If, as Shakespeare wrote in “The Tempest” “what’s past is prologue,” the dysfunctional family in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Appropriate” are in for a shuddering history lesson when they gather at a faded Arkansas plantation swarmed by clicking cicadas to address the estate of their late father.
As Jacobs-Jenkins warns at the outset of the play: “Light abandons us and a darkness replaces it.”
A buried secret with racist overtones is unearthed in “Appropriate,” a 2024 Tony Award winner for Best Revival of a Play. That Broadway production also earned a Tony for Sarah Paulson, who portrayed Toni of the play’s Lafayette family.
Having been conceived in part at the Vineyard Arts Project space on Martha’s Vineyard in 2011, Jacobs-Jenkins’ work premiered two years later at the now-bygone Humana Festival of New America Plays in Louisville and appeared a year after that Off Broadway.
“Appropriate” is now getting its San Diego premiere at the Old Globe under the direction of Steve H. Broadnax III.
Broadnax (“Thoughts of a Colored Man” on Broadway) directed Dave Harris’ “Everybody Black” at UC San Diego in 2019 and a reading of Keelay Gipson’s “The Red and the Black” as part of the Globe’s Powers New Voices Festival in 2022. He’s making his Globe full-production directorial debut with “Appropriate,” which he says “lies in the crossroads” between drama and dark comedy.
“That’s Branden Jacobs-Jenkins,” Broadnax said. “He turns expectation on its head. It’s definitely humorous, but this play is about how when you do not embrace or take ability for a family’s history or trauma, it will destroy the ties that bind in family.”
Broadnax believes “Appropriate” has something to say about not only the Lafayette family but relations everywhere. “We’re all working together with this production to tell the story of a particular family and their issues and also the larger family that’s represented.
“With what’s happening politically with information in certain schools now and the debate about what should be taught, we need to confront our history in a macro sense,” he said. “We’ve got to deal with the truth of what’s happened in the past, too, and then we can reconcile. Sometimes people want to jump to reconciliation and ignore the history.”
In the Globe production Maggie Lacey stars as eldest Lafayette sibling Toni, with Steve Kazee and Daniel Petzold as Toni’s brothers Bo and Franz, respectively.
Twenty-two-year-old Daniel Dale, recently seen in “Saturday Night Live” alum Kyle Mooney’s sci-fi-comedy movie mashup “Y2K,” is playing Toni’s son Rhys.
“What this family’s dealing with is so much worse than what most families deal with — I hope,” Broadnax said. “But you can relate to it. I’ve always wanted to play Rhys mainly because he’s someone who is on the cusp of being an adult person but isn’t quite there yet, and he’s feeling that sort of dissonance that I felt at the same age, and still feel now.
“The storytelling, the writing itself of this play is so over-the-moon incredible. We’re just hoping to do it justice.”
Ultimately, director Broadnax said, “The humanity of the play is within the family structure. The ties that bind us all together are very thin and fragile.”
‘Appropriate’
When: Previews, Jan. 25-29. Opens Jan. 30 and runs through Feb. 23. 7 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays
Where: Old Globe Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park, San Diego
Tickets: $31 and up
Phone: 619-234-5623
Online: theoldglobe.org
