A powerful new production of Appropriate has landed on Broadway and the cacophony of cicadas that feature in the play are nearly as loud as the praise from the press. Lila Neugebauer has directed an exemplary cast, led by Sarah Paulson, and navigated an extremely complicated story with humor, outrage, nuance and heart. Critics agree that this moving and dynamic production is not to be missed.
New York Times Review of Appropriate
But even in Paulson’s eye-opening, sinus-clearing performance, Toni, as she’s called, doesn’t sum up the outrageousness of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play, which has a deep wound and wicked tongue of its own. To get all the way to its sweet spot — and Lila Neugebauer’s production for Second Stage definitely gets there — you must further multiply Toni by her brothers, each awful in his own way. … It would also be easy to attribute the improvement to Neugebauer’s direction, which is so smart and swift for most of the play’s substantial length that you feel gripped by storytelling without being strangled by argument.
Variety Review of Appropriate
Under director Lila Neugebauer, “Appropriate” creates one of the most engaging family dynamics presented on stage. … Still, the story holds together with incredible performances from the entire cast, particularly Paulson and Stoll, as well as from Alyssa Emily Marvin, who plays Rachael and Bo’s precocious 13-year-old daughter. More than a family drama, “Appropriate” displays the inner thoughts of white people, those who label themselves as well-meaning and progressive, and others who hold disdain and bitterness for minorities and for having to answer to the horrors of their lineage and bigoted ideals.
Deadline Review of Appropriate
Pay attention to those loud, annoying cicadas – they seem to have a story to tell. At least they do in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins superb, marvelously performed Appropriate, the Second Stage production opening tonight at the Helen Hayes Theater with one of the best casts – headed by an astonishing Sarah Paulson – on Broadway. A blistering family drama directed by Lila Neugebauer (easily matching her exemplary work in 2018’s The Waverly Gallery), Appropriate is a wicked cacophony of nerve-wrenching mystery, old resentments and laugh-out-loud comedy – the latter all the more remarkable coming, as it does, within a story about the darkest horrors of America’s legacies.
Vulture Review of Appropriate
That Jacobs-Jenkins recognizes and structures the consequent appalling events with such ludic precision is part of what makes his play so sharp: He’s using the building blocks of comedy, even farce, to reveal a smoldering chasm of cruelty, cowardice, equivocation, and shame. It is funny, and it does burn. Crucially, though, it’s not played for laughs. Neugebauer understands that the layer Jacobs-Jenkins is adding to the conventional undulations of melodrama — a family with damning secrets, a haunted estate on the brink of loss, a plot full of gaspy twists — is to turn its stock cutouts into people, catastrophic failings and all. … Neugebauer is doing fine work with the whole ensemble, and Paulson and Stoll provide a supercharged core.
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