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Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart, and on today's show, we're going to celebrate some of the 2024 Tony nominees. Coming up later this hour, we'll hear about Purlie Victorious with stars, Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young, and director Kenny Leon. Plus, we're going to talk about Stereophonic, the most nominated play in Tony's history. We'll have some members of that creative team talk about the production. Later in the show, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez talk Merrily We Roll Along, and Eddie Redmayne, Gayle Rankin, and director Rebecca Frecknall are going to talk Cabaret. For now, I think we've gotten Appropriate, Tony-nominated show, to kick things off.

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When you enter the theater to see Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's play that's titled Appropriate before any actor hit the stage, there's a big screen with the dictionary definition of the word appropriate. Most of the sentences refer to the word as an adjective, but then at the bottom, you realize it is also a verb, to appropriate. The projection signals that some things look the same but are very different even if you don't want them to be. The dramedy is a raucous examination of memory, race, and secrets.

Here's the story, three siblings have returned to their late father's sprawling plantation-esque home in Arkansas, and they're coming with different agendas. Sarah Paulson plays Toni who's a bundle of sarcasm, pain, and rage, and who has an unwavering belief that their dad was a good man, even though the siblings find all kinds of inappropriate material as they sort through their father's things.

The New York-based older brother is judgy and money-obsessed and thinks maybe they could get cash for some of the gruesome artifacts. The troubled estranged younger brother, as in a guy who doesn't seem to get why he can't just hang around a 13-year-old girl, says he has returned to make amends and find closure. Toni isn't buying that. This family has to deal with ghosts or they will be haunted forever.

Appropriate stars Corey Stoll, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, and Michael Esper, alongside Sarah Paulson. Paulson is up for a Toni for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play. Director Lila Neugebauer is up for Best Direction, and the play is nominated in six other categories as well. Appropriate is running at the Belasco Theatre through June 23rd. When Sarah Paulson, Lila Neugebauer, and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, joined Alison back in January to talk about the show, she started by asking Jacob-Jenkins to talk about the original idea he started with and how he worked it into the final product. Here's how he says that idea started.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I began writing this play about 15 years ago, actually, in the shadow of a play that was sweeping the New York stages called August: Osage County by Tracy Letts, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner. It kicked up all this interesting critical discourse around the American family drama as the crown jewel of what we do well over here. I thought I would try to take a swing at that with a bit of irony because I think what was going unmarked in this formulation was the whiteness of these families. Whereas we have an incredible tradition here, perhaps a singular tradition in the States of drama by African Americans, but yet that family drama category didn't exist within that pantheon of things, I would say, or didn't exist in an open way.

I began trying to figure out what that meant. It felt like I was making a diorama, or like trying to put a ship in a bottle for a long time. I would say after a couple of years of work with the help of a lot of amazing institutions, first and foremost, the Signature Theatre where it premiered about 10 years ago. I wound up falling in love with the characters and the story, and it wound up becoming-- it felt something like something more organic than an exercise, I would say.

Alison Stewart: Lila, you and Branden have been not only collaborators but friends for a really long time, what is something about this play that is uniquely Branden?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Be careful.

Sarah Paulson: Easy, Lila. Easy, Lila.

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Lila Neugebauer: Where to begin? Let me endeavor to keep it brief, which is, of course, difficult because this play is the product of a singular imagination, life force, and mind in terms of Branden's particular capacities and his interests. I think in response to what Branden himself just described, what I would say out loud is that it's hard for me to imagine another writer who is capable of so successfully essentially fulfilling and exceeding the expectations and conventions of what we might say is a genre satisfying those conventions so thrillingly and also anatomizing that genre at the same time, which is to say there's a lot of ways to be satisfied by your experience of this play. I'm being told my audio is quiet. How's this, guys? How am I now? [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Yes, I can hear now.

Lila Neugebauer: Okay, great. There's that, that kind of highwire act feels particularly Branden Jacobs-Jenkins to me. Then I would say that the muscularity of the writing, the extent to which the play is willing to explore the furthest reaches of these characters' cruelty and their pain, their humanity. Their hilarity is singularly Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. I could go on, but that's a start.

Alison Stewart: Sarah, Toni, she is a lot and she has a lot going on as we discover over the course of the play. What did you see in Toni that made you want to play her?

Sarah Paulson: Well, for me, the play's the thing, the writing was undeniably, to echo what Lila said, muscular and multidimensional. There was an opportunity, I think, for me to play someone who was unapologetic in their convictions and their beliefs who was also on the face of it, presenting with a particular affect of defense, and, as you said, sarcasm as weapon, but the truth is, for me at least, and this is something that I don't dare to say Branden intended or didn't, although I think he intends all the things that whatever occur to me, of course.

I think this is a woman who, at the end of the day, is in a tremendous amount of pain, and who, at the end of the day, I think, never learned how to love properly. Her way of loving comes out in a way that many people can't receive, but for her, it is what she's doing. The engine in the car, the love car as it were, is weighted down by all these other things that make it really hard to see that truth.

I think for Toni, and for me as Toni, that is undeniable, and it was something, an opportunity for me artistically to play someone unapologetic and who was not worried about being liked. I thought, what a wonderful opportunity to play, therefore, a real person. I don't think people walk around wondering how they are, and maybe some of them should more than they do, how they're coming across, particularly inside their family dynamic, particularly. I thought this was just a person, he had painted such an indelible portrait of a human being to me that I think, on the face of it, does present with a particular rage. I see her as a much richer person.

Alison Stewart: Branden, this was staged signature in 2014, as you mentioned, and obviously, a lot has changed in the past decade. Given that 2020 really opened up conversations about race and people having conversations about race, who didn't normally have conversations about race, what was something that you were able to change in the play, update in the play, or maybe even take out the play that you were excited about? What was a change that you were able to make given how people have become more open to discussing race in the past three years?

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: That's interesting question. I mean, there's been all this discussion about how much I've changed in the play, but in turn, a lot of it was quite superficial. It was always like rhythmic stuff or line polishes. The only two things I really was able to dig in on had very little to do with that theme.

Ironically, I think there was much more of a knee-jerk desire to read the play as satire, I would say, 10 years ago, which made it so difficult for people to sometimes affect or identify with some of our main characters. I did notice that something about with the way people, I think, have these questions have become so undeniably personal to so many people, and no one's going to pretend that we didn't witness December 2020.

I feel that it somehow bought people a willingness to really listen to these characters as they unpack their own interiors. There's a scene between Sarah and the amazing Corey Stoll, the characters of Toni and her brother Bo that's basically a brand new thing that, I think, for a lot of people, becomes a real emotional hinge for the journey and brings it to a place beyond laughter. I feel very grateful to my company, especially the space director, Lila Neugebauer, for giving me the space to reinvestigate that in this iteration.

Alison Stewart: Lila and Sarah, I'm curious, I wonder what your conversations about the way Toni carries herself and her body, the way Sarah uses her body to tell us about what's going on with Toni. Maybe, Lila, you could start.

Lila Neugebauer: Well, I will just say that we have also been blessed with the collaboration. Sarah has-- I will let you speak to this. Sarah has a longtime collaborator who joined us on this production.

Sarah Paulson: Yes, her name is-- [crosstalk]

Lila Neugebauer: We'll let Sarah speak about her.

Sarah Paulson: Her name is Julia Crockett, and she's a person that I worked with on Impeachment who helped me become Linda Tripp. I had never worked that way before of using my body as a way of communicating interior life in a way that was conscious anyway, or deliberate. I had this working experience with her, and I have never worked without her since, because it has been an absolute, integral way for me now to find a way inside something that separates the cerebral component of my acting choices and connects me more to the physical, which, a lot of times, when you're watching something, certainly on stage, you get a physical picture of someone's body that then tells-- so anyway, Julia Crockett is a person who helped me.

Lila, I was very grateful, and this is something Julia and I have talked about before, because not every director would be so welcoming of a person coming into a room and sitting there and pulling me aside and saying, "I want to see more of this tension in your neck, I want your fist." We came up with all of these physical communications to the audience of Toni's tension and internal battle and moments when she wants to reach out and strangle someone and she doesn't. I can physically communicate that with my body. Lila, although, is not responsible for crafting that with me, but what she's responsible for, which is almost more important, is giving the space for that to happen with such collaboration and without feeling threatened, or if she did, I never knew about it.

It's as personal as my intimate relationship with Lila working on the play because it was that necessary for me. There are plenty of people who would not have encouraged that, much less allowed her to come into our rehearsal room and watch us work and help me figure out how to communicate all of that physical stuff. I love the question, just because sometimes I'm out there in the void, I have no idea if it's reading, or if anyone's taking it in, or if they notice it, or if it is telling a story. I love that it was something that registered for you.

Alison Stewart: Lila, this may sound a little bit cliche, but the set itself is a character in many ways. What conversations did you have with your team about what the set should evoke, what feelings it should evoke, what it should be filled with?

Lila Neugebauer: What I would say is, cliche or no cliche, that that's 100% accurate for this play and production. I'm delighted that that was your experience. The first thing I would acknowledge is that we-- I work with, now frequent collaborators of mine, the scenic collective, Dots, on this production. We had a really incredible design team on this show who were integral in every way to the mood, feelings, mise-en-scène, every aspect of this production, they are a part of crafting.

With regard specifically to the set, those conversations began-- they were rooted in dramaturgical research about, first and foremost, architecture of the period and the region. It was our desire that the architecture reflect that authentically. Then without wanting to give anything away, there's an epilogue in this play on the page in which things happen in that house after everybody's gone.

The playwright has given us on the page, a series of unbelievably transporting provocations that a design team and a director are then invited and prompted to make manifest. In terms of what we sought to do, again, I don't want to give anything away, but I would say it is an epilogue in its own right. There is a real transformation and there's narrative as well. I would say it's the rare playwright that invites you to continue to create once the actors have left the stage, and that's a gift.

Alison Stewart: The house has its own monologue.

Sarah Paulson: Yes, it does. It absolutely does.

Alison Stewart: Branden, without giving too much away, the central drama, some of the action, it's going around really some disturbing things that are found in the father's things that he's left behind, stuff that I think if many people saw it, they'd be horrified to see it. Yet every member of the family has a different reaction, and they don't get rid of it. Why don't they just get rid of it? Why don't these three kids, adult kids, just say, like, "This is bad, we're walking away."

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: I think it's because they can't come to a consensus about what it is. I think that, in some ways, the play itself, but also what it's trying to gesture at is just the weird Rorschach quality to American life and history, and that there's no consistent narrative, and so no one can kind of make action in a way that feels unified. It's like everyone wants to march in different directions to do the same thing. That dynamic is something that I was hoping to out or articulate maybe in the play.

Then truthfully, you know what it is? They all have the same ideas, but never at the same time, and then by the time someone's on someone else's page, the other person wants to do something different with it because they've learned something new about it. That, to me, is just the experience of what history ultimately is like. It's so easy to treat it as a thing that's very distant from us, doesn't implicate us, but the truth is, it's the story of how we got here, no matter what we're talking about.

Then as you begin to realize, suddenly, your sense of ego and self is invested in that history, and suddenly, you have a point of view on whether or not it disappears. That seems to be the constant flow of the cycles of American life. It feels like, every 20 years, we're revisiting the same thing and not quite dealing with it. This is that story of the past is never the past. It's always going to haunt us and resurface somewhat like the cicadas that are omnipresent in the work itself.

Kousha Navidar: That was Alison's conversation with actor Sarah Paulson, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and director Lila Neugebauer. The new Broadway staging of the family drama Appropriate is nominated in eight Tony categories, and it's playing at the Belasco Theatre until June 26th.

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Up next, we'll talk about Purlie Victorious with stars, Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young, and director Kenny Leon. The show is up for six awards at this year's Tonys. Stick around. This is All Of It.

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