Appropriate at Donmar Warehouse: First look at pictures of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's play
The first pictures have been released for the UK premiere production of Appropriate at the Donmar Warehouse.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's play, which opens at the theatre tomorrow, takes on the long tradition of the American family drama.
Set on a former slave plantation, Appropriate follows the Lafayette family, who gather together at their late father’s Arkansas estate as they prepare to sell it. While attempting to bury the hatchet, they dig up an old photo album that changes everything.
Monica Dolan and Steven Mackintosh lead a cast including Jaimi Barbakoff, Charles Furness, Edward Hogg, Isabella Pappas, Orlando, Oliver Savell and Tafline Steen. Ola Ince directs the show, with design by Fly David, lighting by Anna Watson and sound by Donato Wharton.
Jacobs-Jenkins has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for his plays Everybody and Gloria, which ran at the Hampstead Theatre in 2017. An Octoroon also had a London run that year, leading to him picking up the Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards.
He told the Standard that he read every American family drama he could find while writing Appropriate and put them together, writing the characters as an all-white family as “an experiment to see how differently I would be treated as a participant in the market. And I was treated very differently.”
Appropriate runs at the Donmar Warehouse until October 5, donmarwarehouse.com
