'So I thought, since we can't do Europe this summer, why don't the kids and I just do a little Southern History road trip? We're going to drive back home through Mississippi, Louisiana - all those places - experience some of Daddy's heritage.'

The Lafayette family gather at their late father's home in Arkansas to bury the hatchet and prepare the former plantation for its Estate Sale. Until, that is, they make a discovery which changes everything.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Appropriate is a gripping play about ghosts and the legacies we are left with, and a wickedly subversive appropriation of the great American family drama.

Appropriate premiered Off-Broadway in 2014, and won the Obie Award for Best New American Play. It had its UK premiere at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in August 2019, directed by Ola Ince and featuring Monica Dolan.

This edition also features his short play I Promise Never Again to Write Plays About Asians...

About the Author

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an American playwright and has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His other plays include An Octoroon, Gloria, Everybody and War.

Reviews

'A bracingly clever play, as twisted and pointed as a corkscrew... viciously funny and profoundly unsettling... Jacobs-Jenkins springs many surprises as his drama runs its suspenseful and gripping course... a magnificent achievement'

* WhatsOnStage *

'A provocative family reunion drama from the sublime Branden Jacobs-Jenkins'

* Time Out *

'A stunning act of theatrical subversion... ingenious'

* The Stage *

'An audacious, vividly atmospheric tour de force'

* Evening Standard *

'Exhilarating... Jacob-Jenkins appropriates the classic American family drama with results that are both gravely serious and mordantly funny'

* Guardian *

'A bitterly funny family drama with ghostly overtones that raise genuine goosebumps... an audacious, vividly atmospheric tour de force'

* Evening Standard *

'The deftly crafted blend of shocking exaggeration and believability, politeness and fury... makes Appropriate land with the kind of thump you rarely encounter in the theatre'

* Chicago Tribune *

'A highly charged and ambitiously sprawling drama... There's no denying that Jacobs-Jenkins is one of the rising stars in the American theatre'

* LA Times *

'Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's very fine, subversively original new play... He enjoys his quarrelsome characters, and he has achieved the difficult feat of making them all both unlovable and impossible not to identify with... this remarkable and devious play allows us to draw our own parallels with the human sound and fury that fills most of the evening'

-- Ben Brantley * New York Times *


Awards
Winner of Obie Award for Best New American Play 2014.



Book Information
ISBN 9781848428713
Author Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Format Paperback
Page Count 112
Imprint Nick Hern Books
Publisher Nick Hern Books