DIVIDED HOUSE

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's "Appropriate" comes to Broadway.

- HELEN SHAW

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.