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This review was originally published on December 18, 2023. At the 77th Tony Awards , Appropriate won three awards including, Best Revival of a Play. Plenty of therapists will tell you: When you have the urge to say but , pause and replace it with and .

It sounds a little hokey, but — and — it’s a small, shockingly easy-to-open door into spaces of greater complexity. Those spaces can be terrifying to enter — people structure their whole lives so as to avoid acknowledging the existence of the door — and if we forced ourselves over the threshold more often, we might live in a different world altogether. I love you and you’re hurting me.



He’s suffering and what he’s done isn’t okay. Violent antisemitism is real and once again rising in the world, and Israel is acting indefensibly in Palestine. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s writing lives entirely and electrically in the space of “and.

” The cataclysms he builds toward are the result of simultaneous truths — every one of them unfaceable, identity-destroying, or even, in plain fact, fatal for someone — crowding and thickening the atmosphere like gas slowly leaking from a stove, until at last the igniter sparks. In Appropriate , the air is so clotted it’s barely breathable. Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2013 play takes place during a queasy reunion of three adult siblings at the former plantation in Arkansas that belonged to their recently deceased father — and, if anything, the past ten years have only taken a whetsto.

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