Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Brian Friel’s Aristocrats is set in Ireland and Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate is set in the American South, but they have similar things in mind.

Aristocrats takes place in and near a crumbling Irish manor house. Appropriate takes place in a crumbling Southern mansion. The two are crumbling because of a lack of money and will to keep up the properties. They are also crumbling because the values that prevailed when they were built are now dead and gone.

Measuring the vitality of a society by the condition of its real estate is not a new dramatic gambit. Birdie in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes bewails the decline of Lionet, the plantation that represented the gracious living she remembered as a child (gracious living supported by the exploitation of Black people). In the last of August Wilson’s Pittsburgh plays, he makes a point of telling us that houses we became familiar with in earlier plays will succumb to developers.

This kind of symbolism is not just the province of drama and fiction. Tearing down a building that was a physical manifestation of oppression is the reason you won’t find the Bastille if you visit Paris; every trace of it was removed during the French Revolution. In Berlin, instead of tearing down the building that once housed East Germany’s feared Stasi, authorities re-purposed it as a museum exposing their methods and crimes. And those of us who live in New York vividly remember that Osama Bin Laden took down two buildings on 9/11 as an expression of his hatred for America.

Charlotte Moore’s production of Aristocrats at the Irish Rep is clean and unfussy, which is pretty much the house style. Friel was one of the many distinguished playwrights (including Lanford Wilson, David Mamet, Michael Frayn and Aaron Posner) who adapted Chekhov, and this play bears a more than passing similarity to The Cherry Orchard, with its semi-comic obsessives and a half-dead relative wandering with dismay as the world he is familiar with disappears. Of course, there are some to whom Chekhov doesn’t appeal because of his purposely indirect technique. They are not likely to embrace Aristocrats. But I was pleased to make its acquaintance again (as well as that of Translations in the Rep’s earlier Friel production).

Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins displays no interest in Chekhovian indirection in Appropriate, his story of a white family trying to figure out how to deal with the legacy attached to the deteriorating southern mansion left to them by a father whose politics are gradually revealed to be horrifying. His writing is in boldface speeches and gestures that the celebrated cast (including Sarah Paulson, Corey Stoll, and Elle Fanning under the direction of Lila Neugebauer) make a meal of. I won’t spoil the final image the designers have manifested in this very satisfying revival that represents Jacobs-Jenkins’s Broadway debut, but it is epic and funny. This is the third time I have seen the play, and, while I admire it greatly, there is something in it that I’ve never bought: it seems to occur to nobody among the characters that monetizing photos of an atrocity is an abomination. I can’t believe that at least one of the characters he has created, who are spread across the philosophical spectrum, wouldn’t have raised this issue. This thought occurred to me all three times I have seen this.