Appropriate

 

I read Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' award-winning play Appropriate some months back and have let its searing story of race, retribution, familial dysfunction and denial marinate.

The 2023 Broadway revival of Appropriate, which was first staged in 2013, won a Tony. Jacobs-Jenkins is a MacArthur Fellow, a true genius. I've not read Jacobs-Jenkins' other works but his status as a theatrical savant is supported by this one piece alone.

A white Arkansas family meets at the homestead to settle accounts on the property, divide up whatever spoils they are able to realize, and go their decidely separate, bitter ways. While going through the detritus of the life of their recently departed patriarch, they discover hideous photographs of lynchings in an album. Additionally, unmarked graves are found on the property.

The already fractured family grows even more so as they debate what's to be done with the property in light of the discoveries. Old resentments are resurrected, and the three central siblings -- a domineering older sister and her two brothers -- spin out of control -- their spouses, companions and children tossed about and variously used as shields and deflectors.

It's a brutal and devastating work that Jacobs-Jenkins closes with the set falling into ruin in front of the audience.

The metaphor is stark and pointed and brilliant and real -- and now.

I love that the play's title, Appropriate, can be read as either "proper" or "theft," depending on one's disposition, where one stands in relation to what is going on.

Again. How fitting.

 

Magazine Dreams

 

 

 

When critics say Jonathan Majors gives a "committed" performance in Elijah Bynum's brutal character study Magazine Dreams, they mean the actor plows through physical, emotional and psychological terrains with a competence and complexity lesser actors would only get partly right. 

 

Majors -- whose bright career was scuttled by his conviction two years ago on charges of domestic abuse -- convincingly sells the whole persona of his damaged bodybuilder, Killian Maddox, and the man's pursuit of perfection, recognition, acceptance, maybe even human connection despite not wanting to be touched.

 

Majors spends much of the film in his skivvies, posing in front of the mirror, recording clunky workout reels for social media, or in the gym, pounding out reps and cursing himself. He pushes steroids into his hip and does lines of cocaine to get him through his training, all while caring for his ailing, war-veteran grandfather, played by Harrison Page. Maddox is a loaded, imposing powder keg, and audiences will sit anxiously waiting for the explosion. The brilliance of the film is the blast doesn't come in the expected ways. 

 

Maddox's mental illness will be immediately clear to observant audiences, but nonetheless it is affirmed by his counselor (Harriet Sansom Harris), who can barely contain her painful worry about the young, likely schizophrenic who struggles with murderous ideation. 

 

His attempts at outreach are cringe-inducing -- he sends mash notes to his bodybuilding idol (Michael O'Hearn), whom he eventually meets, and moons over a young supermarket cashier (Haley Bennett), a co-worker Maddox asks on a date in THE most awkward proposition I've seen on film in quite some time. Both of these explorations are bruising disasters for very different reasons, but each pushes the volatile Maddox close to the edge. 

 

Bynum's film, his first major feature, is being compared, favorably mostly, with Scorsese's classic Taxi Driver (1976). Magazine Dreams simmers and steams and occasionally boils over. Majors delivers every level of intensity, leaving audiences pummeled and breathless.

 

It's a bravura performance in an unnerving and exhausting film, tough going from start to finish.