In “Appropriate,” now on Broadway at the Hayes, directed by Lila Neu gebauer, the prologue is just a sound. In total darkness, we hear the metallic waterfall song of a billion cicadas, a nightmarishly amplified version of the insects’ ancient mating call. According to the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s stage directions, the noise’s “pulsing, pitch black waves” should last long enough for the audience to wonder, Is this the whole show? It’s the sound of a thirteen-year cycle ending; it could be the sound of the Cenozoic waking up.
Slowly, the curtain rises on the double-height entrance hall and parlor of an imposing nineteenth-century plantation home, crumbling a little and crammed with furniture, boxes, lamps, and teetering piles. In the course of the ensuing two hours and forty minutes, we sometimes forget the frightening, singing swarm that greeted us in the dark. (Bray Poor and Will Pickens did the sound design; Jane Cox designed the lights.) The creatures in the house are mostly human: the fractious siblings Toni (Sarah Paulson), Bo (Corey Stoll), and prodigal Frank (Michael Esper), and their respective loved ones, assessing their moral and material inheritance. The father of the siblings, who has recently died, kept a cluttered house, which must be organized for an estate and property sale, and the eldest of them, Toni, played by Paulson as tightly as a twanging bowstring, has fired the company that was meant to help.
Denne historien er fra January 01 - 08, 2023 (Double Issue)-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra January 01 - 08, 2023 (Double Issue)-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.