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Regional Reviews: St. Louis Appropriate Also see Richard's reviews of Stay a While: A Birthday Play in Four Seasons, The Last Show on Earth, The Color Purple and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women
So much has changed since the author of The Glass Menagerie took Broadway by storm in 1945. And what once hurled us much further than the moon may seem tame in some ways, notwithstanding Williams' great poetic writing. But now, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' dramedy, Appropriate, updates Southern-charm-turned-haunted-house at the Center of Contemporary Art (COCA), under the complex and naturalistic direction of Benny Sato-Ambush. Appropriate officially debuted in 2013 at the Humana Festival in Louisville. And eleven years after that, in 2024, it won a Tony Award for Best Revival in a production that began on Broadway at the Hayes Theatre. At two and a half hours long (but with slightly over half as many characters), it seems almost of a piece with 2007's un-diagrammable August: Osage County, with all its boundless family drama. Then again, it also reminds me of 2016's The Humans where everything's falling apart for parents and their grown-up children who are basically just trying to be good. All of this is by way of explaining how we attempt to organize modern domestic upheaval in theatre. Maybe each of these works is about the decline and fall of our latest modern empire. Or, in this one case, maybe it's just an incredibly bleak rough patch for the ironic and self-mocking Lafayette family in a weirdly realistic style. A glassy kind of plausibility wraps itself around a wicked Southern corruption, especially in act two. But the more dominant theme emerging in Appropriate is how history belongs to us, along with the other way around. Comedy comes from northern and western manners, madly imposed on the antebellum. The line-burden is fairly evenly shared, but actor Joel Moses draws inexorable focus as Franz (Frank), the prodigal son who fled the play's crumbling mansion a decade earlier. Maggie Newstead-Adams finds complexity in seeming simplicity as his new-age girlfriend, River, after the pair sneaks into his father's tumbledown Arkansas plantation house in the middle of the night. The home is shown in fantastic detail (impressionistic in some ways) in the set and lighting design by Matthew McCarthy, with a seemingly infinite array of props by Mikhail Lynn. In Act One it looks as though an entire, forgotten attic has crashed down upon them all, crushing their breezy modern attitudes. Much later, in his penultimate scene, Mr. Moses is psychologically ripped open, far more than I'd ever seen before, even in his performance last year as the drunken son in Long Day's Journey Into Night. His characters are often weirdly irresistible, in spite of their best attempts at resistibility. And somehow, Appropriate develops the unexpected feel of Tennessee Williams drama–or perhaps it's a tale by his brother from another mother. Julianne Marie Klaus is great as the sharp-tongued Toni, perhaps the Violet Weston (from August Osage County) of this particular Southern charmer. "Southern" and "Gothic" jumped the broom a long time ago, though here the "gothic" part comes not just from the spooky house, but from a curse upon the land as well, as if a whole region had been consigned to an elegant, self-induced madness. And yet, Ms. Klaus mostly defies all of that with a hard-edged realism that somehow just makes things worse for them all. Is it fair to say the South is permanently twisted? Maybe it's just the mad buzzing of cicadas in Mary Robinson's sound design. Michael James Reed firmly occupies the center stage, but late in act two he magically makes himself the least prominent of the clan in that very same starlight as Bo, the sensible brother who sees only ruin from a big fight over the spoilage of his father's estate. Lizi Watt dances on an invisible circus ball as his wife Rachael, who's convinced the house is haunted–at least by anti-semitism. Nobody talks like a fish-faced fool here, even in the depths of Elaine, Arkansas, amidst the forgotten farmland. But Braden Phillips is almost languidly detailed under his glum adolescent attitude as Toni's son Rhys. And Ainsley Hammond is cleverly clumsy as Cassidy, daughter of Bo and Rachael, who's mad for her sexy Southern cousin. The child actor Aviv Giancola-Poremba is a pixie on stage, even in a pointy headpiece, as little Ainsley Lafayette. The excellent costumes are by Abby Pastorello. Back story comes front and center again and again, creating an impassable psychological terrain, which is standard for the form. And more and more uneasy laughter squeezes out of us as tensions boil over–and the elements of horror and haunting are twisted in shadowy new ways. Appropriate, produced by the Tennessee Williams Festival of St. Louis, runs through September 27, 2026, at the Center of Contemporary Arts, Catherine B. Berges Theatre, 6880 Washington Avenue, St. Louis MO. For tickets and information, please visit www.twstl.org. Cast: Production Staff: Additional Production Staff: * Denotes Member, Actors' Equity Association |
