Coal Mine Theatre/Appropriate, written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Ted Dykstra, Coal Mine Theatre, until Oct. 21. Tickets here.
Appropriate (meaning suitable). Appropriate (meaning to take over).
Those two different meanings (and pronunciations) of the same word were the flashpoint that triggered Branden Jacobs-Jenkins to write his 2014 eponymous play, which has become another runaway hit for Coal Mine Theatre.
Award-winning Jacobs-Jenkins is not unknown to Toronto and festival audiences. In fact, three of his sly and subversive works have been featured on playbills. The Shaw Festival produced An Octoroon and Everybody, while Crow’s Theatre and ARC mounted Gloria. All are very different, but equally disturbing.
Appropriate fits into the great American literary trope of gathering dysfunctional family members together and letting all hell break loose, with nothing ever being the same again.
In this case, we are meeting the Lafayette family, who have come to their decaying mansion to sort through their late father’s belongings for an estate sale. They are from Arkansas, which places them in the deep south of the US, where they were once part of the antebellum plantation class. The most remarkable thing about Appropriate is that you have a Black playwright exploring aspects of racism using all-White characters, which is the central theme of the play. A brilliant conceit if ever there was.
The bitter, angry, foul-mouthed, divorced Toni (Raquel Duffy in a performance of a lifetime), has shouldered the burden of her father’s care, and most of the work on the house. Her dead-pan teenage son Rhys (Mackenzie Wojcik) is something of a pot-addled wastrel, distant from his mother, although Toni seems to forgive him everything.
Laid-back if nervous Brother Bo (Gray Powell) lives in New York, and has been the family’s financial support, but is worried about money. His hyper-ctive, perhaps even near-hysterical wife Rachael (an intense Amy Lee) represents the Jewish liberal tradition. Did Bo marry her out of rebellion against his roots? They have three children, the most worrying being over-keen teenage daughter Cassidy (Hannah Levinson) who craves adventure of any kind. She has a wild younger preteen brother Ainsley (Ruari Hamman).
The third sibling is the prodigal brother, a seemingly even-tempered Frank (Andy Trithardt) who has been absent from the family for many years, having left under a cloud. He, an AA graduate, has returned with his hippie, flower child fiancée River (a delicious Alison Beckwith) with a desire, under her guidance, to make amends for past sins.
As in all these sprawling family dramas, confrontations occur, secrets are revealed, past hurts are hurled about, and emotions and tempers run at high dudgeon. But Jacobs-Jenkins has a surprise in store, and it is a stunning coup de théâtre. In going through their late father’s belongings, a book of horrible photographs is discovered — and this is not giving anything away. The pictures are of lynched Black men. This is the kind of play where, just when you think things can’t get worse, they do.
And so we come to the ninth, if invisible, character — their father, apparently an admired and fair-minded lawyer. It is how each member of the Lafayette family, including the children, copes with this unnerving find, that is at the heart of the play. Was fine, upstanding Daddy a racial bigot or worse? What about their slave-owning past? It is a house, we discover, steeped in ghosts.
Cleverly, for this old-fashioned family format play, set designers Steve Lucas and Rebecca Morris have created a raised proscenium stage with a drawn curtain, and it works. On Coal Mine’s budget, we’re never going to get the ramshackle if once elegant furniture, but the designers have given it their best shot, and Lucas’ lighting design has some nice effects. Des’ree Gray’s costumes are spot on.
Appropriate is long, running almost three hours, but director Ted Dykstra keeps the pacing boiling and roiling along. Duffy’s unremitting Toni is the fulcrum, and Dykstra has wisely put her front and centre. If she doesn’t get a Dora nomination, there is no justice, but the cast is uniformly good, with a special nod to Lee and Beckwith.
A visit with the Lafayette family is harrowing, to say the least. As a play, Appropriate is absorbing, compelling, and at times shocking. Jacobs-Jenkins is relentless at what he throws at the audience.
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