Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play is haunted. It is haunted by the ghosts of those lying in the two neglected cemeteries outside the house in which it is set.
And it is haunted by the great American family dramas of the past, those monumental works by O’Neill, Williams, or more recently Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) or Letts (August: Osage County). Because like the clans in those works, the one here, the Lafayettes, are epically dysfunctional.
The play’s period is present and its setting is a derelict plantation house in Arkansas. Fly Davis’s shadowy design is haunted by the generations now buried in those cemeteries — one for the family who owned it, the other for their slaves. The old man who lived there has died. And, a bit like Miller’s The Price, his three now middle-aged children — and their children —have turned up at the derelict family home ahead of an impending auction to sell it.
Monica Dolan is terrific as the fierce, eldest sibling Toni, who defends her venerable father’s reputation even as evidence mounts that he was saturated with the race-hate of his slave-owning forebears.
Toni’s Jewish sister-in-law Rachael (Jaimi Barbakoff) is the one who accidentally unearths that evidence from the hoarded bric-a-brac — a photo album of atrocity that recorded what the country’s whites did to blacks in America’s slave-owning past.
Yet the book was apparently made not as a record of lynchings and amputations to be used as evidence, but as a souvenir with which to fondly recall the past.
Toni’s defence of her father’s reputation exposes every long-held resentment and secret in the family, not least a sex crime perpetrated by a family member. But where Jacobs-Jenkins differs from many of the great dramatists from whom he knowingly borrows, is that unlike, say, the Tyrones in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the Lafayettes exist in the wider world. And there is always the tense sense here — skilfully stoked by director Ola Ince — that the world is going to gatecrash this family reunion to devastating effect.
The play is also very funny and scary, ghosts might make an entrance at any moment and the way a white sheet is used to confirm the racism of the householders’ past is priceless.
Just one negative, and it relates to Rachael, played in most respects very well by Barbakoff. But in the week after this column took issue with those Jewish theatre practitioners whose complaint about what they called “Jewface” argued for Jews to play Jews, it has to be admitted that the character of Rachael in this production has a few traits that feel like tropes.
She is prissier than everyone else, dresses more expensively and is higher maintenance right down to her flashy luggage. She has long, dark hair, too, which wouldn’t be worth mentioning at all were it not for the Barbakoff’s curly blonde locks in the programme’s rehearsal photos.
So what lies behind these decisions, presumably made by director and actor? Is the thinking that if Rachael does not conform to certain preconceived notions the audience may not believe she is Jewish?
It is the kind of thing I would normally notice and not mention. But times have moved on. Appropriate is actually written to subvert such tropes and assumptions, such as a 23-year-old character (Tafline Steen) is hilariously assumed to be Native American because she has a couple of braids in her hair. So it is just a bit too obvious to ignore that the deep thinking about race behind this show isn’t applied to the Jew.
Yet it would be a huge mistake to allow this to define a production and a play that reveals how atrocity is handed down to the descendants of those who perpetrate it like a family heirloom.
