Drama

Appropriate - What belongs

Wednesday, 31/05/2023 / 08:00 PM - 09:50 PM / Theater Freiburg - Small House

Intermission catering Rain or shine Wheelchair-accessible

African-American auteur Branden Jacobs-Jenkins appropriates the classic "American family drama" in his outrageously sharp comedy APPROPRIATE: A white, dysfunctional family gathers in a dilapidated Arkansas plantation house to sort through the possessions of their recently deceased father. The house is to be sold and the proceeds divided between the two oldest siblings, Toni and Bo. An unpleasant surprise is not only the cemetery located on the property, which lowers the property value, but also the appearance of the outcast youngest brother Frank. But the quickly igniting inheritance dispute and old rivalries are overshadowed by very different ghosts of the past. A photo album with disturbing racist content turns up among the father's possessions. Who was this man really, and what should be done with the photographs? Should they be given to a museum as historical evidence, or are they possibly worth a lot of money? Is that proper? Branden Jacobs-Jenkins unabashedly borrows from Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Tracy Letts the ingredients for his cynical family drama and mixes them with current discourses on post-colonial heritage, appropriation and white supremacy. Spiced with a pinch of horror story, he succeeds in creating a deadly serious, bitingly funny play whose characters behave in the most "inappropriate" way.

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