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In a black-and-white portrait of four people, two of them, a man and a woman, are sitting next to each other. Behind them, the other two people are standing.
Clockwise from bottom left, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the director Lila Neugebauer, and the actors Corey Stoll and Sarah Paulson.Credit...Erik Tanner for The New York Times
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Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Revisits His ‘Illusion of Suffering’ on Broadway

The “Appropriate” playwright has teamed up with the actors Sarah Paulson and Corey Stoll and the director Lila Neugebauer for the play’s Broadway debut. “Everybody onstage is a political statement,” he says.

By Eric Grode

As with so many family reunion plays, the squabbling Lafayette siblings in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate” dislodge their share of skeletons from the closets of their childhood home, a former plantation in southern Arkansas. But here those secrets, hovering over everything and everyone, may be actual skeletons, and worse. The increasingly unsettling revelations power what The New York Times’s Ben Brantley called a “very fine, subversively original new play” at its Off Broadway premiere in 2014 at the Signature Theater.

So subversive and so original that it took almost a decade to reach Broadway. Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient whose works include bold reimaginings of “The Octoroon” and the 15th-century play “Everyman,” got there a bit earlier when he contributed original material to a 2022 revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Second Stage’s production of “Appropriate,” which is in previews at the Helen Hayes Theater and opens on Dec. 18, is his first original work on Broadway after nearly a half-dozen New York productions.

As it happens, two of the three actors playing the siblings had their own shared history. Sarah Paulson (“American Horror Story”) and Corey Stoll (“Billions”) were a year apart at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York, but they didn’t work together until Stoll briefly joined the cast of the Paulson-led TV series “Ratched” in 2020. (She fantasized about sawing his leg off during sex, he squashed a leech with his bare hand, and she tried to boil him alive in a hydrotherapy tub — all in the span of two episodes.)

The two actors joined Jacobs-Jenkins and the director, Lila Neugebauer (“The Waverly Gallery,” Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Everybody”), backstage at the Helen Hayes last month to discuss catharsis, sibling rivalry and the tyranny of stage directions. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.

ImageIn a scene from the production, two men are sitting on a sofa, a woman is standing and talking with her hands raised and another woman is sitting with outstretched arms.
Michael Esper, Stoll, Natalie Gold and Paulson in the Broadway production at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Lila didn’t direct “Appropriate” Off Broadway, but the two of you have been in each other’s orbit for a while.

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