Theatre in Review: Appropriate (Signature Theatre Company)

	Mike Faist, Johanna Day. Photo: Joan Marcus

Looking for some dysfunctional family action? In Appropriate, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has assembled the most neurotic and fractious tribe to be seen since the Westons of Osage County last staged a dining room brawl. You know you're in for it when you see the towering, ruined Arkansas mansion interior designed by Clint Ramos. It looks like Tara by way of Charles Addams -- complete with a staircase so steep that ascending practically constitutes a stress test -- and every square inch is covered in piles of clothing, books, unopened boxes, and just plain junk, as if the Collyer Brothers had been summering there for years. Before the lights come up, we sit in the dark for an unnervingly long time, listening to the menacing sound of the cicadas massed outside. "It's like a horror movie," a first-time visitor comments. (The effective sound design is by Broken Chord.) There are other, slightly macabre details: We quickly learn that the family plot is located just outside the door, and beyond that is a set of unmarked graves for the slaves who served when it was a plantation.

The house, which has belonged for generations to the family Jacobs-Jenkins has imagined, is in this state because Ray, the patriarch, retreated there 20 years earlier with his youngest son Frank, who is now known as "the family pedophile." Frank eventually disappeared, and, as Ray's health declined, the objects around him accumulated. Now that he is dead, Frank has returned, with his new girlfriend, River. Frank insists that he has changed his ways; River, he proudly notes, is 23.

None of this is really good news for Toni, the eldest of Ray's children, who is having a really, really bad year. Her husband has left her; her son, Rhys, has been caught selling drugs, for which he did prison time; and she has lost her job as a school principal. (Rhys was one of her students.) Now Rhys has announced he is leaving her to live with his father. Attempting to maintain peace is Bo, who escaped to New York and a career in magazine publishing that now looks increasingly shaky; with a wife and two children to support, he dearly hopes that he can squeeze some money out of this wreck of a family manse.

Put them all together with a mandate to get the house thoroughly cleaned in time for an estate sale the next day and sturm und drang is virtually guaranteed. Toni is a world-class injustice collector who feels abandoned and patronized by Bo and Frank. She cannot stop butting heads with Bo's wife, Rachael, "who thinks anything south of Brooklyn is a trailer park," and she can barely tolerate River, who is a fountain of New Age bromides. ("Let the universe tell you how to heal," she advises Frank in a typical moment.) Stirring the pot is Rachael, who casually notes that Ray was an anti-Semite who occasionally referred to her as "Bo's Jew wife." This sends Toni into a defensive rage, but even she is hard-pressed to explain the scrapbook full of photos of lynched black men that is found on a bookshelf in the front room. And then there's the matter of the Ku Klux Klan hood that Ainsley, Bo's younger child, is caught wearing.

As Toni, Bo, Frank, et al. lamely try to explain away the evidence -- Ray, Bo asserts, "wasn't social enough for this sort of thing" -- while lashing out at each other, it becomes clear that Jacobs-Jenkins has attempted an ambitious and imaginative twist on the standard family slugfest that so many American playwrights favor, creating an historical context that contrasts their aggrieved, self-aggrandizing behavior with a barely acknowledged history of racism and violence. The playwright casts the family in an especially unflattering light when Bo learns that the photos may be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Apparently, there are collectors who treasure such disturbing images.

It's a bold idea and, sad to say, it ends up sabotaging the entire enterprise. The characters are so busy insisting -- usually at the top of their lungs -- on their victim status that they quickly become a trial; juxtaposed with the facts of their ancestors' behavior, they become insufferable. Indeed, for every sharp observation and well-placed revelation, there are long stretches that tax one's patience as well as sequences that set out to shock or amuse only to go nowhere. In one of them, Frank catches Rhys, his nephew, masturbating to pornography on his smartphone. Frank misconstrues the situation, believing that Rhys is using the lynch photos as a sexual stimulant and awkwardly tries to explain how he can rewire his sexual impulses. There are many, many aggrieved arias, with each character claiming that he or she has suffered the most. Toni, forever spoiling for a fight, uses the ugliest of anti-Semitic terms against Rachael, then self-importantly justifies her behavior, saying, "It isn't because she is Jewish; it's because she is an annoying person."

This isn't a matter of making the characters likable or relatable. But they do have to be interesting, and sadly, they turn out to be something of a bore. It takes a lot of skill, and plenty of wit, to bring such narcissistic fools to dramatic life. It's a talent that, for example, Tracy Letts has in abundance. It's a talent that Branden Jacobs-Jenkins does not yet possess.

Liesl Tommy's direction finds some quietly telling moments in the middle of all this hi-fi angst, when Cassidy, Bo and Rachael's 13-year-old daughter, backs away in horror at the thought of being separated from her cell phone; when Rachael visibly shrinks from a kiss offered by River; and a farewell handshake that threatens to become an embrace. The author has some good points to make as well, especially in depicting Cassidy's blasé reaction to the photos. (She tries to shoot them with her smartphone and tweet them to her friends.)

Nevertheless, this is not the best showcase for Johanna Day, Michael Laurence, and Patch Darragh, as Toni, Bo, and Frank, none of whom manage to add interesting shadings to the crybabies they are made to play. The same is true of Maddie Corman's Rachael, although at least she admits at one point that she has become almost unbearable. Mike Faist brings an appealing quality to the character of Rhys, although it's difficult to believe that this casual adolescent has actually served hard time.

In addition to the set, Ramos has also provided generally solid costumes, although he dresses River like a chorus member from the last revival of Hair. (In another misfired joke, Bo mistakes her for a Native American.) Lap Chi Chu's lighting creates a number of effective time-of-day looks, and Aaron Rhyne provides projections for the play's wordless final sequences, in which a parade of special effects detail the house's future decay.

Appropriate is such an interesting idea that you keep hoping that Jacobs-Jenkins will make it work, but, for all the volume expended, it never catches fire. His indictment of the characters never sticks because they never seem to matter. Their ancestors may have left behind a terrible legacy, but all we know is that they make for extremely tiresome company.--David Barbour