Coronavirus Diary

Today is Friday, April 12, 2024. I was missing in action from yesterday’s blog because I was sitting very uncomfortably in a Broadway theater watching Sarah Paulson as Toni Lafayette in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Appropriate at the Belasco Theater, on West 44th Street, with Elliot and friend “Seth.” The play boasted verbal fireworks from all of the cast involved in this haunting family drama inhabited by the ghosts of the post-Civil War South and a deceased father’s lasting legacy. This play apparently is the hottest ticket in town, since it boasts Paulson in a key role and it also features Corey Stoll as her brother, Bo. Our friend Seth was able to score three Mezzanine tickets to the play sometime in March.

We met at Marseilles, a French restaurant on West 45th Street, around 5:15. We immediately informed our server, Sara, that we had tickets to a Broadway play at 7. She said she would expedite dinner, but there was still some tension there in getting to our destination in time. In fact, we all arrived on line around 6:55 p.m. We had to rush through the rain drops.

So when we arrived, we were escorted to the staircase up to the mezzanine section. I could overhear a woman next to me being told her ticket was for yesterday’s performance, not today’s. I don’t know how that went! Obviously, she didn’t look at the date of her purchase; or she just assumed the play was for April 11, not the 10th.

When we finally got to our seats, I noted how tight they were. There was no leg space to speak of. I felt that I was literally leaning over into Seth who I was sitting next to in the theater. Thus these seats were unbearably uncomfortable. And the play ran for 2 hours and 40 minutes. There was only one intermission.

As the play began, we’re treated to the thrilling sound design, provided by Bray Poor and Will Pickens, as we hear the trilling of cicadas surrounding the Lafeyette house last lived in by the patriarch who died 6 months ago. We are in the rural outskirts of Arkansas as the play lurches into being. We emerge into the cluttered living room of an old plantation house in southeast Arkansas, summer 2011 (this was the year that the playwright began writing this play). The stage is chock full of a cluster of lamp stands, a pile of old TVs, buckets of board games, and mountains of books on the stairs. And into this thicket of things comes the dysfunctional Lafayette family who are reunited on the eve of an estate sale at their late father’s decaying plantation home in Arkansas.

The play, directed by Lila Neugebauer, plays as family sitcom, part sibling death match, and part sociopolitical commentary. During the first act, we meet the prodigal son, Franz (who’s real name is Frank) who’s been away for about 10 years, his eldest sibling, Toni (Sarah Paulson), who barely recognizes him. She lives in Atlanta with her angsty teenage son Rhys (Graham Campbell) and is licking her wounds as primary caretaker of their long-ailing father. Part of the play’s delight is hearing Paulson’s delivery of some truly scathing burns, particularly to Franz and his much-younger girlfriend River (Ella Beatty), an aspiring hippie with hair feathers – or as Toni, ever sharp and unforgiving, calls her, a “walking rape fantasy.”

This being a family reunion, everyone has competing motivations, compelling cases to make, and grievances to lodge. Toni desires credit, obedience, control and also maybe to turn back the clock when things were more manageable. Middle child Bo (Corey Stoll), now a wealthy New Yorker, wants to wash his hands of the business. His wife Rachael (Natalie Gold, who played Rava Roy on Succession) feels she was rejected by the deceased patriarch because of her Jewishness. She even goads Toni into admitting that her father was rife with antisemitism. Into this boiling pot, Rachael brings her two children, Cassidy (Alyssa Emily Marvin) who experiences her first crush on Rhys, her cousin, and eight-year-old Ainsley (Lincoln Cohen and Everett Sobers) to bond with their southern heritage.

The play devolves eventually into a slugfest of old grievances and resentments, primarily focusing on Franz’s sordid history of pedophilia, drug abuse, and drunken episodes, and why he came back after so many years away from the family. This is complicated by the discovery of some dark secrets left by the father, an album of damning photos which soon passes among the family members like a hot potato, wreaking havoc in its wake. Toni is particularly indignant in the face of evidence that her father, a DC circuit judge bred in the Jim Crow south, was racist, or that it was his fault.

All in all, the story holds together with incredible performances from the entire cast, particularly Paulson and Stoll, as well 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.

The sizzling play has been extended to June 23. Go see it, despite being squeezed into your seat. It’s worth the inconvenience. Our friend Seth, however, was not too enamored of the play, especially with Act II, which had very long monologues by the principals, especially by Paulson and Stoll who loses it with his younger brother’s very young fiancé River. In fact, Act II features an actual brawl involving all of the Lafayette siblings and Bo’s wife Rachael.

Well, we have just three days left until the first trial of the former president gets under way. He is heard saying something about testifying in his own behalf to “say the truth” about what actually happened. You have to laugh out loud that this beast who lies as much as he breathes would actually say such a ridiculous thing on the heels of this most unprecedented criminal case starting on April 15. I seriously doubt his legal team would want him to take the witness stand. He would perjure himself as soon as he began speaking.

Anyway, have a great weekend.

Stay safe and be well.