Lexington’s first resident professional theatre company, New Views Theatre, is currently rehearsing Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’play, “Appropriate.”
The play will be presented over two weekends, April 25-26 and May 1-3, in the black-box Johnson Theatre on the first floor of the Lenfest Center atWashington and Lee University.
In the play, every member of the Lafayette clan has descended upon the crumbling homestead to settle the accounts of the newly dead patriarch. But after a disturbing discovery surfaces among their father’s possessions, the reunion takes a turn for the explosive.
New Views Theatre’s artistic director, William R. Duell, described the play as “powerful, very funny and very dark at the same time.”
Duell said that one aspect of the theater’s mission is to bring off-off-Broadway to Lexington; another is to showcase area talent.
“Stephanie Sandberg, who teaches at W&L, is directing, and we have designers and actors from W&L as well as from SVU and JMU,’ he said. “They’re all integral to making this as good as the best OOB productions in NewYork.”
Performances will be Saturday, April 25, 7:30 p.m., Sunday, April 26, 3 p.m., Friday, May 1, 7:30 p.m., Saturday, May 2, 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, May 3, 3 p.m.
There will be a short panel discussion after the Sunday,April 26, matinee, hosted by Sandberg and featuring Grace Elizabeth Hale, an award-winning University of Virginia historian who focuses on the regional history of the South, as well as Lexington’s own Doug Harwood, an award-winning journalist who has written about the local area’s history.
Tickets are available at https://www.newviewstheatre.org/ tickets.
