and we all are eager to be able to do this terrific new drama justice.”
Flower believes that she is drawn to family dramas because of “the weird behavior in all our families.” Last season, Flower directed another modern family drama, August: Osage County.
“A lot of the actors from that cast are returning for Appropriate,” Flower says. “I am very excited about the cast. They are mixed generationally, which I love directing, with actors ranging from 10 to fully grown-up.”
Flower fears that a lot of people will want to categorize Appropriate as an issue play.
“But it is so much more than that,” she says. “It deals with many things in complex and new ways. Things happen that you will recognize from your own life. On top of that the ride is fun. Appropriate is very contemporary drama and is grippingly funny. What more could you ask?”