Appropriate | 2hrs 40mins. One intermission. | Hayes Theater, 240 West 44th Street | 212-239-6200
“Someone has to defend the dead,” declares Toni (Sarah Paulson). “Someone has to defend the truth.” Enraged by claims that her late father was an antisemite, Toni is appealing to her brother, Bo (Corey Stoll), whose Jewish wife, Rachel (Natalie Gold), has the receipts: casual slurs made when the old man thought no one was listening. Toni’s incensed, while also a hypocrite; neither she nor her siblings think to defend the dignity of the dead, lynched Black people whose images they recently found in a picture album.

That gruesome collection of antique photographs, discovered as family members clear out a cluttered ex-planation home in Arkansas for auction, is something of a MacGuffin in the world of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s savagely subversive Appropriate. A cultural critique of white privilege disguised as a classic three-act family drama (in two lopsided acts), the play arrives on Broadway nearly ten years after its New York premiere, now in a far stronger production and for a public primed to discuss race and legacy. Crucially, the action is set in 2011, among the extended members of a white family whose greed and inability to read the room ring more credibly in the pre-BLM era.

Back to the MacGuffin. How can a book of lynching photos—horrific mementos of the........

© Observer