At just 39, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins already has a bouquet of artistic decorations. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, an Obie winner, and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. He has been to the Tony Awards, however, only once—as a nominator.
Next Sunday, Jacobs-Jenkins will finally attend as a nominee: His 2013 play Appropriate is up for eight Tonys, including (somewhat controversially) best revival. After opening at the Hayes Theatre last December, the show, directed by Lila Neugebauer, moved into a bigger house, the Belasco, in March—almost exactly a decade after Appropriate made its New York City debut down the road, at the Pershing Square Signature Center, in an 191-seat theater.
On Broadway, its original ensemble cast featured Elle Fanning, Corey Stoll, and, at the center of it all, a ferocious Sarah Paulson as one of three siblings unpacking their deceased father’s literal and spiritual baggage. Given the rave reviews that followed—including a deeply personal one from New York Times critic Jesse Green, who had panned an earlier version of the play—it was surprising to nobody, except perhaps Jacobs-Jenkins, that Appropriate’s run kept being extended. (The show will play its final performance on June 30.)
Vogue caught up with BJJ, as he’s universally known, in the weeks leading up to the 2024 Tony Awards to revisit the brilliant, horrifying, undeniably entertaining dynamics of Appropriate. [Fair warning: spoilers to come.]
Vogue: BJJ, is that a fake Zoom background, or is that literally where you are?
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: This is my studio at the Park Avenue Armory. Don’t tell them I’m here or they might kick me out.
Do you know that this is a follow-up to a conversation we had in 2014? I interviewed you for Vogue.com way back when, but I don’t think I did a very good job.
Well, I don’t think I did a very good job answering the questions, so this is our second chance.
OK, first question. [Third question.] What did the 7,800-word New Yorker profile get wrong? Did they miss anything?
Oh, shit. To be honest, I literally cannot read press on myself. I sped-read it to make sure nothing super embarrassing was happening, and then literally put it away. Can we circle back on that?
Alright. I want to ask you about the Broadway of it all. Your accolades are many, but this is your first play on the Great White Way. How does it feel to be recognized by the American Theater Wing with all these nominations?
The irony is that I’m on Broadway for the first time with a play that I wrote when I was 25, and it’s being categorized as a revival. So I’m debuting on Broadway with a revival, which I think is kind of…
Chic. That’s chic.
It feels like a surprise gift. I’ve never had a play run this long. I’ve never had a play reach this broad of an audience. The thing about Broadway is that you don’t control who shows up. It’s not a niche market. Anyone who cares about Sarah Paulson or Elle Fanning is coming to the play. People who like plays are coming to the play. People who happen to be staying in a hotel nearby are coming to the play. [On Broadway,] you really get the most radical version of an audience you can, and to feel those audiences respond as they are is encouraging and humbling. I never saw this coming.
Do you think of Broadway—and therefore Appropriate on Broadway—as pop culture? And like much of pop culture, is it a Trojan Horse for ideas that are bigger or scarier than people would otherwise choose to pay attention to?
Wow. I love pop culture, but I don’t know if theater ever gets considered pop culture. There are so many hurdles to access it, whereas the barrier to entry is quite low for pop culture. It’s entertainment, it’s comfort. At its best, it’s engaging the imagination, but always in an affirming way. High art is cast as a space in which you’re meant to be challenged. You’re on the edge of something. And I think that my brain is received in that space more easily.
What’s interesting, though, is that Sarah Paulson, ultimately, is pop culture. Sarah at her heart and in her origins is a theater artist—an actual artist, who is interested in pushing envelopes and upending expectations about what people can and cannot do. So I think, in some ways, she was the perfect person for this play.
So, maybe Sarah Paulson is the Trojan Horse?
In some ways, yes. The whole run is a Trojan Horse. Nobody expected us to run longer than 12 weeks. We had one of the weirdest slots you could play in, and we’re still running. Which means that it has some kind of popular appeal that’s shocking everyone, certainly me.
So you admit it—it’s pop culture!
I think about it in terms of comfort and discomfort. I have a point of view that the theater is a place where you can feel all kinds of feelings and still feel safe. That bandwidth of feeling is not something you see in popular culture because the stakes, the capital that flows through it, are so much higher. Pop culture is conservative.
In the final moments of Appropriate, the static plantation house set is radically, bombastically ruined by years of neglect, vandalism, and sheer natural force in the span of a few minutes. A tree grows in the middle of the stage, from sprouting to towering, before the audience’s eyes. Tell me about the first time you saw the stage transform at the Helen Hayes Theater.
Everyone likes to talk about that tree moment, because people can’t afford trees off-Broadway! We don’t even have the fly-space. So it was something that was only fully realized now, for the first time. And very moving to me.
The world is a really different place in 2024 than 2014. Do you think your audiences are much more aware of their own racial biases and those of their family, for instance?
The audiences are more sophisticated. Everyone’s had that family altercation where you’re like, “Uh-oh, are we going down this road?” Culturally we have more language attached to concepts like white fragility that we just didn’t have 10 years ago.
How has that changed the way audiences react?
Ten years ago I remember encountering a lot of resistance and suspicion. It was Obama’s second term and a lot of the critics felt [the play] was overheated, like I was picking a fight. There was, like, a weird forcefield around it in 2014, and now people are much more open to the game of the play. People are more willing to engage.
That says a lot.
It’s profound. It feels like the play gets to be its full self without engaging someone’s defense systems. People are bringing their families and telling their parents to go see it.
What are some of the changes that you made to update the play to 2024?
Well, everyone thinks I rewrote this whole play and I really haven’t. Actually, that’s what the New Yorker got wrong!
One thing a friend said to me is that there are no villains and no heroes in Appropriate. At some point each character speaks the truth, but they all say or do things that we can’t get behind. Do you agree?
That’s the essence of every great play I love.There is a non-judgmental fullness of person being presented on stage, which I think is compelling. At the end of the day, we all know deep down there are villainous parts of ourselves as well as heroic parts of ourselves, and I honestly think the American character is both those things. It’s hard to wrap our head around the worser parts of our history—the worser parts of our present—and yet we think of ourselves as a land of the free and a home of the brave.
I don’t come to the theater to see a hero and a villain. I’d rather see that in a Fast and the Furious movie—that’s why there are 18 of them. If I’m sharing space with strangers, I want to be brought closer to something that feels like the truth.
There are moments in Appropriate that shock people—one in particular. Do you like making people squirm?
I definitely don’t like making people squirm. At the moment you’re speaking of [when a child runs onstage wearing a disturbing piece of costuming] the audience makes a different sound every night. Sometimes they howl, sometimes you hear people screaming, sometimes you hear people laughing or clapping. Some people are having an out-of-body experience. My intention at the end of the day is to make people feel something. So, I guess we did it. I don’t want people to feel unsafe, but I do want people to feel free.
It says a lot about someone to know what they most admire. What’s the one play that you most wish you had written?
Very obvious one for me: Angels in America. I don’t know how [Tony Kushner] sustained that work, how he had so much invention in him. The journey of that play, both parts, is so wild. How does one human mind contain all that? But Tony’s did! It’s an iconic piece of imagination.
Hard pivot. BJJ, what are you wearing to the Tony’s?
Mark, I have no idea.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
