‘Appropriate’ Broadway Review: Sarah Paulson and Elle Fanning Fuel a Spectacular Family Smash-Up

The rotten apples don’t fall very far from the dead tree in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s great family comedy “Appropriate.” First seen in 2014, the play receives its belated but totally riveting first Broadway production, which opened Monday at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater.

The three adult siblings at the core of this family dispute are amusingly nasty, backbiting, vile and loathsome toward each other. As families go onstage, the only ones approaching this brood in terms of miserableness would be the bickering bunch in Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County” and Eugene O’Neill’s “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

The genius of Jacobs-Jenkins, as well as that of Letts and O’Neill, is that he keeps these three characters not only human but very relatable, especially if you happen to be of European descent and your family arrived to America a century or two or three ago.