‘Appropriate’ Is a Play Packed Full of Secrets — and Its Set Is the Most Jaw-Dropping One

A two-page-long stage direction from playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins helped set up design team, dots, to create the biggest scenic surprise of the season.

The cast of Appropriate at the Belasco Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus.

In a play where Sarah Paulson and Corey Stoll bare their souls, it takes a special kind of artistry to leave the audience talking about the set design on their way out. (Ok, maybe it wasn’t the whole audience, but it was definitely a particular group of theater nerds, myself included.)

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s powerhouse play Appropriate sees a fractured family return to its deceased patriarch’s rundown Arkansas plantation home to put his affairs in order only to discover deeply disturbing secrets about their family legacy. The home is brought to life in expansive two-story glory on a stage replete with a solid-wood staircase, ornate trim, stained glass, and a mural of lush southern greenery positioned above the front door. And in the play’s final moments, the set gets a particularly unique chance to shine.

Act Three, Scene Three contains no dialogue. The ensemble has left the stage, and the family drama we’ve witnessed over the past two-plus hours has been tensely tied up with a bow. But there’s still one character with some work to do: The old Arkansas plantation house has, up to now, served as merely a backdrop — albeit an impressive one. It now comes to life, undergoing decades of dilapidation and decay in a matter of minutes.

When faced with Jacobs-Jenkins’s instructions for this epilogue, scenic team dots, composed of designers Andrew Moerdyk, Kimie Nishikawa, and Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, was raring to go. It was nothing short of a set designer’s playground. “The way Branden writes that moment, it’s very evocative, beautiful writing,” said Moerdyk. “You get inspired by the text. Just by reading it, we were like, ‘Oh, Branden is really giving us the bits,’” added Orjuela-Laverde.

But they had to admit they were also a bit intimidated. “It was a lot of pressure. It was stressful,” said Nishikawa. Not only did they have to design a hyper-realistic southern plantation home, but they had to make it destroy itself night after night — and not give away its secrets before it was time. “It was really important that the house feel like an actual place that exists,” said Moerdyk.

The first step to getting it right was situating the house in its historical architecture. “Branden gave us a bunch of really critical and useful dramaturgical tidbits about southern plantation homes that he had folded into the text,” said Moerdyk. Even the first entrance is rooted in the home’s practical architecture. Characters hoist themselves into the living room through the window — a window that’s clearly elevated. Jacobs-Jenkins shared that the first floors of many plantation homes were raised up to prevent flooding. And that’s just one example of the thoughtfulness behind the design.

In order to make the characters’ exits and entrances more believable, dots designed the floorplan of the entire house — even the rooms we never see. Developing a full ground plan allows the actors to understand why they might be using a specific exit to get from one place to the next and it helps them feel grounded in their character’s choices. “We really wanted to give them the sense of what the rest of the house was so they didn't have to do that creative work on top of the work that they already had to do, which is really extreme,” says Moerdyk.

It also helps the audience feel grounded in the reality of the space. “Even if we don't see it, unless it's planned really naturalistically, we won't believe it,” said Nishikawa. And making it believable isn’t always easy, especially when the script places certain entrances in specific locations. “It’s a mind-boggling challenge of the play,” said Moerdyk. “The way it's written is a little bit in opposition to the way that plantation homes generally work.” So they became architects, designing the whole house from top to bottom to make sure the flow of rooms made logical sense. “Even though we're looking at a portion of something, it has to feel like a portion of a real thing, and not just like solutions to theatrical problems,” said Moerdyk. “[Otherwise,] you start getting into fakey fake scenery world, which we really wanted to avoid.”

With the ground plan solved and the design finalized, it came time to build the thing — solid as a rock; no shortcuts. You won’t find any of the usual giveaways that often betray a set’s temporary nature: No wobbly walls after an overzealous actor slams a door a bit too hard, no hollow footsteps on the staircase, and absolutely no doors to nowhere. Everything was created with the utmost intention. “We wanted everything to be built out of wood in the way that it would've been built [in a real home], so we had to do a little crash course in understanding how to build things out of wood that didn't feel like shaky scenery,” said Moerdyk. “Staircases don't shake.”

When the kids in the play run up and down the stairs like kids do, a familiar thud accompanies each footfall. And when a drunk Toni, played by Sarah Paulson, can’t situate her key in the front door lock, the scraping you hear against the metal plate is genuine, as is the sound the door makes opening and closing. “The sound of the front door was a thing that we worked on a lot to make it sound like a real door,” said Moerdyk. “We add weight to it, take weight away from it, add padding, take padding away. It's just a lot of trial and error until it feels right.” Once they were

Then, news of the transfer broke. The show was to move from the 597-seat Hayes Theater to the 1,016-seat Belasco Theatre. But the notion of breaking down and moving an entire two-story, solid-wood set didn’t really stress dots all that much. They’d experienced a similar process when they moved The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window from BAM to Broadway — and rumor has it, they may have to do it again for Oh, Mary!

Luckily, the stage widths of the Hayes and the Belasco were surprisingly similar, so they simply picked up the set and moved it. “We reused everything,” said Moerdyk, though one important piece didn’t survive the move — the fresco above the front door. And in another moment of good fortune, the scenic painters had a perfect reference point for recreating the mural. It was originally inspired by the ones in the Belasco.

When developing the set for Appropriate, dots happened to tour the Belasco for an unrelated project that never came to fruition. In looking around the theater, Moerdyk was inspired by the murals in the space. Now that kismet has brought Appropriate there, Nishikawa relishes that link. “That idea really connects the set with the theater in such a beautiful, but subtle way,” she said. Count it among the many rich secrets the set holds.

Appropriate runs through June 23 at the Belasco Theatre.