[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: You and Me]

Alison: When you enter the Hayes Theater to see Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's play titled Appropriate, before any actors hit the stage, there's a big screen with the dictionary definition of the word appropriate. Many of the definitions and sentences refer to the word as an adjective, but then when you get to the bottom, you realize it's also a verb, appropriate. The projection signals some of the themes of the play, including 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.

Three siblings have returned to their late father's sprawling plantation-esque home in Arkansas with different agendas. Sarah Paulson placed Toni, a bundle of sarcasm, pain, and rage, 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 items could be appropriate for a white supremacist. 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 brother, younger brother, as in a guy who doesn't seem to get why he can't just hang around 13-year-old girls says he has returned to make amends and find closure, Toni is not buying that. The family has to deal with ghosts or they will be haunted forever. Appropriate stars, Corey Stoll, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, and Michael Esper, alongside my guest, Sarah Paulson. Hi, Sarah.

Sarah: Hello, how are you?

Alison: Hello. Just directed by stage and film director, Lila Neugebauer. Hi, Lila.

Lila: Hi.

Alison: Hi. Though the pledge was stage off-Broadway in 2014, this marks the Broadway debut for Branden Jacob-Jenkins. Welcome back, Branden.

Sarah: Jacobs.

Alison: Jacobs.

Sarah: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Alison: Thank you. [laughs] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Thank you.

Branden: Hi.

Sarah: Yes, I know.

Alison: We'll get that right by the end of the interview. The play is running at the Hayes Theater through March 3rd. Branden, when you first began writing this play, what was it about, and then when you finished, how close were you to that original idea?

Branden: Yes. I began writing this play about 15 years ago, actually in a 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 kind of whiteness of these families.

Whereas we have a incredible tradition here, perhaps a singular tradition in the states of drama by African-Americans, but yet that kind of 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, trying to put a ship in a bottle for a long time but I would say after a couple of years of work with the help of a lot of amazing institutions, first and foremost a signature theater where it premiered about 10 years ago, I wound up falling in love with the characters and the story, and it felt like something more organic than an exercise, I would say.

Alison: 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: Be careful.

Sarah: Easy, Lila. Easy, Lila.

Lila: 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 anonymizing 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? [chuckles]

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

Lila: Yes. Great. There's that. That kind of high-wire act feels particularly Branden Jacobs-Jenkins to me. 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: 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: 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. 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 would ever 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. She is the engine in 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 an opportunity for me artistically to place 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, but I see her as a much richer person.

Alison: I wanted to talk to you all about pacing in this play. Branden, as I mentioned, Toni's a lot but there's a lot going on, and we discover it and it's revealed slowly over the course of the script, and there are other slow reveals. How do you think about pacing and how did you want to use pacing to tell this story about this family?

Branden: I think about the fact that they teach you in the theater or sometimes they do. There's two kinds of plays, which is like someone goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. You need that audience surrogate to really understand what's happening. The truth about families is it's not like the history that people have in a family goes beyond the lifespans of most of the people in it, right? You really can't rush the goods. [chuckles] For me, it was really this intense game of portraiture.

I just wanted to feel that these people were real in some way, and that these relationships were real and you could feel their various versions of themselves connecting and disconnecting in any given moment. You just have to give that time. I don't know, I feel like that was ultimately what it was. It was to do justice to the characters and to the truth of their circumstances. I needed to give every layer of the onion room to breathe. That was my attack. Whether or not people love it, I don't know, but that was the aesthetic engine of it.

Alison: Lila, then your job also is to keep your audience engaged and the actors engaged as you're having to work with Branden's pacing. What was a decision you made? Because directors make decisions. That's what they do all the time. What was a decision you made that involved pacing that turned out to be the right one?

Lila: First, I'll acknowledge that when you say the word pacing, I am thinking of both from a purely technical perspective, the rate at which an event is calibrated musically. Branden, you are also speaking about the rate at which information and psychology is unfolded in front of us. With regard to the latter, which is a meteor dramaturgical question, I guess what I would say is that there's a clear invitation in this play based on what unfolds to judge these characters.

It struck me as tremendously important that those of us who are inhabiting the play see ourselves as the advocates for these characters, which is not to suggest that we shy away from their shortcomings. In fact that for us from the inside to immediately judge these characters from the outset would, in fact, be to less meaningfully implicate the audience and would, in fact, I think be to let the audience off the hook from the outset in terms of the ways in which some people in the room might, in fact, come to see themselves on stage.

Alison: Sarah, for you, there's slow reveals about Toni. I won't give them all away. We find out she lost her job. Her son has troubles. How did the way that we, the audience, learn about her, how did that impact the way you play her? Because you know her story, Toni knows her story, and we're just getting it piece by piece.

Sarah: Well, my job is simply to play the truth of the play as it is revealed for the audience. I living inside of the, as you described, the knowledge, I have all of the history of the events of Toni's life leading up to this moment in my mind, in my body, and in my heart, there's no question. I think Branden does a very beautiful thing, which is that you meet Toni kind of full throttle with a surprising event that is happening, which is a return of her once beloved, and also, the person she was responsible for raising who's disappeared and he is now back.

That is, you're meeting Toni at a moment, where she might not normally be behaving the way she's behaving. You're talking about a ratcheting up of events that cause a particular internal boil for her that is, I don't believe Toni's operating level. Branden does this wonderful thing where it isn't until I leave the stage in Act 1 that the audience has delivered all the information about me. I've behaved the way I've behaved, and the audience is witnessing that without the context of my history.

I think it's so deftly done because you basically then are asking the audience to reengage with their understanding of who this woman is and perhaps to put it somewhere else in their mind or their body while they're watching it, which then I think launches something wonderful for the rest of the play for her. Because I do think, sort of to speak to your earlier question about pace in terms of what Branden's done. That first act goes by like a bullet train. It does for us as actors. I have heard audience members who I know who will say afterwards that first act, you blink and it's over.

Then the rest of the play has a different energy. That is all, of course, by design. I think it's a really wonderful thing to have the audience meet this character, as you say, who is a lot. Then you find out after I leave the stage, what I've been going through, which reengages you with the audience and asks the audience to participate and deal with their own thoughts about what they have decided she is, which makes it more of an interactive experience, which in my view is a wonderful, important, meaningful part of attending the theater.

Alison: We're discussing the play Appropriate. It's at the Hayes Theater through March 3rd. My guests are actor Sarah Paulson, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the playwright, and Lila Neugebauer, the director. Branden this was staged signature in 2014, as you mentioned. 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: That's an interesting question. There's been all this kind of discussion about how much I've changed in the play. A lot of it was quite superficial. It was always like rhythmic stuff or [unintelligible 00:14:55]. 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 it-- something about the way people I think have these questions have become so undeniably personal to so many people. No one's going to pretend that we didn't witness the Summer 2020. I feel that people were able to-- It had somehow bought people a willingness to really listen to these characters as they unpacked 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 this space director, Lila Neugebauer, for giving me the space to reinvestigate that in this iteration.

Alison: Lila and Sarah, I'm curious, I would 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: I'll just say that we have also been blessed with the collaboration. I will let you speak to this. Sarah has a longtime collaborator who joined us on this production. Let Sarah speak about her.

Sarah: 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-- Anyway, Julia Crockett is a person who helped me and 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, and I want to see it more in your-- 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, 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: Lila, this may sound a little bit cliché, 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: What I would say is cliché or no cliché, that's 100% accurate for this play in production. I'm delighted that that was your experience. The first thing I would acknowledge is that I worked with a now frequent collaborators of mine, the scenic collective, Dots, on this production. We had a really incredible design team on this show who are integral in every way to the mood feelings, we sense then every aspect of this production, they are a part of crafting. With regards 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, and then without wanting to give anything away, the playwright has written-- 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's 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: Yes, the house has its own monologue.

Sarah: Yes, it does. It absolutely does.

Alison: 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: 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 roar shock quality to American life and history. There's no consistent narrative, so no one can make action in a way that feels unified. It's like everyone wants to march in different directions to do the same thing. Dynamic is something that I was hoping to out or articulate, maybe in the play. Truthfully, they all have the same idea, but never at the same time.

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. 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 was invested in that history, and suddenly, you have a point of view over that disappears, and 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 the cicadas that are omnipresent in the work itself.

Alison: It's really interesting the way you write it that the family just casually talks about how the enslaved people buried. They just say it and move on. What does this tell us, Branden, about this family's relationship with the reality of their family history? Like "Oh, yes, they're out there. There's some dead enslaved people."

Branden: Yes. These enslaved folks died many years before any of these folks were born. It's funny because I think also people often want to say this is a Southern family, but the truth is that the only person who lives in the South here is Toni and that's by choice. They all raised in DC, which is kind of contentious part of the country despite being between two formally sailing state. There's a way in which this history is abstract to them.

It's very easy for themselves to put up psychological boundaries between who they believe they are now and the very soil upon which they were reared up their name began as a family. Yes, I can't tell if that's an easy or one that deserves more unpacking.

Alison: Toni-- Sarah. [chuckles]

Sarah: You can call me Toni. That's fine.

Alison: Toni is just so in my brain right now.

Sarah: Good.

Branden: That's how good she is.

Alison: Yes, right. Toni just--

Sarah: Easy?

Alison: No. Is Toni--? Is she a daddy's girl through and through?

Sarah: Listen, I think when you're a young-ish woman and your mother dies and you have two brothers, one of whom needs a great deal of care, the other one who might be somewhat emotionally remote to you. I think Toni and her father had a special bond. I do think this. I do believe this. I also feel there is that feeling, and this is something Branden and I, and I don't even think Lila and I have discussed.

But when you feel you're in this constant state of loss in terms of your family's story, and that when you have one parent who has died, and you were a budding young woman, and you no longer had that connection, and you have these two boys, men in your life, I think it was probably very important for Toni to have her father be proud of her, celebrate her, and feel connected to her.

I think at the end of the day, some of it is memory and what you need a person to be, what you need the truth to be, so that you can still feel that you have something to orbit around. It's like you don't want somebody to take something else from you.

Alison: Right. She's lost a lot.

Sarah: This is something that she has that means something to her that helps her identify herself in space and time, and somebody cannot try to casually take that from her. I don't think she believes. You've said it a couple of times, and I think people say it a lot, these were her father's things. My argument is, how do we know that? We do not know that. The cousins had this property for a long time. Toni's arguments make a lot of sense to me, but of course, they should because that's my responsibility to make sure that they do.

Alison: Lila, someone said to me right before. "You heard what happened." Lila went on stage the other night. What happened, director, on stage?

Lila: Well, in the age of COVID, the show still got to go on.

Sarah: You're not the first director, right, Lila, to do this? This is you now, you joined the pantheon of--

Lila: Yes, I know. It's a pretty good club. I think it includes Sam Gold, Sam Mendes, maybe a few other Sams.

Sarah: But maybe you're the only lady, we're going to find out now.

Lila: Possible.

Alison: So you went on and went part just so folks can--

Lila: The role of Rachael, played by the great Natalie Gold.

Alison: Well, we hope everybody's feeling better and doing well.

Sarah: You can imagine what it was like for us to turn over and look over at Lila in Natalie's dress, with makeup on in a way I've never really seen on her face, and there she is at the pages, playing Natalie's lines. It was very surreal and also kind of thrilling, I have to say.

Branden: I must say the great regret in my life was not being able to see that performance because I was in Chicago at the time. I'm sure Lila, it must have been so surreal to step inside the Hurricane you had designed.

Alison: [chuckles]

Branden: It's an iconic effort. I have to say it's pretty unheard of even when listing these greats, but I consider Lila one of the greats. It takes a special director honestly to be willing to do that work. It was amazing.

Lila: Well, it takes a very special company to hold you in the full home of their embrace, [laughs] and really move you on. I think it was a pretty wild time for everybody in that room.

Alison: I think we just watched you relive it. I just saw it in your eyes. [laughs]

Lila: Yes, that's just for us. We got this unsolicited text that says, "I saw Appropriate last week. It is brilliant on par with Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill. The acting and direction are amazingly effective in getting lines heard and absorbed. A must-see." That is an unsolicited text from one of our listeners.

Sarah: I love an unsolicited text of praise. I love it. Thank you, whoever you are out there.

Alison: For folks who haven't gotten their New Yorker yet, there's a big old profile of Branden in the current New Yorker and the news was dropped yesterday that you are going to working on an adaptation of Purple Rain.

Branden: Yes. You can say yes. How weird does it get to go from this to Prince? It's going to be amazing. I'm so excited that the news is out and it's the next big mountain to climb. Yes.

Alison: Was that a hard secret to keep?

Branden: Well, probably not that hard because it got out and people are excited, but yes, I've been working on this for a little over two years and stars are lining and we're very happy. So far, I'm working with base director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, but of course, Prince is, how do you capture Prince and not be Prince? That is just one of the great existential questions of human life.

Sarah: [laughs]

Branden: [unintelligible 00:30:04] [laughs]

Alison: We will stay tuned. Appropriate is that the Hayes Theatre through March 3rd. My guests have an actor Sarah Paulson; playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins; and Lila Neugebauer, who is a director and sometimes actor on stage.

Branden: [laughs]

Alison: Thanks for the time today.

Lila: Thank you, Alison.

Branden: Thank you, Alison. Much a pleasure always.

 

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