Shannon Cochran in “The Little Foxes”; Jess Andrews, Hunter Spangler, Cochran, Tessa Auberjonois, Jamison Jones, and Lea Coco in “Appropriate,” each at South Coast Repertory. (Photos by Jenny Graham/SCR)
Two households, each alike in venality: That might be the tagline for South Coast Repertory’s present “Voices of America” program, during which Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes trades off with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate in rotating repertory. In two-show days and alternating evenings via Feb. 26, on the identical fundamental set designed by Lawrence Moten, and with six of the identical actors, Southern California audiences could have the possibility not solely to dig into two scintillating performs about households in battle; they may even get the distinctive probability to ponder the thematic resonances and rhymes between Hellman’s meaty 1939 drama of Southern plantation succession and Jacobs-Jenkins’s riotous, unsettling 2014 examine of an estranged Arkansas household with a closetful of darkish secrets and techniques.
“When I proposed it, everyone’s eyes kind of popped out,” mentioned David Ivers, South Coast’s creative director. Both performs had been on the studying checklist of the staff-wide “book club” Ivers has been operating since he took the reins of the theatre in 2018, and the concept of pairing them arose in a convergence of realizations: that SCR had by no means produced a piece by Hellman (“I was shocked, but that’s not an indictment—there are a lot of plays!”), and that Jacobs-Jenkins is underneath fee from the theatre, and he had been in search of a option to introduce the author to his viewers earlier than merely springing a brand new play on them.
“So I’m thinking, okay, one of them is set in Arkansas and one is set in Alabama,” Ivers recalled, “but they’re both on a plantation house in the South, they both center family, they center whiteness, one’s written by a luminary American woman and one by arguably one of the most talented current playwrights in the country.”
Still, doing each directly could be a stretch and a raffle. For one factor, although Orange County’s new-play powerhouse actually has “repertory” in its title, that is the primary time the 59-year-old theatre has completed true rotating repertory. For one other, even theatres that do that frequently—principally classics-oriented corporations like American Shakespeare Center, A Noise Within, or the Shakespeare festivals in Utah and Oregon, the place Ivers labored beforehand—don’t are inclined to program exhibits so, nicely, programmatically, in clear thematic tandem with one another. Sure, some Shakespeare theatres will do the Henriad (although typically over a span of seasons, not ), and I can consider two different fascinating examples, coincidentally each in Baltimore: Center Stage’s “The Raisin Cycle” in 2012, which paired two Hansberry-inspired performs, Kwame Kwei Armah’s Beneatha’s Place and Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, and Everyman’s “Great American Rep” in 2016, which put two postwar classics, Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire, into the rep blender.
It could be a departure and a heavy carry for South Coast, absolutely. But, Ivers mentioned, the extra the concept developed, the extra he and his group discovered it “undeniably compelling.” Conceded Ivers, “I wiped out a lot of other programming—which is not necessarily a virtue, it just means that it’s important to me—in order for us to make this one happen.”
While the design group and about half the actors are shared between the 2 performs, it was clear to Ivers that they’d every profit from having a separate director. So he introduced in Delicia Turner Sonnenberg to helm Appropriate and Lisa Peterson to deal with The Little Foxes, and the 2 administrators have been sharing concepts and notes with one another about their respective productions, in a course of Peterson calls “the grooviest” and about which Turner Sonnenberg raves merely, “I fucking love Lisa.”
Both mentioned that whereas they’re working to craft stand-alone stagings that may be seen individually, they’re additionally inevitably shaping their work with a watch to the comparisons and contrasts between the 2 performs and their views. For her half, Peterson, who’s seen productions of Foxes she admired by Ivo van Hove and Daniel Sullivan, didn’t really feel a burning have to put her personal stamp on the play till the repertory provide arose.
“I only wanted to do it because it was going to be alongside Branden’s play,” she mentioned. “The idea was that this is a lens through which we could look at certain notions about capitalism, and the way that the country is built on the slave economy.”
Meanwhile, Turner Sonnenberg seen a line that Addie, the Black maid in The Little Foxes, has close to the tip, which the director feels hyperlinks the 2 performs: “There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it…And other people who stand around and watch them eat.”
The eaters in Foxes are the Hubbards, a newly rich Southern household—arguably subtly coded as Jewish, as Hellman partly was—one among whom, Regina, has married right into a fading however nonetheless flush plantation household, the Giddenses, and all of whom are scheming for cash to fund a brand new cotton mill. In Appropriate, the Lafayettes descend on their late patriarch’s dwelling to divvy up the inheritance, solely to find money owed as a substitute—to not point out troubling proof that Dad was a hardcore anti-Black racist who collected lynching photographs and will even have been a Klansman. In each performs, machinations and revelations churn up battle over property, propriety, and privilege, as these two very completely different white households are confronted with their pasts in a violently unequal nation and financial system, and in flip wrestle to map out their subsequent steps. At the guts of each is an easy however freighted thought: what we take with us from one era to the following.
“I describe it to the cast as a family coming home after the death of the patriarch to deal with their inheritance,” mentioned Turner Sonnenberg. “A part of that inheritance is, yes, the house, but also the racism and the relics of it.”
In this distinctive repertory experiment, although, there’s one other site visitors or transference happening—not simply among the many dad and mom and youngsters inside these performs, however between these two performs and their characters.
“I went into this somehow hoping that we would be looking for difference as much as possible—that for the actors the part in this play is wildly different from the part in that play, so that they have this range, so they don’t feel like they’re in the same trap,” mentioned Peterson. “But as things are going on, I see: Oh, wow, there’s gonna be more and more similarities, not less. That’s gonna signify.”
Turner Sonnenberg likewise mentioned she was “interested in how different the characters are in both plays. But I’ve been wondering if the work on Little Foxes is coloring the work in Appropriate. I was wondering in rehearsal the other day: Why is this getting so emotional in this moment that’s not really emotional?”
Shannon Cochran, who performs the lead in each performs—Toni Lafayette, the barely-holding-it-together oldest daughter in Appropriate, and Regina Giddens, the coolly Machiavellian widow-in-waiting of Foxes—has an inkling of what’s happening.
“I thought I would call characters by the wrong name, I thought I would get mixed up in my feelings, but none of that happened,” mentioned Cochran, for whom repertory appearing is a primary however whose résumé is in any other case lengthy; she beforehand appeared at SCR in A Doll’s House Part 2 and performed Regina in a 2015 Goodman Theatre manufacturing of Foxes (for myself, I without end cherish her flip in Bug again in 2004). “I don’t know what kind of bifurcation my mind has been able to do, but there’s something exciting about getting through the day or the evening with one show—you get to let it percolate for a day, then switch gears and go to the other show.”
In that percolation, although, one thing is brewing.
“There’s some work that happens that you’re not aware of,” she mentioned. “You could get all woo woo about it and say the characters are speaking to each other. I don’t know if that’s really true. But definitely something is rumbling or simmering on that burner while you’re doing the other piece.”
One title for that simmering one thing: a racial reckoning. Make no mistake; in neither play do the characters rudely awaken to their white privilege—certainly, if something, by the tip of their respective dramas, each the Hubbards and Lafayettes might the truth is have doubled down on denial. Light bulbs ought to go off for audiences, although.
“There was a lot of deep and encouraging and hard conversation about what it means to put this many white people onstage right now,” mentioned Ivers. The expectation is that in these “incredible fireworks theatrical experience from these really amazing playwrights,” South Coast’s predominantly white viewers will “see themselves.”
Turner Sonnenberg put it extra bluntly: “Racism is something that’s going to be solved by white people, necessarily. But when we think about it or how to solve it, we always turn to people of color. Really, it’s time for white people to start having these conversations with each other and themselves. I really hope this project is a way to at least start some of those conversations.”
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is the editor-in-chief of American Theatre. rwkendt@tcg.org
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