Stage/Theatre

What: Appropriate
Where: Coal Mine Theatre, 2076 Danforth Ave.
When: Now, until Sat., Oct. 21
Highlight: An eight-person cast is a rare treat these days, so half the show’s fun comes from watching the characters interact in different configurations.
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Director Ted Dykstra embraces the play’s indirectness: the production’s themes creep up gradually before erupting with cataclysmic force.

COAL MINE THEATRE’S new production of Appropriate, by American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, begins with multiple minutes of darkness, during which sound designers Deanna Choi and Michael Wanless conjure a tactile nighttime soundscape dominated by cicadas. This drawn-out aural cocoon demands the audience members turn their minds away from the overwhelming digital drone of contemporary metropolitan life and give themselves over to the coming art.

The rest of the production, directed by Ted Dykstra and associate director Matthew G. Brown, is similarly patient. Jacobs-Jenkins’s play is long — nearly three hours, with two intermissions — and slow to reveal itself. Dykstra embraces this indirectness: the production’s themes creep up gradually before erupting with cataclysmic force.

Appropriate concerns Frank (Andy Trithardt), Bo (Gray Powell) and Toni (Raquel Duffy) — tightly-wound, middle-aged siblings preparing their late father’s Arkansas plantation house for auction. This is no three-person play, though: each brings along their family, making the house count total eight. The significant amount of money on the table doesn’t help the siblings get along, and neither does a terrifying object found among their father’s things: a grimy photo album filled with images of lynchings.

Despite its genre-mandated dose of yelling and hair-pulling, the play is surprisingly sensitive. While the sun’s out, the auction clutter piling up by the living room couch prods everyone to agitation; but under moonlight, the house quiets down and ghosts haunt the air.

The production’s design finds beauty in this alternation of day and night. During the day, the dilapidation of Steve Lucas and Rebecca Morris’s detailed set overwhelms. Lucas, also the lighting designer, blasts the walls with warm tones, revealing their stained pallor. At night, however, he makes use of on-stage light sources — candles, lamps, a window — to offer a shadowy respite from the mess.

An eight-person cast is a rare treat these days, so half the show’s fun comes from watching the characters interact in different configurations. If I had to choose a  pivotal character, it would be Toni, whom Duffy fleshes out through ferociously biting text work contrasted with tender silences. Yet the other two siblings — Powell’s heartbreakingly tense Bo and Trithardt’s wayward Frank — aren’t far behind. And many great scenes don’t include the trio at all — Alison Beckwith, in particular, is hugely enjoyable to watch throughout.

Dykstra has again proven himself a perfect director for plays that end with just a hint of surrealism. His realism is so alive that when a ghost appears or the apocalypse suddenly begins, it feels not only earned but an entirely natural conclusion to what came before. The ending of Appropriate, a magic trick of sorts, shimmers with a poignant inevitability despite its surprisingness.

I have questions about Jacobs-Jenkins’s play — though it does ultimately implicate the audience in its societal critique, I feel it could do so more aggressively — but not about this production: it’s excellent. Multiple times during the show, I was reminded of Maggie Nelson’s (and others’) notion that artists should “leave the centre empty for God.” Dykstra does — and the resulting production is appropriately spiritual.