{"id":5764,"date":"2020-11-20T20:00:12","date_gmt":"2020-11-21T01:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/?p=5764"},"modified":"2020-11-20T17:57:59","modified_gmt":"2020-11-20T22:57:59","slug":"theatre-rc-confronts-the-past-in-appropriate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/?p=5764","title":{"rendered":"Theatre RC Confronts the Past in \u201cAppropriate\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by Charissa Roberson\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

From Nov. 12-14, Theatre Roanoke College presented Branden Jacob-Jenkins\u2019s layered production \u201cAppropriate,\u201d which won the Obie Award for Best New American Play in 2014.<\/span><\/p>\n

The play centers on the Lafayette family as they return to their deceased father\u2019s house\u2014a former plantation\u2014in Arkansas. As they go through his belongings, they uncover dark facts about their father\u2019s past that force them to rethink the image they had of him.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[T]his play deals with issues of race, family and protecting memories,\u201d said senior Adeline Huggins, who played the wife of the middle Lafayette sibling. \u201cIt\u2019s especially powerful given the BLM movement and the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

With many people around the country beginning to have difficult conversations about race, \u201cAppropriate\u201d is an extremely timely production. Like the Lafayette family, America must confront the truths about its past that are too often ignored.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cJacobs-Jenkins has created a world that reflects our contemporary society\u2019s discomfort when reckoning with its racialized past,\u201d wrote Dr. Nelson Barre, the play\u2019s director, in a note on the TRC production. \u201c[N]one [of the characters] can truly escape the fact that the comfortable world they have inhabited is haunted by people and events that have served as the foundation of America\u2019s current unrest.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

TRC itself has played a role in the \u201comission of racial history,\u201d according to Barre. In the 50-plus years that the organization has been putting on plays, \u201cAppropriate\u201d is the first written by a Black man.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Interestingly, the play is explicit in its direction to have an all-white cast. Using a premise that is familiar to American theater-goers\u2014a family confronting their issues in a domestic setting\u2014Jacob-Jenkins draws the viewer in and then adds his own spin to the narrative, resulting in a work that is \u201csubversively original\u201d (The New York Times).<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to the complex material of the play itself, the TRC cast of \u201cAppropriate\u201d also had to contend with COVID-19 restrictions, which made the rehearsal and performance processes more challenging. The cast had to learn to act with masks, and the audience numbers were much smaller than usual, with about 10 people in-house and other viewers tuning in online.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The cast and crew, however, persevered through these difficulties and helped each other along the way.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone\u2019s been kind to the new theater kids,\u201d said freshman Mateo Biggs, who had his first TRC role in \u201cAppropriate.\u201d \u201cDr. Barre was a huge support for everyone as he worked closely with us.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Junior Sarah Jane Ruppert, who played the fianc\u00e9e of the youngest Lafayette, voiced similar sentiments.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe all tried to support each other and our director, Nelson Barre, worked tirelessly to make sure we had the resources to be successful in each of our roles,\u201d she said. \u201cThis play is so important, and the entire cast feels lucky to have been able to bring this work to life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Charissa Roberson\u00a0 From Nov. 12-14, Theatre Roanoke College presented Branden Jacob-Jenkins\u2019s layered production \u201cAppropriate,\u201d which won the Obie Award for Best New American Play in 2014. The play centers on the Lafayette family as they return to their deceased father\u2019s house\u2014a former plantation\u2014in Arkansas. As they go through his belongings, they uncover dark […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":5765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-5764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-summer2019"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/Pic-for-Appropriate-article-courtesy-of-Rob-Bessolo-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}