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    Review: Sarah Paulson Makes a Horrible Discovery in “Appropriate”

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    Making a blistering Broadway debut, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2014 play about the legacies of hatred feels like a new work entirely.Think of the worst person you know: the kind who blabs people’s secrets, mocks their diction, dismisses their pain while making festivals of her own. Throw in a tendency toward casual antisemitic slurs, for which she thinks she has a free pass, and a “What’s the big deal?” approach to racism.Now add a deep wound and a wicked tongue and you’re almost partway to Antoinette Lafayette, the monster played by Sarah Paulson in the blistering revival of “Appropriate” that opened on Broadway on Monday. Recalling yet somehow outstripping the thrilling vileness of theatrical viragos like Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Violet in “August: Osage County,” she is the burned-out core of a nuclear family reactor, taking no prisoners and taking no blame.But even in Paulson’s eye-opening, sinus-clearing performance, Toni, as she’s called, doesn’t sum up the outrageousness of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play, which has a deep wound and wicked tongue of its own. To get all the way to its sweet spot — and Lila Neugebauer’s production for Second Stage definitely gets there — you must further multiply Toni by her brothers, each awful in his own way.Bo (Corey Stoll) is passive and entitled, content to let others fail as long as he can’t be faulted. Frank (Michael Esper) is a serial screw-up, the rare person for whom statutory rape is not the worst thing on his résumé. At the heart of their grievances is greed — Bo’s for money, Frank’s for forgiveness and Toni’s for revenge.So when the three, accompanied by their assorted spouses, children, enablers and ghosts, gather in the grand dramatic tradition to dispose of their late father’s estate, you know things are going to explode. Indeed, as the curtain rises at the Helen Hayes Theater, it appears they already have. The Arkansas plantation house in which generations of the family have lived, in eyeshot of the cemetery where generations of their slaves are buried, is now a hellhole in spirit and fact. The once grand building is collapsing under the weight of centuries of evil and, more recently, decades of hoarding.Michael Esper, left, and Elle Fanning as an engaged couple in Second Stage Theater’s production of the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe two seemingly incompatible stories — the evil and the hoarding, one national, one domestic — come together in a way I don’t want to spoil; it’s part of the brilliance of the play that it lands its biggest surprises with satisfying thumps at exactly the right moments. Suffice to say that when horrible relics of the past, both the country’s and the family’s, are discovered in the clutter, they force the Lafayettes to re-examine the legacy of their father, supposedly once in line to be a Supreme Court justice but also, depending on whom you ask, a saint or a psychopath.To Toni he was “a thinker! A loving person!” Frank says he was bipolar and abusive. Bo is too avoidant to offer a strong opinion, but his wife, Rachael (Natalie Gold), makes up for that. To her there is no question the old man was an antisemite (she once overheard him refer to her as Bo’s “Jew wife”) and a racist. Even so, she has insisted on bringing the couple’s children — a petulant 13-year-old girl (Alyssa Emily Marvin) and a hyperactive 8-year-old boy (Lincoln Cohen, on the night I saw it, and, alternating in the role, Everett Sobers) — to experience their “roots” as part of “a little American history Southern tour-type thing.”It’s the kind of laugh line — there are also guffaws, cackles and strange gasp-giggle combos — that works because we think we know more than she does. But it’s also a stinger because, the play suggests, we may not. In “Appropriate,” the “little American history Southern tour-type thing” is meant for the audience, too.That history is of course full of horrors, not the golden past portrayed in works about the gracious days of juleps and spirituals. But neither is it, for Jacobs-Jenkins, as neatly political and singularly damning as when filtered through a progressive lens. Questioning whether racism and antisemitism are really the core sins of this particular family, “Appropriate” posits that the problem may instead be that they’re just personally hideous. And if that’s true, could it also be true that the various institutions of subjugation so rampant throughout human society are nothing more (or less) than convenient formats for the expression of hate hard-wired in our hearts?Cherry-picking some of the worst examples imaginable — the play also features Elle Fanning as Frank’s sententious, sage-smudging fiancée and Graham Campbell as Toni’s drug-dealing son — Jacobs-Jenkins makes a convincing if despairing case. That he does so largely through comedy and melodrama (with an astonishing coda of surrealism) makes “Appropriate” easier to enjoy than to understand. The grammatically two-faced title doesn’t help, but easy understanding is not what the author appears to be after.The director Lila Neugebauer accentuates the conflicts and alliances among the characters, our critic writes. The cast includes, from left, Natalie Gold, Stoll, Paulson, Fanning, Graham Campbell and, above, Alyssa Emily Marvin.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI have to admit that when I first saw it, at the Signature Theater in 2014, neither understanding nor enjoyment were forthcoming. Rereading my scathing review in light of what is obviously a rave today, I am forced to grapple with my own past, and the play’s. It would be easy to say that the difference between then and now is the heavy rewriting Jacobs-Jenkins has done in the interim. And certainly, comparing the two scripts, I see the clearer dramatic architecture and sharper point-of-view that a playwright in his prime, at 38, can impose. (I thought Jacobs-Jenkins’s most recent play, “The Comeuppance,” was one of the best of 2023.)It would also be easy to attribute the improvement to Neugebauer’s direction, which is so smart and swift for most of the play’s substantial length that you feel gripped by storytelling without being strangled by argument. Her staging, on a towering double-decker set by the design collective dots, is also nearly ideal, accentuating (with the help of Jane Cox’s painterly lighting) the conflicts and alliances among the characters. And the daredevil cast, instead of reveling in falling apart, focuses for as long as possible on keeping it together. We thus experience, in the force of that repression, just how awful human awfulness must be if human will cannot ultimately corral it.Though all those improvements are real, they do not fully explain why I’ve flipped for this revival. Perhaps this does: Playwrights who show us things we are reluctant to see may have to teach us, over time, how to see it. And we must be willing to have our eyes opened. I guess I’ve changed at least that much in 10 years of reviewing, and Jacobs-Jenkins is part of the reason.AppropriateThrough March 3 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Revisits His ‘Illusion of Suffering’ on Broadway

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      As with so many family reunion plays, the squabbling Lafayette siblings in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate” dislodge their share of skeletons from the closets of their childhood home, a former plantation in southern Arkansas. But here those secrets, hovering over everything and everyone, may be actual skeletons, and worse. The increasingly unsettling revelations power what The New York Times’s Ben Brantley called a “very fine, subversively original new play” at its Off Broadway premiere in 2014 at the Signature Theater.So subversive and so original that it took almost a decade to reach Broadway. Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient whose works include bold reimaginings of “The Octoroon” and the 15th-century play “Everyman,” got there a bit earlier when he contributed original material to a 2022 revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Second Stage’s production of “Appropriate,” which is in previews at the Helen Hayes Theater and opens on Dec. 18, is his first original work on Broadway after nearly a half-dozen New York productions.As it happens, two of the three actors playing the siblings had their own shared history. Sarah Paulson (“American Horror Story”) and Corey Stoll (“Billions”) were a year apart at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York, but they didn’t work together until Stoll briefly joined the cast of the Paulson-led TV series “Ratched” in 2020. (She fantasized about sawing his leg off during sex, he squashed a leech with his bare hand, and she tried to boil him alive in a hydrotherapy tub — all in the span of two episodes.)The two actors joined Jacobs-Jenkins and the director, Lila Neugebauer (“The Waverly Gallery,” Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Everybody”), backstage at the Helen Hayes last month to discuss catharsis, sibling rivalry and the tyranny of stage directions. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Michael Esper, Stoll, Natalie Gold and Paulson in the Broadway production at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLila didn’t direct “Appropriate” Off Broadway, but the two of you have been in each other’s orbit for a while.BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS We actually met at the Humana Festival, where the show premiered in 2013.LILA NEUGEBAUER I was there with a different play.JACOBS-JENKINS Shortly after “Appropriate” happened at the Signature, Lila directed a production of it at Juilliard. I just knew instantly that she had grasped something about the undercurrents and the essential energies of the play.Sarah and Corey, when did you come on board?SARAH PAULSON I read the play in September of 2021. I hadn’t read anything as complicated and deep and funny in a very, very long time, and I said yes almost immediately.COREY STOLL Right in the depth of the pandemic, my agent sent me a stack of plays. It was like: “Since you’re not doing anything, I just want you to read all these plays.” And this one was so clearly the one to do.One character alludes to “the universality of suffering,” but there’s suffering and then there’s suffering. You’ve got these three siblings and all the bad things they’ve done, even criminal things …PAULSON It’s not me who’s done the criminal things. Write that down.STOLL Sarah is a real advocate for her character. You [to Paulson] cannot stand people talking ill of her.PAULSON It’s easy to do when a person isn’t thinking critically or deeply about who she is.My point is that these actions pale in comparison to the suffering inflicted on the play’s Black characters, whom we never meet. It feels almost like that line of dialogue is trying to level a playing field that ought not be leveled. Am I reading too much into the text?JACOBS-JENKINS When I wrote it, I was really interested in this writer named Dion Boucicault. He has this essay, “The Art of Dramatic Composition,” where he says the sole purpose of everything in the theater is to create an illusion of suffering that then creates something cathartic in the audience. I believe that everyone onstage is suffering. They all believe they are suffering. But how do we judge — how can we judge — someone else as suffering or not? I think that’s one of the games that the play is trying to get us to play.Have these ideas also evolved for you, Lila, now that you have directed “Appropriate” twice?NEUGEBAUER The first time, the play struck me on more theoretical terms. Now I feel more of an invitation to have complicated feelings about these characters. Every character has done something that someone in the audience or someone onstage might feel is questionable or strange or other. Every person walking the planet is the star of their own lives. Therefore, it feels like the thing that’s happening to them is the most significant thing that could ever be happening to anyone.“The play does a lot of that work in terms of how to create the sibling dynamic,” said Paulson, center, with Alyssa Emily Marvin, left, and Esper.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe presence of siblings can be a pretty quick reminder that there are other people in the world. Is it hard creating that rapport?PAULSON It doesn’t hurt that we know each other and have worked together, but I would argue that the play does a lot of that work in terms of how to create the sibling dynamic.STOLL There’s a momentum to the arguments between these two. At first, it just seems like these are two people who despise each other. Then you get to the second act where the whole play downshifts a bit, and we can find an intimacy. Even though that conflict is still very hot, and there is still a whole lifetime of resentment, that intimacy is there.PAULSON And I want to stress that we are missing Michael Esper, the third end of the triangle, who is wonderful.I remember Larissa FastHorse said “The Thanksgiving Play,” with its all-white Broadway cast, was a response to what she had been told about who was castable. Young Jean Lee has written great works, and “Straight White Men” was the one to reach Broadway. Now “Appropriate” has an all-white cast. Does this say anything about the American theater today?JACOBS-JENKINS There’s a phenomenon that’s been written about in academia called the “white life novel.” “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin is an example. Zora Neale Hurston has a book called “Seraph on the Suwanee.” It’s this thing where Black writers or Black-identified writers will write one thing that’s all white people. I think this is often an experiment in trying to get the viewer or even an industry to own its own blind spots.I’ve talked a lot about reading The Times’s review of “Stick Fly” by Lydia Diamond, which is an amazing family drama that was critiqued for not being enough about race and class in America and for being melodramatic. And then an equally wonderful play by Tracy Letts called “August: Osage County” was praised for being familiar by the same critic. There was no mention of the way that I think Tracy was actually engaging in very smart ways with whiteness and Indigenous presence. That double standard was very informative to me as a young writer who is constantly asked to do articles for The Times about Black drama.Honestly, everybody onstage is a political statement. Nobody’s a neutral body. And until you can talk about that, there’s nothing to pat ourselves on the back about as an art form in terms of how we do or don’t deal with these issues. I love Tennessee Williams. I love “The Piano Lesson” by August Wilson. No one calls “The Piano Lesson” a family drama. They call it about the Black experience in America. No one ever talks about “A Raisin in the Sun” as one of our best family dramas. I want to be able to love and own these things equally. And I feel like even this question is part of that continuum of things I have to address that no one else has to address when we make work in America.Can I ask about the stage directions in the script? They are ——JACOBS-JENKINS Chaos.They do sometimes go on for a page and a half. It reminded me of reading Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams.JACOBS-JENKINS When I started writing this, I was drunk on Williams and O’Neill. The reading experience is different than the experience of seeing the piece in a theatrical space. Your task as a playwright is to light up the things inside of people that lead them to the most electric choice. And that’s just as true for the reader. You’re trying to inspire the reader to bring more than just something schematic or familiar to the script.And when the script reaches the three of you, do you see those directions as marching orders?PAULSON It depends. Most of the plays I’ve done have been by people like Tennessee Williams or Lanford Wilson, people who were already dead. I’ll read a Williams stage direction and think, “Is that what Laurette Taylor did? Because I definitely want to do that if she did it.” For me, they can be incredibly evocative and other times they feel almost directorial.STOLL I tend to bristle against them in film and television because I think they’re often overprescribed, but here I’ve found them to be really helpful. Look, I’m happy with any help I can get.“At first, it just seems like these are two people who despise each other. Then you get to the second act where the whole play downshifts a bit, and we can find an intimacy,” Stoll said of the characters that he and Paulson portray. Erik Tanner for The New York TimesHow about you, Lila? If they can be overly directorial, where does that leave you?NEUGEBAUER This is a bit of a spoiler, but there’s a bunch of information in the script about what might happen at the end of the play. I feel that the writer is spell casting with that text. He is giving me and the designers this spectacular provocation to use our imaginations, to make that spell manifest. It’s within the power of our theatrical machinery to show pretty much anything, but everything that happens onstage also has emotional information. It’s not just a literal event.In other words, Branden, I don’t think they’re listening to you.JACOBS-JENKINS Actors love to say, “The first thing I do is cross out all the stage directions.” And I’m like, “If we’re in the erasure business, I just take my delete button and now you have nothing to say.”A lot has happened in the 10 years since “Appropriate” premiered. How has that affected either the play itself or the way you think it will be received?JACOBS-JENKINS We definitely didn’t transfer to Broadway 10 years ago. So that’s a sign that something has shifted, maybe? The play was originally set in 2011, and there was a big debate about whether to update it. I didn’t think I could, because these people would look like true idiots if they had not paid attention to what everyone else has paid attention to since then.NEUGEBAUER I do think there has been a semi-mainstreaming of a certain degree of race consciousness in America that would make the events in this play not quite make sense if it were set in 2023. My suspicion is that audiences will bring a somewhat more nuanced vocabulary to it now. They have a different tool kit. And that’s going to be very interesting. More

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      Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ Tells of World War II Rescues

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      A Netflix series dramatizes the efforts of Varian Fry, an American who helped save some 2,000 people from the Nazis without his government’s support.When Anna Winger, the co-creator of the new Netflix series “Transatlantic,” relocated to the vibrant French port city of Marseille last year, she found a dilapidated villa awaiting her. The “relic,” as she called it, was ideal for her purpose: the recreation of the Villa Air-Bel where, early in World War II, a dapper American named Varian Fry oversaw an extraordinary rescue operation for artists and writers, most of them Jews, hounded by the Nazis and the Vichy government of occupied France.Arriving in Marseille in mid-August, 1940, determined to help those in danger after witnessing the abuse of Jews in Berlin in 1935, Fry had to battle not only the French authorities and Nazi ideology, but also his own risk-averse United States Consulate in Marseille.Improvising at a time when the United States had not yet entered the war, Fry, a rebel in a suit, navigated a narrow path until his forced departure in late August 1941. He was determined to secure safe passage and overseas visas for the thousands of “foreign undesirables” who soon came knocking on his door.Among the some 2,000 people he rescued were the artist Max Ernst, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and the German novelist Heinrich Mann.In his book “Assignment: Rescue,” written after the war, Fry wrote of Nazism that “I could not remain idle as long as I had any chance at all of saving even a few of its intended victims.”For many years, Winger had been obsessed with the story of “this man alone doing something very brave,” she said in an interview. In 2018, she started working on the project, and in 2020, she optioned Julie Orringer’s novel “The Flight Portfolio,” which became the basis for the fictionalized events in the series.Winger, who created the shows “Unorthodox” and “Deutschland 83,” lives in Berlin, where “as a Jew you think of these stories all the time,” she said. Her parents, both anthropologists, were Harvard professors and “a lot of people in the generation above them were refugees from Europe.” For her, “the impact of the emigration made possible by Fry is immeasurable in its influence on midcentury American thought.”Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022; war broke out in Europe just a few days later. With millions of refugees eventually pouring out of Ukraine, the moral dilemmas of conflict that the series explores felt particularly pertinent. “For all of us, it was top of mind and seeped into our daily lives in Marseille,” Winger said. She would go home to a Berlin dealing with a vast influx of refugees.The show captures not only the life-or-death seriousness of Fry’s mission to save refugees of another war, but also something of the louche, living-on-the-edge drama of a city that has always been a crossroads, and in 1940, unlike the northern half of France, was not directly occupied by German troops.Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022, and war broke out in Europe not long after.Anika Molbar/NetflixThe Marseille that Fry and his motley team of driven young anti-Fascists encountered had something of the freewheeling intrigue captured in “Casablanca,” another story of people suspended by war in a foreign place, aching in limbo for love and visas. Inevitably, money and sex — the currency of clandestine escape — have their place in “Transatlantic.”“We try to be true to the history but also make fun by working with it in a heightened way,” Winger said. The degree of fictionalization in the series has already caused controversy; Sheila Isenberg, the author of a book on Fry, called the show a “travesty.”Much of this pushback has been focused on the decision to depict Fry having a gay relationship. In 2019, James D. Fry, his son, wrote a letter to The New York Times stating that “My father was indeed a closeted homosexual.” He was responding to a New York Times review by Cynthia Ozick of the Orringer novel that said of Fry, “there is no evidence of homosexuality,” contrary to the novel’s portrayal of him.“We consider the letter from his son, James Fry, to The New York Times to be the last word on the subject,” Winger said via email.In the show, Fry, played by Cory Michael Smith, works closely with Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs), an American heiress who brings her money, energy and connections to the mission, as well as with Albert O. Hirschman (Lucas Englander), a German Jewish intellectual who would become a distinguished American economist.Their activities meet the stern disapproval of the American consul general in Marseille, Hugh S. Fullerton (renamed Graham Patterson in the show), who is played by Corey Stoll. Fullerton, hewing to the then-neutral State Department line, wants to keep the United States out of the war. His vice consul, Hiram Bingham IV (Luke Thompson), thinks otherwise, however, and he quietly helps Fry with travel documents, some of them fraudulent.The interactions between these characters, their relationships and ruses, their hopes and hypocrisies, form the narrative backbone to “Transatlantic.”Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs) and Graham Patterson (Corey Stoll) have a dalliance on the show, even as he is resistant to the team’s rescue efforts.Anika Molbar/NetflixOne night last spring, Winger shot scenes featuring Jacobs and Stoll in the recreated Villa Air-Bel, on the outskirts of the city. The consul, a loyal diplomat incapable of an act of rebellion against State Department policy, has a dalliance with the heiress, “that has a transactional nature to it, a question of getting people out,” Stoll said.They embrace. They argue. He wants to spend the night with her. She asks him to leave. Over and over the actors played the scene until Winger was satisfied that the exchange between the pair achieved the right degree of sparring and sexual tension.Fry and Gold may be on the same side, but they bicker a lot. To play the central character, “I spent a lot of time reading about Fry, going to Columbia University, where all his papers are,” Smith said in an interview in Marseille. “He was unassuming and demure, which I appreciate, yet he burned with a contrarian courage that led him to row against the tide.”A literary journalist, enamored of European writers and artists, Fry was 32 when he arrived in Marseille. He had been sent to France from New York by the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee (the forerunner of the International Rescue Committee), established by American and German intellectuals. With him he brought a list of people to rescue, including Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Alma Mahler, who would eventually escape across the Pyrenees carrying Symphony No. 10, the last work of her former husband, Gustav Mahler.Fry thought he could get the job done quickly. But as Alan Riding wrote in his book “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris,” Fry found himself in a “no man’s land of Gestapo spies, corrupt French police and refugees galore.”Initially installed at the Hôtel Splendide, Fry quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers. Continuously hounded, detained for several days in late 1940, Fry faced off with Fullerton, the American consul, who repeatedly advised him to leave or face arrest, and in January 1941 refused to renew Fry’s passport unless he returned to the United States.To the U.S. authorities at the time, Fry was a troublemaker, his effort to protect Jews and anti-Nazis a renegade operation undermining a craven official policy.The events portrayed in the show are many-faceted, Smith said, but a core truth is inescapable: “There were civilian heroes before our government was ready to step in.”Initially installing himself at a hotel, Fry far right, quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers.Anika Molbar/NetflixJacobs, who plays Gold, a sometime pilot of impetuous courage, said she found the part fascinating for its multiple dimensions. Gold makes mistakes, and her relationship with Fry is sometimes tense. He “views her as too impulsive, while she sometimes thinks he is too cautious,” Jacobs said, and yet, Gold’s moral core is clear: “She knows what she does is the right thing to do.”Englander, the Austrian actor who plays Hirschman, another of Fry’s volunteers, said in an interview on set that filming the show made him reflect on his family’s own history.“We never spoke of our Jewish past,” he said. “Grandpa had to run away — that was all we said in my family.” When Englander came to lines in which Hirschman speaks about his past before fleeing Germany, he said: “I felt my grandfather so strongly. I needed minutes of crying and coffee and cigarettes to recover. Now, I feel a compulsion to give something to life and help today’s refugees.”Fry never ceased in his search to find ways out, until he was hounded out of the country after 389 days. He was told by the Vichy police, with the apparent backing of the American consul general, that he had “gone too far in protecting Jews and anti-Nazis,” Riding wrote in “And the Show Went On.”Back in the United States, Fry wrote a groundbreaking article for The New Republic in 1942 titled “The Massacre of the Jews.” It had little effect. The slaughter continued, with Western powers doing their best to look away.Anna Winger, a creator of the show, left, was obsessed with Fry and his story for many years before she started working on the project.Anika Molbar/NetflixWriting and teaching, Fry lived out the rest of his life in relative anonymity, and died at the age of 59. It was only in 1967 that France honored him with a Légion d’Honneur, the country’s highest order of merit.During production, Smith found himself thinking about Fry as an American hero defying his own government.“There’s a real fight in America about exceptionalism, about what it means to be an exceptional nation,” he said. “Is it loving your country unyieldingly? Or is it taking a scalpel to it and looking at it honestly. This show is asking people to look realistically at our history.” More

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      ‘What We Do Next’ Review: A Political Morality Play

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      In this three-person chamber drama, an ex-convict, a politician and a white-collar defense engage in tense conversations while pursuing their individual goals.“What We Do Next” is a three-person chamber drama that takes the scheming and blackmailing of political thrillers like “House of Cards” and shapes them into something like a morality play.In seven acts, the film tracks the relationship between Elsa (Michelle Veintimilla), an ex-convict; Sandy (Karen Pittman), a New York City politician; and Paul (Corey Stoll), a white-collar defense attorney. Years ago, when Sandy was running for office, she gave Elsa some cash to presumably flee her family home, where her father was sexually abusing her. Instead, Elsa bought a gun and shot him dead.Her lengthy prison sentence is an injustice in and of itself, the film makes clear. Like many women, Elsa is the victim of a criminal justice system that too often fails to take into account the context of abuse and survival in which such crimes take root. After being released, Elsa is left with a criminal record that has largely condemned her to low-paying work.Elsa refuses to settle for this, challenging the authenticity of Sandy’s progressive platform in the process. She threatens to publicly reveal Sandy’s connection to the killing in exchange for a decent job, while Paul, desperate to rebrand himself and transition to anti-corruption law, inserts himself into the women’s negotiations for the sake of good public relations.These talks unfold in various small and nondescript locations — the film was shot during quarantine — but the drama’s stripped-down, dialogue-heavy approach isn’t entirely an extension of the minimalism that defined many sets at the height of the pandemic. The writer and director Stephen Belber is best known as a playwright, which explains many of the film’s strengths and weaknesses. Elegantly composed if ultimately visually bland for the big screen, “What We Do Next” is essentially a series of debates powered by the performers and Belber’s intelligent script, an intricately drawn microcosm of the country’s dynamics of power. The result doesn’t make the best use of the medium’s powers, but the chatty ride does make for good food for thought.What We Do NextNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More