How Appropriate Director Lila Neugebauer and Dots Created the Epilogue 'Dream Ballet'

In a conversation with Broadway.com last year, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins described what he’s going for in his uniquely lyrical stage directions: “I felt like the idea is to be inspirational,” he said. “The language you use has to activate the actor’s imagination.”

The opening stage direction of Appropriate, his play about the secrets unearthed during a fraught family reunion, is both simple and strange: “Light abandons us and a darkness replaces it.”

The closing stage direction—taking up the entirety of Act Two, Scene Three—is something else entirely. In a succession of rapid-fire scenes, punctuated by sudden disorienting blackouts, the future shudderingly unfolds, and the former Arkansas plantation house where the play is set has somehow become its protagonist.

As Jacobs-Jenkins writes, “[I]t is some day—any day—tomorrow thirteen years from now—twenty-six years from now. It is the future. It is the present. It is any present. It is the past—any past—now. Time moving faster, pieces of the abandoned place starting to disappear—chunks of wood, the flooring, banister beams cobwebs emerging and emerging.”

The director Lila Neugebauer and the design collective dots (comprising Kimie Nishikawa, Santiago Orjuela-Laverde and Andrew Moerdyk) worked hard to do justice to Jacobs-Jenkin's vision on Broadway. The result is the most jaw-dropping and soul-stirring coup de théâtre on stage this season. 

For The Broadway Show, Neugebauer and Nishikawa of dots spoke with Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens about Appropriate’s climactic “dream ballet” and more.

Watch the video for the full interview.