Jacobs-Jenkins ’06’s Play Opens in New York

New play: Appropriate, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ’06, directed by Liesl Tommy

Dates and location: Through April 13, at Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, N.Y.

The playwright: The Brooklyn-based Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright-in-residence at Signature Theatre Company in New York City. He has won the 2013 Sundance Theatre Institute Tennessee Williams Award, among other honors. His 2010 play Neighbors explored race.

The show: From Signature Theatre Company’s website: “The estranged members of the Lafayette clan have returned to Arkansas and their crumbling old plantation home to settle the accounts of their recently deceased patriarch. As they sort through a lifetime of hoarded mementos and junk, the discovery of a gruesome relic and a surprise visitor send the family into a spiral of crackling confrontations, repressed histories, and regret.”

Review: New York Times critic Ben Brantley called Appropriate a “remarkable” and “very fine, subversively original new play.”

Read more: PAW’s April 14, 2010 story on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ’06.