A NEST OF VIPERS

Don’t stop the presses. Yet another blatant spin-off (if not rip-off) of August: Osage County has splattered on the boards. What the world needs beyond peace and prosperity, it seems, is one more dysfunctional drama about a dysfunctional family. (Which is more defective, you may well wonder?) Unsolicited but eager to deliver his toxic goods in this world premiere by Victory Gardens Theater, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins lavishes us with bullseye-wearing characters defined by their quirks (don’t give me that “inner life” crap!) and crammed with vile bile. It’s all too Appropriate.

Sadly, there’s a perverse payoff in watching from a safe distance the Lafayettes–a doomed, racist, hateful clan–self-destruct. It’s just what detonated regularly in Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer winner (which itself borrowed shamelessly from Long Day’s Journey, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and especially The Little Foxes). We endure a slew of shock-effect revelations and ugly twists that expose a cesspool of sociopathic behavior: drug-taking, financial skullduggery, child molestation, greed, incest, spousal abuse, anti-Semitism, and the pursuit of porn. Unfinished baggage gets unpacked, obscenities and recriminations are screamed and bellowed, and blame is thrown Olympic-style. Yes, we learn, loved ones can be hated ones too. Tell us what we don’t know, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins.

Combine a catalogue of calamities too improbable to be authentic with an audience’s deep if not diseased desire for schadenfreude (“how great my life must be because it’s not theirs!”) and you have a play that contaminates more than it enlightens.  The result is a sick sitcom, a very sad evening void of sympathy, pandering to YouTube voyeurism and tabloid tastes. Imagine a chain of embarrassing videos all strung into one script and you’ve got the ironically named Appropriate.

Following the welcome death of the family’s rancidly racist and compulsively hoarding patriarch, the decrepit family manse, a once-historic Arkansas landmark, is about to be auctioned off in an estate sale to pay off a defaulted loan. (Meant to distract him from drugs, the youngest son’s crack-brained scheme to turn their plantation house into a bread-and-breakfast went awry.)  This forced family reunion assembles the father’s three damaged adult children. Alcoholic Toni (Kirsten Fitzgerald) is the control-freak daughter who loathes life, bullies her drug-dealing son Rhys (Alex Stage) and insults anyone in earshot. Materialistic Bo (Keith Kupferer) is the middle child, eager to profit from his past even as he denies it–which means trying to get a six-figure offer for a hideous heirloom; a family album filled with horrific images of the broken bodies of lynch-mob victims, the perfect complement to the graveyard outside the mansion where the unmarked bodies of dead slaves infect the ground. Bo’s wife Rachel (Cheryl Graeff) is a human dartboard for Toni’s vilest slurs, while her daughter Cassidy (Jennifer Baker) is a tad too interested in her cute cousin Rhys.

Ironically, the least-lousy child is Stef Tovar’s child-molesting Franz, who’s seeking a second chance married to River (Leah Karpel), an almost redemptive nature lover. Jacob-Jenkins’ mean play mocks them too, but for being weak, as if strength in this hellhole isn’t pathological. At least the mean mocking in another Jacob-Jenkins’ play, the messy and overly long but provocative and brilliant Neighbors, posed extraordinarily thought-provoking questions about family and race.

Before 150 torturously excessive minutes are over, enough dirty laundry gets unpacked to defy a fleet of washing machines. At the bitter, empty end’”as if we didn’t already know there was something rotten from foundations to hurricane deck–we watch the abandoned house slowly disintegrate until an unseen figure with a flashlight enters, searching for God knows what. I get it, I get it.

Gary Griffin, a consummate director who usually can do no wrong, can d0 no more than feed the fuel for this two-act feeding frenzy of a hatefest. Though there’s no occasion to rise to, his eight actors, Chicago treasures on other stages, manage to be as real as their caricatures permit, no small triumph. And all too appropriate.

photos by  Michael Courier

Appropriate
Victory Gardens Theater
presented in association with Actors Theatre of Louisville
scheduled to end on December 8, 2013
for tickets call 773-871-3000 or tickets@victorygardens.org

for info on this and other Chicago Theater, visit http://www.TheatreinChicago.com