Review: Old Globe’s dark family drama ‘Appropriate’ packs a wallop

A scene from the Old Globe production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Appropriate.” (Jim Cox)

By Pam Kragen | [email protected] | The San Diego Union-Tribune

UPDATED: January 31, 2025 at 4:07 PM PST

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play “Appropriate” at the Old Globe couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

First produced in 2014, then revived last year in a Tony-winning Broadway production, it’s about a trio of dysfunctional White American siblings grappling with their family’s disturbing history of racism, cruelty and immorality.

Each of the Lafayette siblings — who have gathered at their late father’s Arkansas plantation home in 2011 to sell the property and divide his estate — hope to close the door to their family’s dark and long-secret past and walk away hundreds of thousands of dollars richer.

Instead, they discover there is no escaping the sins of their slave-holding and racist forefathers. Seven generations of hatred, greed, denial, entitlement and moral decay have rotted the roots of the Lafayette family tree.

Daniel Petzold as Franz, left, Maggie Lacey as Toni and Steve Kazee as Bo in the Old Globe's "Appropriate." (Jim Cox) — Daniel Petzold as Franz, left, Maggie Lacey as Toni and Steve Kazee as Bo in the Old Globe’s “Appropriate.” (Jim Cox)

Jacobs-Jenkins’ astute observations of White American life from his perspective as a Black playwright are fresh and illuminating. “Appropriate” has razor-sharp nuggets of humor, but it’s a dark comedy offering more gasps than laughs.

The Lafayettes are a microcosm of today’s America, where our new federal istration’s plan to ban the teaching of inherent racial bias in public schools and dismantle hiring initiatives created to address historic disparities in opportunities for people of color. New laws will be ed in the coming weeks and months, but they can never erase America’s past and the truth.

The Globe production, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III and scenically designed by Arnel Sancianco, physically mirrors the 2024 Broadway production, which I saw last April in New York. That staging showcased the fiercely funny Sarah Paulson as eldest Lafayette sibling Toni. Broadnax’s cast is more of a balanced ensemble led with strong performances by Maggie Lacey, Steve Kazee and Daniel Petzold as Lafayette siblings Toni, Bo and Franz, respectively.

In addition to the eight actors onstage, the Lafayette home is its own spooky character, a living and breathing entity, thanks to fine technical work by Sancianco, music and sound designer Curtis Craig and lighting designer Alan C. Edwards.

To say too much about the plot of this 2-1/2-hour play would spoil its many twists. But the key point Jacob-Jenkins makes in “Appropriate” is that no family (or, by comparison, no nation) can grow deep and sustaining roots in poisoned ground.

This final, toxic generation of plantation-owning Lafayettes are irretrievably broken by family secrets, childhood trauma, addiction, divorce and criminality. But it is their shared indifference to others’ suffering, and how they might profit from it, that might be the final nail in their hereditary coffin.