Appropriate: The disturbance lies not in the players but in our selves...

 Appropriate, Broadway Play, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Race, Racism, Denial

Appropriate, with Sarah Paulson and Elle Fanning, is the hot show in New York this season.  I am in New York for the American Psychoanalytic Convention with the Reluctant Wife.  The Eldest Reluctant Daughter decided to join us for the weekend, so we went to see the show that has people talking – or should.  As we were headed back afterwards, I commented that I thought the Reluctant Wife had done a good job of choosing the show.  This was based on my experience of it having been poignant, well-acted, and, while some of the lines were wooden, the staging was great; it was dramatic, I was pulled in, and it was a good performance.  Also, it was in the Helen Hays Theater – a small house, so though we were ten rows back in the balcony, it felt like we could reach out and touch the actors.

The Reluctant Wife looked skeptical and said that it had left her feeling nauseous.  The Reluctant Daughter chimed in that she was tired of people being entertained by the oppression of African Americans.  Not having had a chance to process the play, still floating on the cloud of the aesthetics of it, I was brought up short.  As we reached our destination and were able to discuss it, and to do a little online sleuthing about the backstory, things came together for us in a way that led me to have a very different take on the evening, and to join them in being deeply disturbed, not just by the play, but perhaps more to the point, by the audience’s reaction to it; the audience’s reaction which mirrored mine, not theirs.

Appropriate announces, by projecting on the curtain ahead of time, the ways in which the title of the play is a pun.  As an adjective, the screen notes, appropriate is describing proper, reasonable behavior.  As a verb, there are a variety of meanings that are related to hostilely taking what doesn’t belong to the person.  I assumed, knowing nothing more than this, that we would see the ways in which whites have appropriated African American culture by, for instance, stealing Rock and Roll and making it into our own very commercial art form.

The play unfolded, though, as a drama about a dysfunctional family.  The three adult children and three grandchildren of various ages are gathering at the Arkansas ancestral plantation of the family patriarch who died six months ago and whose estate will be settled this weekend.  The prodigal son, Franz Lafayette (Michael Esper), who has been out of contact with the family for a decade, sneaks in through an unlocked window with his hippie-dippie girlfriend River (Fanning) and wakes up his sister Antoinette “Tony” (Paulson) and her teenage son, who weren’t supposed to be there yet, and the fun begins.

This play revolves centrally around denial.  Denial is a psychological defense (not just a river in Egypt – bah dum).  In denial we simply refuse to acknowledge something that is unacceptable to us, for whatever reason, despite ample evidence that the thing we don’t want to acknowledge is, in fact, the case.

The children’s denial takes place on two levels.  The first is the denial of the complexities of the past relationships between the siblings.  Each, in their own mind, has done right and the others have wronged them.  The youngest sibling, Franz, with the help of his hippie-dippie girlfriend, has gone into AA and NA and perhaps some shamanic interactions, and has come to the “reunion” with the intention of making amends.  He wants to apologize, but also have his siblings acknowledge their role in the difficulties he has caused with both his substance abuse and also some statutory rape/pedophilia when he was a young adult.

Franz’s apology is batted down by his sister Tony who sees it as an empty ploy to avoid taking responsibility for his actions (again).  Though his older brother Bo (Corey Stoll) seems more reasonable, Bo is also in denial about how much strain Tony has been under both caring for – in her distant and authoritarian way – Franz when Franz (who was then called Frank) was younger and, more recently, caring for their father, again from considerable distance and with little apparent warmth, as the father declined.  All three seem to be in denial about the impact of their mother’s death on them when they were much younger and their father’s subsequent relocation from Washington D.C., where he may have been in line to be a Supreme Court Justice and where they were raised, back to this small town in Arkansas.

The family drama is adequate – indeed takes up much of our bandwidth as we watch – especially Tony’s strident squelching of anything remotely resembling assertion on the part of either of her brothers.  This is mirrored by the Hippie-Dippie girlfriend of Franz that keeps pushing him out into the family arena and by Bo’s wife’s cowing of Bo whenever she is in the room.  So, we are mesmerized by the current – post death of the mother – family drama, so much so that we might well miss the unfolding historical drama that is roiling underneath.

The task that the family is setting about is to get the plantation house and land in order for an estate sale and auction.  The house is in disrepair and is filled with stuff – Franz accuses his father of having been a hoarder as well as manic depressive in the wake of his wife’s death when Franz, as a young adolescent, moved with him to this dreary backwater. 

We see the clutter that litters the stage in the first act.   As the children pitch in to help, the youngest grandchild, all of five or so years old, discovers what appears to be a scrapbook of photographs of lynchings.  Though Franz is accused of having been the owner of the pictures, he believably denies that he was.  But where did they come from, then?  Even more disturbing are jars of what appear to be body parts – ears and fingers etc. – that are soon discovered after that.

The body parts are quickly disposed of (presumably thrown away – there is no sense that these are a human being’s remains and should be treated with anything resembling reverence), but the book circulates though every family member’s fingers – no one can quite seem to bring themselves to throw it away – there is something fascinating about it.  At one point, the adolescent grandson is masturbating and Franz, who walks in on him, mistakenly believes that he is using the lynching pictures as pornography.  The audience knows that he is using homoerotic porn, but Franz does not.

As more and more evidence accretes that their grandfather was not just run of the mill racist and anti-Semitic (both of which are completely denied by Tony but grudgingly acknowledged as possible by Bo and Franz), the fighting continues on the level of the presence or absence of bigotry, and the father’s apparent perverse interest in or participation in violence against African Americans, is ignored.  Even when their google searching clarifies that, post lynching, body parts were often cut off as souvenirs, they can’t seem to put two and two together.

The family’s denial of the depth of their father’s depravity becomes more and more pronounced – but so does the audience’s.  We are laughing along with the family and horrified (not in an “I’ve been there” kind of way) at their infighting, when we might be horrified at what is unfolding.  The mood is jocular.  We are laughing at this over the top, balls to the wall dysfunctional family, not cringely laughing with an uncomfortable sense of recognition of a version of ourselves.   

When Franz, attempting to cleanse the family of its demons, takes the pictures into the algae covered water in the pond out back, his brother and sister are up in arms because they now know that the pictures have great monetary value; selling them was the going to clear the debts that have been incurred by the patriarch and it is apparent that they are interested in the windfall because none of the three of them is fiscally solvent.  We should recoil at their lack of emotional solvency, but somehow we seem to get sucked into the wake of their financial concerns.

Into this fever pitch, the youngest grandchild emerges bearing undeniable evidence of the patriarch’s complicity in heinous fascination and/or violence, and this precipitates violence on stage as the children begin to brawl with each other dragging everyone into a physical version of the chaotic sparring that has been going on throughout the play.

In the aftermath of the fight, it might well have been possible for some kind of reckoning to occur.  But the children agree to part and to pretend that they are dead to each other.  The resolution of the play, such as it is, involves our watching the house be ravaged by vandals, squatters, weather and time and it decays until we welcome the cast back onstage with a standing ovation.

As we were leaving the theater, the Reluctant Wife and Daughter overheard a woman next to them exclaiming, “That play was so funny!”.  And the mood in the almost all white crowd was jubilant – they seemed to feel satisfied (as I had been) by having had the opportunity to see a play that lived up to its hype.

After our discussion, and after learning that the author is an African American playwright (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins) and the director is a woman (Lila Neugebauer), it became clear to me that, in so far as the play worked, it worked on the allegorical level.  We white people, especially those from the south, are so focused on denying our participation in racist positions – or perhaps even more damning, we believe that the racial wrongs are in the past, weren’t that bad, and are best forgotten – that we fail to recognize the roots of our current difficulties and, on some level, I guess, that is laughable.

The quality of this laughter is interesting though.  It is not the laughter of recognition – of there I go again doing stupid things, but the laughter at others – stupid, ignorant, narcissistic others who are too self-involved to recognize what I do – and so I don’t have to be touched by this drama.  It isn’t a drama, it is a comedy – a funny play, not a deeply disturbing and difficult play.  Perhaps, as the President & Artistic Director of the Hayes Theater notes in the Playbill, it will provoke conversation – it did in our family.

But this was in part a critical conversation – critical of the failure of the play to work on the more concrete, even prosaic level of helping to instruct us in how to think about what we had seen.  Instead, we were encouraged to look away.  Or to look at the Plantation as we drive by and to think, “Man, that family wasn’t able to sustain that property without slaves, were they?  What a shame. Serves them right.”  We were not encouraged to look at ourselves (unless my shame at being brought up short by my family is what we were to experience).

The evidence that surfaces of the Patriarch’s misdeeds would, my family thought, have a sobering effect on the people we know – even those who are deeply unsympathetic or blind to the impact of racism – which these characters did not seem to be.  There was no point at which, in the words of the Reluctant Wife, the characters or the audience were “brought up short.”  We were just along for the ride, as the children of the patriarch seemed to be, and we were encouraged to keep our safe distance and to imagine these characters as different from us (including by their being Southern in this play being put on in New York) rather than reflecting the conflicts that we feel about race and racism that has been practiced throughout our country (there are plenty of lynching trees in California).

I have written before about the virtues of white writers, as in The Help, avoiding writing about Black subjectivity.  I have also written about the perils of white writers speaking black thoughts, as in Horse.  A play is an interesting vehicle because we have behavioral windows into the functioning of the characters – we see them moving about the stage – but we also have indirect access to their thoughts – we hear their words, including the words that they speak in private. 

The Patriarch in this play was, based on the evidence, able to have a public persona (if we believe that he was, in fact, being considered to be a Supreme Court level legal mind) that belied deep convictions about race and a fascination with the illegal taking of black lives – and perhaps participating in that.  There is evidence that he had a psychic structure that allowed him to dehumanize African Americans – in whatever way it was that he accomplished this.  And the fascination with and likely participation in the violent suppression of Blacks likely allowed an outlet for expression of deeply felt but likely projected beliefs about Blacks.

There was no evidence, other than in one of the grandchildren (the grandchild who was, ironically, using homoerotic porn – something that likely would have been conflictual within parts of this family system), about casual prejudice on the part of the main characters.  They likely had varying degrees of prejudice, and this likely involved varying means of managing that prejudice using defense mechanisms.  But, unlike the patriarch as I am imagining him, there is no evidence that they would be unambivalent about these feelings.  In other words, these feelings would be deeply conflictual for them.

If the denial would have broken down, which I believe it would have in a family with this composition given all of the evidence, I think there would have been a reckoning: a realization that their father was not who they had assumed him to be.  There would have been an effort to reconcile who they had thought he was with all of this newfound information.  This would not have been pretty – the drama would have been considerable, and different for each of them, but I believe it would have been present.

Depicting their conflicts around the information would have given us models for dealing with our own version of coming to grips with our own inheritances – and our own ambivalence about them.  Denying the characters the ability to wrestle with their conflict – denying that they have conflict about their legacy, about their family tree, the tree(s) on which men were lynched and then their body parts robbed – denies the characters – and the audience, humanity.  Of course, my supposition that the denial of the family would have been punctured by the amount of evidence presented may reflect my own denial of our ability to acknowledge our actions.

The New Yorker’s review of this play suggested that the windows in the house, which are at the back of the set, may have been looking as much at us, judging our reaction to what we saw, as giving us a view of the family graveyard and slave graveyard beyond that.  The play may have been observing us as much as being on view for us to see.  I hope that others who were as entertained as I was had families who helped them see the tragedy that lies behind, but somehow was not depicted.

  

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