Dear Friends,

Welcome to our production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ blisteringly funny and jaw-dropping conversation starter, Appropriate. Only now making his Seattle Rep debut, Jacobs-Jenkins stands among the most consequential playwrights working today. He is a writer known for theatrical daring, formal invention, and an unmistakable appetite for provocation and surprise.

^{Sophie Kelly-Hedrick and Ellie Getman in Appropriate (2026) at Seattle Rep. Photo by Bronwyn Houck.} 

With its 2013 production at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., Appropriate became Jacobs-Jenkins’ first work to appear on a regional stage. (Fun fact: Woolly Mammoth was the former artistic home of Seattle Rep Managing Director Jeffrey Herrmann, who produced Appropriate before making his move to the Pacific Northwest in 2014.) The play went on to an expansive run at adventurous theaters across the country, and in 2024, Appropriate made it to Broadway, earning the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. Jacobs-Jenkins returned to Broadway the very next season with Purpose, winner of both the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Together, these back-to-back Broadway runs cemented Jacobs-Jenkins as a playwright working at the height of his craft.

^{The cast of Appropriate (2026) on stage at Seattle Rep. Photo by Bronwyn Houck.}

A decade before his Broadway run in 2024, Jacobs-Jenkins caught attention and created controversy Off-Broadway with An Octoroon, a wildly imaginative, uncomfortably funny riff on Dion Boucicault’s 19th-century melodrama that deploys an incendiary use of blackface to skewer the historical conventions of American theater. He won the Obie Award for Best American Play while artfully confronting audiences with the mechanics of representation. In 2015’s Gloria, he pivoted to a razor-edged workplace comedy that fractures into an unsettling meditation on media spectacle through its utterly shocking office-shooter framework. This pair of wildly different theatrical tours de force played a role in his receiving the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Award in 2016. With 2017’s Everybody, inspired by the medieval morality play Everyman, he created a theatrical ritual in which roles are reassigned by lottery each performance, foregrounding mortality, chance, and the ephemeral nature of performance. Across these works, Jacobs-Jenkins built a body of writing that is visceral, intellectually electric, and entertaining.

^{Angela DiMarco and Jen Taylor in Appropriate (2026) at Seattle Rep. Photo by Bronwyn Houck.} 

Jacobs-Jenkins launched his meteoric rise by applying his singular voice toward one of theater’s most enduring forms: the combustible American family drama. Echoes of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County reverberate through the play. Inheritance, sibling rivalry, and buried grievances ignite theatrical fireworks. Yet Appropriate does more than inhabit this lineage, it interrogates it. Set within a decaying Arkansas plantation home, the Lafayette family’s reunion unfolds as a familiar contest of power and memory, while Jacobs-Jenkins exposes the historical foundation beneath these dynamics. The genre is reframed with its characters’ legacy of racism and slavery shadowing the family estate. He wickedly blends comedy with a lurking tension to create a riveting examination of how the legacy of racism can persist. I hope you’ll keep the play’s secrets while telling your friends to experience it for themselves.

As we celebrate the finale of our 2025/26 Season (not counting the June return of The Play That Goes Wrong), we are already at work on 2026/27! I hope you’ll make plans to join us for another dynamic season at Seattle Rep. Check out our website for our new lineup, which offers everything from a soul-stirring musical to the organized chaos of another show that “Goes Wrong,” from both epic and intimate costume dramas to contemporary comedies. We’re building this season to delight you with the full range of shared experiences only theater can offer.

We look forward to welcoming you back soon!

Until next time,

Dámaso Rodríguez
Artistic Director

See Appropriate at Seattle Rep through May 10, 2026. 

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