Dear Friends,
A pen-as-sword-smith whose work I had the privilege of seeing recently is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. His powerful drama, Appropriate, has quietly detonated the Broadway season.
I’d gone to catch the fabulous Sarah Paulson as the lethal lead character, Toni Lafayette. She shredded the boards and rightly walked away with this year’s Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.
This production is a revival, conceived in 2011 with a limited off-Broadway run in 2014. It chronicles an Arkansan family’s return to its homestead/plantation upon the death of its patriarch. Fights over legacy, both financial and familial, ensue.
As I watched the performance, I wondered just how many in the nearly all-white audience actually knew the playwright was African American. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a monster talent. Appropriate is not billed as a Black play, but Black folk are all up in that Kool-Aid. The cast is all white, which gives this typical Broadway audience the entry needed to better relate to, and identify with, the characters.
The Lafayettes are a Southern clan, reckoning with their history and each other. The family birthright is entwined with the dwindling but enduring hereditament of slavery. Seven generations of Lafayettes are buried in the cemetery out front. The field over yonder blankets the unmarked graves of generations of their enslaved, whose presence is an invisible, relentless vein feeding the stories unfolding on stage.
The depictions of and references to racism are casual yet deadly. Its tentacles benignly slither into the next generation of the family, even as the adult siblings play hot potato with the graphic evidence found in Dad’s room.
Each family member’s monologue (and all of the actors are strong) frames his or her position in relation to past and contemporary societal mores about race and place with equal amounts of highly layered insight and fairness.
They accuse each other one moment, feel victimized the next, and vehemently deny the truth of what is right in front of them. Yet we completely understand their points of view, agreeing or being repulsed in the telling or experiencing both feelings simultaneously.
That is the savage beauty of the script and the power of the playwright. His pen is a sword of truth. Who has the right to tell the story of another race? Anyone with courage and skill. That Jacobs-Jenkins gave himself permission to write this story from the Lafayettes’ perspective takes real bravery in this era of questioned cultural authenticity.
He has successfully woven his racial story into one of the dominant culture’s without pushing it to the front and center of the plot. That is because he knows our stories in this country are insidiously enmeshed, whether we acknowledge that or not.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a Tony Award- and Obie Award-winning playwright, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Fulbright Scholar, and MacArthur Fellow. A graduate of Princeton, he is a Professor in the Practice of Theater and Performance Studies at Yale University.
March On!
Isisara Bey
Artistic Director
The March On Washington Film Festival