GableStage’s ‘Appropriate’ Reviewed in the Miami Herald

It’s summer in Arkansas and members of the Lafayette family arrive after the brood’s patriarch has died. They are ready to sift through what’s left in the Southern plantation home, perhaps sell the place, split the money, and do everything most families are tasked with when someone passes away.

“Appropriate” opened on Broadway in December of 2023 and, after a demand for ticket sales, moved to another theater for an extension, finally closing at the end of June 2024. Only six months since its bow on Broadway, the play gets its Miami premiere at GableStage opening Friday, Jan. 31 and running through Sunday, Feb. 23.

Bari Newport, GableStage’s producing artistic director, says she read the original version of the play in 2013 when she was leading the Penobscot Theater Company in Bangor, Maine. “At the time, it wasn’t right for that theater; the many, many layers didn’t make themselves known on the page,” she recalls. When she saw it on Broadway, she noticed that some “nips and tucks” had been made, which “helped bring out” more of the comedy. “It’s really quite funny and poignant. I believe it’s very much an actor’s piece and an ensemble piece. Each one of the characters is somewhat of an archetype and I try to find the Achilles heel of each of them.”

Written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a Black playwright, “Appropriate” deals with a white family faced with denying or profiting from a legacy of racism. While the play is a feat getting eight actors together to create the perfect ensemble (two child actors are in the production, eight-year-old South Florida actor Lorenzo Garcia and Cecile Etzbach, a 13-year-old student at Ransom Everglades), there are other mountains to climb to create the realistic atmosphere.

For the company to put “Appropriate” inside the theater has been a technical undertaking, admits Newport. “It is pushing us in a lot of different ways to be more ambitious technically. It’s one thing to design it and then it’s another thing to build it,” she says, giving credit “where credit is due” to her technical team behind the scenes.

Newport says audiences will be “absolutely astounded by the set.” While the New York production created a cavernous, high-ceiling Southern mansion, Newport says the antebellum Arkansas plantation had to be entirely rethought for the GableStage space, housed since 1998 in the former horse stables at the historic Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables.

“We only have width. We don’t have much depth,” confides Newport, about the approximately 140-seat theater.

The set, created by GableStage’s resident designer Frank J Oliva, is built out into the audience with the carpeted area of the floor covered with wood. The chandelier, which hangs in the house, is over the audience. “It’s about family roots and tree roots and history repeating itself. I wanted to make sure that the audience weren’t passive observers; they are truly sitting inside the house,” she says.