About the Play:

Winner of the 2015 Obie Award for Best New American Play

Appropriate is a full-length drama by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. In this searing comic drama, the estranged members of the Lafayette family return to their crumbling Arkansas plantation home to settle the accounts of their recently deceased patriarch. As they sort through a hoarded lifetime of mementos and junk, they discover a gruesome relic that sends them spiraling into a dark history of repressed memories and family secrets. A breakout play from one of the theatre's most exciting and provocative young writers.

Appropriate is about family secrets on an Arkansas plantation. 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 the disturbing discovery of a gruesome Southern relic among their father's possessions, the reunion takes a turn for the explosive, unleashing a series of crackling accusations, repressed fears, and more questions than answers. A challenging play on race, family, and if it's possible for history to ever stay in the past.

Appropriate premiered in 2013 at the Actors Theater of Louisville during the Humana Festival of New American Plays, followed by regional premieres at professional theatres across the US, including Victory Gardens Theatre (Chicago), Woolly Mammoth Theater (Washington DC), and Signature Theatre (New York, Off-Broadway). The play was nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play, and won the 2015 Obie Award for Best New American Play. Since then it has been mounted by colleges and community theatres.

Cast: 4 women, 3 men, 1 child

What people say:

"…very fine, subversively original… [Jacobs-Jenkins] honors the time-tested recipes of those who have gone before him, combining them into a crafty narrative… But he also brings a culinary self-consciousness to the mix that makes you savor the ingredients anew, while pondering why they have dominated American theater for so long …Appropriate is piercingly clear, with carefully drawn characters who speak in crisp and fluid dialogue. [Jacobs-Jenkins] enjoys his quarrelsome characters, and he has achieved the difficult feat of making them all both unlovable and impossible not to identify with… remarkable and devious." — The New York Times

"…prodigiously gifted… [Branden Jacobs-Jenkins] effortlessly and believably taps into a white family's dysfunction, infuses the script with unforced, viperish humor …Appropriate is an uncommonly deft dramatic and technical achievement." — Entertainment Weekly

"…an exceptionally brilliant piece of writing…gut-punchingly honest work." — Time Out (Chicago)

"…biliously funny…Jacobs-Jenkins [is] a witty provocateur and a dramatist on whom to keep your eye…What distinguishes [Appropriate] is the playwright's gift for drawing his characters into an escalating conflict and sustaining, with humor and craft, our curiosity about how they digest the terrible information thrown at them." — The Washington Post

About the Playwright:

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an African-American playwright. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a two-time Obie Award winner, a MacArthur "Genius Grant" Award recipient, and was awarded the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation Theatre Award, among many other honours.