Can family members find common ground with one another while reckoning with the dysfunction wrought by an unstable father? What if his death unearths evidence that their white privilege was built on the backs of black bodies?
In Appropriate, directed by Wesley Enoch for Sydney Theatre Company, US playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has created a southern family who, despite the awfulness of their patriarch, make for plentiful laughs courtesy of the siblings’ competing grievances and mismatched memories. There is a rich seam of comedy well played here.
The tragedy of the Lafayette clan of Arkansas, however, is their lack of curiosity about their family’s complicity with historical slavery, and their ongoing moral deficit: unearthing a photo album of lynched slaves from among their father’s belongings, they hatch a plan to sell the images for profit.
Even the 13-year-old granddaughter’s first instinct is to upload these macabre souvenirs to Instagram. The family also throw around antisemitic lines as casually as they speak of the graveyard of slaves on their plantation property that might yet be dug up to build a Walmart in its place.
Appropriate is not merely a play about the aggressions of structural and personal racism, however. It is a grand family story about belonging and how we reshape memories to suit our own ends, building shared histories that erase uncomfortable truths too painful to parse. Its “casually dysfunctional” family follows in the tradition of classic plays by the likes of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.
Enoch’s direction elicits performances that are deeply human and funny, the tension tautly winding until it inevitably snaps. As daughter Toni, who is going through a divorce, Mandy McElhinney is superbly funny, her character held together only by anger and resentment at her siblings for besmirching their dead father’s name. She tells us he spent much of his life mourning his wife and their mother, who pre-deceased him.
Johnny Carr throws himself into the demanding role of Toni’s younger brother, Franz, who has come to seek forgiveness for his rape of a minor a decade earlier. As money-obsessed older brother Bo, Sam Worthington has less to work with, and delivers a more muted, less distinct performance than his on-stage siblings, until he lets fly in the play’s denouement.
On stage, the father’s two-level plantation house living room is magnificent in its seamy decay, with stairs, balustrade and chandelier, and filled with boxes and bags and household bric-a-brac – he was a hoarder. The room eventually becomes its own chilling character with some effective lighting and sound effects to convey its rotting foundations.
Appropriate is the third in a sequence of plays by Jacobs-Jenkins, who is African-American, that satirically examines histories of the US. The first, Neighbours, featured blackface minstrelsy. The second, An Octoroon, dealt with forbidden interracial relationships, and was adapted in 2017 by Australian playwright, actor and director Nakkiah Lui, who changed the play’s setting from the US south to far north Queensland, to focus it on injustices in Australia.
Given ongoing denial, in some quarters, of colonisation’s devastating impact on Indigenous Australians – last year, prime minister Scott Morrison had to walk back his incorrect observation that there had been no slavery in Australia – I found myself wondering what an Australian version of Appropriate might look like.
What might a white Australian family have to say about, for instance, their historical complicity in coercing Indigenous people to work as indentured labourers – blackbirding – and using them as free labour in the pastoral industry and as household servants? Or perhaps finding grim souvenir evidence of an ancestor who massacred Aboriginal people in the frontier wars?
While as Australians we are used to engaging with good and bountiful American drama, we are at a remove from the characters’ experience. We need to reflect on our own history too, and understand where and why the bodies are buried.
Appropriate is at the Roslyn Packer theatre until 10 April.
