
Kevin Collins and Bridget Patterson in Appropriate. Photo credit: Cindy McErnery
RALEIGH – When three characters talk of ghosts at different times in a three-act drama, a playwright just might be trying to tell you something. When those conversations take place within the clearly decaying confines (thanks to set designer Michael Anderson) of the main house on the remains of an antebellum plantation in southeast Arkansas—immediately adjacent to the family graveyard, and a stone’s throw from the all but the unmarked plot where its enslaved lie buried—it’s fair to suggest that some subtleties have been sacrificed, hopefully in the service of a greater cause.
Rest assured that they are—and indeed, we quickly note that sacrificed subtleties are the name of the game—in the award-winning drama, Appropriate. North Raleigh Arts and Creative Theatre‘s current and certainly notable production of the show that took the 2024 Tony Award for Best Revival opens here just over a year after it first opened on Broadway, a tribute to the taste and tenacity of NRACT’s managing artistic director, Tim Locklear.
One ghost in particular stands out in a family drama so harrowing that it calls into question the whole notion of what family is in the first place: the unnamed, recently deceased patriarch of the scattered, shattered Lafayette family, who’ve returned to auction the house and sell off its belongings.
To be clear, no ectoplasmic rendering of the dead father and grandfather figures into Brenden Jacobs-Jenkins’ cautionary and frequently caustic script. Instead, he not only haunts but intervenes directly in the ongoing action, pulling levers from the strongest sinecure available for the malevolent dead: the post-traumatic psyches of the now-adult children he abused. As a result, someone who never sets foot on stage becomes one of the clearest characters in Jacobs-Jenkins’ play.
As we view the estrangement between the neurotic and bellicose oldest daughter, Toni (short for Antoinette), resentfully dutiful middle son Bo (for Beauregarde) and Frank, the self-exiled, much younger sibling (originally named François), one thing is clear. Sometime in the 1990s, somewhere in Washington DC, a successful, rising federal lawyer from the South always took his work home with him: raising three children with all the tender mercies of a prosecuting attorney.

Edith Snow, Betsy Henderson and Matthew Kinney in Appropriate. Photo credit: Cindy McErnery
Bo’s got the head for numbers and the steel-trap analytical mind, adept at dismantling an opponent with preternatural calm. We see it as actor Matthew Kinney, more or less like a functionary from human resources, coolly informs Edith Snow as his sister Toni that multiple recent crises in her life (including divorce, trouble at the office, and the arrest of her son, Rhys) have made her work as executor of her father’s estate simply unacceptable. “I feel that it has been irresponsible and unfair of you to hold the rest of us… hostage… to your hardship,” he says, punctuating his sentence with clear distaste. “You were obviously in no position to accept the responsibility of executor and you should have had the… self-awareness to say something.”
Toni’s got the aptitude—and the clearly predatory delight—in publicly eviscerating a litigant on the witness stand after sussing out their soft spots. Under veteran Jeri Lynn Schulke’s direction, that keeps showing up in Snow’s deeply disquieting and overtly toxic interactions with her character’s siblings and their significant others, particularly Bo’s hard-nosed Brooklynite wife, Rachel (a seasoned Betsy Henderson): unilaterally declaring from scene to scene who is actually a member of the family, and doubling down when defending her image of her dad whenever she or it is questioned. Cruelty is always the point, when an exponentially disproportionate offense is considered the best defense.
But the biggest tell by far here of dear old daddy’s trade is their deep-seated need, decades later, to prosecute – endlessly and sometimes brutally – the injustices each feels has been done by the other.
These are all behaviors we’d expect when children grow up in a house of law, where justice was rarely tempered by mercy. Under the circumstances, the life sentences being served are sobering, but not that surprising.
Though Frank (soulful Kevin Collins) came along nearly a decade after Toni and Bo, we see as the play unfolds that, as his father’s mental health deteriorated with age, he was hardly thrown clear of the wreckage. Ten years after escaping, he’s returned with his fiancé, a New Age vegan spiritual practitioner named River (Bridget Patterson), seeking healing, closure and a reckoning over what he believes he is owed.
We’re tempted here to say, “So far, so centripetal,” as a repellant and thoroughly self-absorbed family threatens to implode into its own black hole.
But when Bo’s and Toni’s children discover a notebook filled with photos from lynchings among the patriarch’s belongings – and later, a box containing other grisly souvenirs from that era – it’s strange how reluctant these children of the law are in admitting new evidence, even when they disclose literal horrors, and atrocities exponentially greater and more vast than the abuse all three have seen.

Edith Snow, Havana Blum, Kevin Collins and Xenon Winslow in Appropriate. Photo credit: Cindy McErnery
Though they stand at the epicenter of their family’s plantation, the siblings struggle to own, address and transcend—as opposed to merely sidestep and ignore—the racism and anti-Semitism in their family’s past. But before they can decide what to tell the children (winsome Havana Blum as awkward 13-year-old Cassidy, rough-edged Xenon Winslow as bewildered older teenager Rhys, and kinetic Julian Fisch as the chaotic Ainsley) they must decide what to tell themselves.
Among this group, that will be litigated, at a cost, even though any further rips in the fabric of this family threaten to leave everyone holding nothing more than tattered, disconnected threads.
There’s good reason why, at the end of yet another psychological cul-de-sac, one character wonders if the notion of family itself is but a myth: “…[I]s family just a bunch of mismatched memories—stories you tell yourself when you need an excuse to explain how trapped you feel or broken or cheated?”
These and other questions are left for us to answer.
This production’s strengths in scripting, direction and acting make Appropriate a clear early candidate for one of the best shows of the year in this region.
Ethically, I also have to note that it just as clearly has the potential to trigger people who have experienced abuse or neglect during their own childhoods – particularly in the accurately written and sometimes devastating voicings of an adult abuser that Toni’s character has internalized. As I have written of in the past, I know more of that world than I wish I did, and I found parts of this production challenging. I am still glad I saw it.
Those in search of insights to that world – and possible sources and solutions for more than one dilemma our culture faces at present – will find considerable food for thought here in a work whose significant laughs are punctuated at times by gasps of recognition. Strongly recommended.