--Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Appropriate: A “Greatest Hits” Compilation?

“Your family is a group of people that you have lived with for many years—of course you are going to have tons of stories about them. You know about them when they were at their cuckoo-bird-est. You know everything about them! These are the people you watch, other than yourself. And you can’t really hide from them.”

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Vogue Culture

With last year’s critically acclaimed film adaptation of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, the movie-going population of America was introduced to one of the most successful and venerated genres of U.S. theatre: “the Great American Family Play.” Lauded playwrights like Letts, Horton Foote, Sam Shepard, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill have each won multiple accolades for their pieces written about family relationships that begin to implode during times of crisis. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a young playwright and an admirer of these writers and their shows, has now tossed his hat in the ring with Appropriate, the most recent recipient of the Obie Award for Best New American Play. 

Jacobs-Jenkins actually took a different route when creating his show, specifically when it came to the inspiration. The canonized playwrights above got the ideas for their “great American family” plays from famous poems (Howard Starks’ “August: Osage County” for Letts) or from real-life events in their pasts (the remaining playwrights on that list). For Jacobs-Jenkins though, his approach to Appropriate came from the oeuvre of these plays. Each of the playwrights listed influenced the conception of Jacobs-Jenkins’ piece as the playwright struggled to create what started out as a “greatest hits” compilation of sorts; from the opening scene (which New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley believes emulates Shepard’s Buried Child) to the knock-down, drag-out fights, the works of these celebrated creators of theatre is imbued within Jacobs-Jenkins piece.

However, some other sensational playwrights also make it into Appropriate. In an interview, the playwright mentions his reaction to these collected works. “I’d look around and be like, ‘There are no people of color on these lists.’ Who has access to this idea of family as a universal theme? A Raisin in the Sun [Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking 1959 play] and The Piano Lesson [a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece by August Wilson] and Stick Fly [a play by Lydia R. Diamond, a contemporary of Jacobs-Jenkins] —which are all totally about family—are somehow ‘social drama’ about ‘race.’ That’s sort of what I kept skirting around and thinking about.”

Regardless of the separation, Jacobs-Jenkins intentionally pulled themes and ideas from plays on both of these lists to create the masterful Appropriate. For the playwright, the first writing session “was a hot, four-hour crazy mess. But somehow, beginning from that place of learning to love these plays, shapes and arcs began to be apparent. And then the play kind of happened.”

With his pen, this young black playwright has somehow truthfully written about race within the monochromatic confines of a southern white family. With what started as a “greatest hits” compilation of sorts, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ racially charged spin-off of “the Great American Family play” has simply become a great hit.

 Zach Dailey

Further Reading:

Eliza Bent’s American Theatre article on the collected works of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Vogue Culture’s Mark Guiducci on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Appropriate

Washington City Paper article on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Ben Brantley’s New York Times review of the Signature Theatre’s production of Appropriate