Don’t go see APPROPRIATE now showing at Bluebarn Theatre if you want a pleasant evening out where you go home feeling good. This is a play that will leave you uncomfortable. The crowded set, the deafening sound of cicadas, the inky darkness, the constant bickering… That’s why it works. It achieves its purpose. It agitates us to the point where we understand the severing of family ties over deep secrets. This should have been a reunion replete with stories from childhood and laughter over shared experiences. Not so.
Susan Clement directs a fabulously gifted cast in this gritty, raw look into a family that is meeting to sell their recently departed father’s property in an estate sale. Three siblings with very different lives work with and against each other to sort through their hoarder father’s things. Just as their lives differ, their memories of their father differ. Was he the kind, successful man Toni remembers? Was he abusive to his boys, Bo and Frank (who now goes by Franz)?
The Lafayettes, a white family returning to their father’s plantation in Arkansas, grapple with selling the home which is situated on two slave cemeteries. Is it haunted? Candles flicker. Lights go on and off. And infiltrating the house is the insistent chirp of cicadas. Toni, the eldest sibling, is a divorced mother who has lost her job as the Assistant Principal at her drug dealing son Rhys’ school along with his affection. She is driven, controlling, and sarcastic. Middle son Bo seemingly has it all together with his Jewish wife Rachael, who likes to point out that their two children were raised right. Thirteen year old Cassie (“I’m almost an adult”) and hyperactive son Ainsley, are proof that Bo and Rachael are good parents. As for the youngest sibling, Franz, his is a turbulent past of statutory rape accusation and drug addiction…