Appropriate at the Donmar: So Much to Work With, So Much that Doesn’t Work

Today’s show is Appropriate, playing at the Donmar Warehouse until October 5.

In the week leading up to our performance of Appropriate, husbo and I were debating the pronunciation of the title: Was it “appropriate” like when something is or is not proper? Or was it “appropri-ATE”, like what white people with dreadlocks do to a culture that isn’t theirs? Is it both?! Both would be amazing. We were pumped. Sadly, our intrigue over the title was more exciting than the actual play.

While the show does somewhat engage both meanings of the word, Appropriate puts a lot of interesting feelers out there regarding racism and prejudice and how modern-day Americans deal with their history and their present relationships with bigotry and what’s proper and what’s not – but fails to deliver real meaningful conversation about any of it. We have a family drama (a very classic-feeling one in many ways, largely because the playwright ‘stole’ (his words!) bits from all the classic American plays) of a pretty shittastic family convening at their deceased patriarch’s plantation home before it goes to auction, and, as expected, ghosts (and ghost-like hoods) from the family’s history are dug up, as are interpersonal issues between the remaining relatives and their own prejudices.

The plot centers on the three grown children of the patriarch, Franz (a total fuck-up former child rapist??) ( played by Edward Hogg), Bo (who seems semi normal) (played by Steven Mackintosh), and Toni (Jean-Ralphio was really singing about her and not his sister – she is THE WORST) (played by Monica Dolan), and their families. When a book of horrifying old photographs – of black people being lynched – are found, reactions vary. Most want to sell the photos to pay off the father’s lingering debts. Some characters just want to hide them from their kids. The struggle over what to do with the pictures reflects the larger struggle among the family of whether they trust each other (they do not) and of what these pictures mean for them, for their memories of their father, and whether they care.

Toni, she doesn’t care. Toni sucks. I can’t BELIEVE that they got the character of Toni to suck even more than the character who literally was a child rapist. Dolan starts off the show pitched at an 11 on a scale of 1-10 so she has nowhere to go and no choice but to stay at an 11, just screaming at the same level of intensity so you never really care about anything she says and can too easily ignore her. You wait and wait for this main character to explain in an impassioned climactic reveal the reason why she is such a g-d bitch to everyone and why she doesn’t care that her father was a klan member, or why she’s cool with her teenage son using racist language, or why she hates everyone in her family especially her brother’s Jew wife (this is a phrase that is used), aside from the obvious reason of ‘she’s also a bigot’, but instead, her big climactic reveal is that she’s sad (but in a loud way) because there’s no one left in the world who held her as a baby. Fuck you, lady. That’s most people. And that’s not a good enough excuse to be a racist piece of shit. In fact, nothing in the play helped give the characters enough reason to act as they do, in all their variously bigoted ways.

And that might be the most brilliant part of the play – how realistically shitty it made its characters, how realistic it is that Toni would be racist like her father and that her teenage son would be too, and that when they use racist language no one would be around to hear them and Toni wouldn’t think anything of it. But there’s so much that feels close to powerful that stops short. There’s so much that could be said about dealing with the father’s racist history, but instead there’s a lot of bickering among siblings. Which is again, realistic, but the less interesting choice.

The playwright, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, is relatively young man whose works are already regarded as modern American classics. He’s African-American, so we know that his decisions about how to discuss racism were carefully and precisely made. But, I honestly think that more than any other show I’ve ever seen in London, this one can be too heavily influenced by its audience. During the entire last third, the elephant in the room, at least for me, is that no one in the all-white family at any point says ‘maybe we shouldn’t be profiting off of black suffering again,’ off of black people’s trauma that their family caused. It seems like the family fails to say this precisely because they are so terrible and because their whiteness blinds them from this realization. And I believe that’s kind of what BJJ was going for, the power of what he doesn’t show or tell, but I think the mostly-white London audience would have to be in on the joke for that to work here, and they are really, really not.  It seems like a vital point that he left unsaid, assuming that decent people would find the omission flagrant, but maybe there aren’t as many decent people as he thinks.

And along the same lines, I hope, I really hope, that he wanted audiences to find the same problems with how the play and the characters treat Jews, but I fear that I’m misplacing this hope. AS USUAL, London audiences react in really troubling ways to anything about Jewishness. Bo’s wife, Rachael (played by Jaimi Barbakoff) – a character that Ben Brantley called “defensively Jewish” in 2014 even though a) that’s not apparent and b) that’s not a thing? would you say that about a black person? (Brantley is such an ass) – tells Toni the father did not like her because she was Jewish. Although this sheds more light on the father’s definite racism, our audience dismisses it, agreeing with Toni that this Jew doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say, instead of realizing for themselves that this is A Bad Take. I’ve shared frequently over the years how troublingly London audiences react to anything Jewish in plays – like when they laughed really hard in Caroline, or Change, when Caroline tells her young Jewish charge that he will burn in hell (they did not laugh like that in NYC (because it’s…not funny)) – and this was another doozy. When Toni calls Rachael a slur, when Toni dismisses Rachael’s valid concerns about her father, saying he didn’t like her not because she’s a Jew but because she’s an annoying person – all of this made our audience side with Toni, who is the wrong person to side with. I doubt BJJ expected this, or at least I hope he didn’t mean for it. When Toni and Rachael fight, the audience’s hate of Rachael was palpable. In fact, in other reviews I’ve seen, most are calling Rachael the most unlikable character, which blows my mind. Did they SEE the others? If BJJ was trying to get the audience to realize for themselves how the family should be refusing to profit off of black suffering again, and if he similarly wanted the audience to identify on their own that the anti-Semitism of the characters was wrong, it did not work.

I was truly disturbed for most of this play, and not in the good way that drama should disturb your comfort. I was mostly unsettled by the people around me, who seemed to be getting a way different message from the play than I was, one that was super troubling especially in today’s very racist times. And then I was troubled that maybe they were getting exactly what was intended after all, and that I maybe expected equality that wasn’t there.

The best parts were Isabella Pappas’s performance as Rachael’s young daughter, since she is an astoundingly natural performer, and at the end when Bo and Franz awkwardly say goodbye and then don’t know what to do so they shake hands, and immediately in my head I heard Chris Farley’s Tommy Boy say “Brothers don’t shake hands! Brothers hug!!!” and laughed hysterically.

INFORMATION

Appropriate plays the Donmar Warehouse in London until October 5.

The first act is only 50 minutes so the second act is way too long, about an hour and a quarter.

You’ve already heard how forked up our audience was and judging from my entire theatre-going experience in London, it was not a fluke. But what’s more, five phones went off during the final scenes.