Posted: 1/24/24 at 3:10am
No joy in saying this, but I am with the naysayers. Jesse Green was so very, very right -- the first time. For those of you who did not click through to or otherwise remember the original review of the off-Broadway production he imbedded in his review of the Broadway production posted above, here:
"The play is as overstuffed as the house, but at least the house gets cleaned during the action. The play just gets more cluttered. Starting with the title, which is awkward whether understood in its verbal or adjectival sense, Jacobs-Jenkins wants things both ways and ends up with neither. Is Appropriate a comic tragedy? A tragic comedy? No, just a mess, undercooked and overexplained, with enough pregnant symbols (dark lake, shrieking cicadas, two graveyards) for an Ibsen festival. Under Liesl Tommy’s direction, the leading actors, all better elsewhere, have no choice but to hack their way through the emotional underbrush, shouting their arias of self-pity as they go.
Granted, great plays have been written about some of the same kinds of characters: viragos, pedophiles, wingnuts, dingbats. But in — let’s say — Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or How I Learned to Drive, the playwright finds ways to seduce us into accepting his creatures as real and even attractive. That doesn’t happen here. The Lafayettes are under no one’s control; all you want is to get away from them. Fortunately, people like that don’t live in real houses. They live only in theaters, and you get to leave them there."
Spot on. I am as confused as Green was as to why he did a 180, as the play's faults remain the same in the latest iteration. Green had no blind spot (in this case, at least) warranting a mea culpa. The above was as clear-eyed and unbelievably decisive review as Green has ever given. The show still wants to be a lot of things and, still, instead, is nothing in particular. Actors are still doing a lot of heavy emoting, spouting about family resentments/secrets but saying so little of cohesive, thematic merit. I love, love, love a good dysfunctional family drama, but the family has to be an interesting one --even if not particularly likeable. Despite the talent pool on stage, I've never seen a larger collection of flat, un-finely etched characters uttering so many uninspired lines to one another to such useless dramatic effect on any stage anywhere Sometimes the words spoken lent so little to constructing a remotely interesting drama, t thought they were being spoken in a foreign language that I just couldn't understand.
The sage burning hippie chick girlfriend as the outsider dropped into the family chaos was, most egregiously, so stock and trope-y she was an insult to stock and trope-y -- Fanning could not make anything interesting of it, but it was an impossible and thankless task from the get-go. I think Paulson and Stoll are starting to run the risk of being over-praised and standing o-ed just for showing up. There was nothing resonant to either's performance, but they are also not miracle workers and could not rescue this play.
God bless that a new drama is drawing people in at top dollar and being enjoyed by many and they feel they are getting their money's worth, but, for me, it was just a big dramatic bamboozle - and not in any good way.
The good news (for me) is that having unsuccessfully entered the lottery that morning, I walked up to box office an hour before last week's Wednesday matinee and was able to get a mezz seat for $99 - had I spent any more on this, I would have wept profusely.
