HAMTRAMCK, Mich.–Whether it’s Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” or Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County,” or even to some degree “The Lion In Winter,” there is nothing quite like a family reunion around a holiday, death or terminal illness to explore what makes us tick. Remember, we choose our friends, but we get family thrust upon us.

Added to this tradition of wrought plot-lines is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a sharp-penned author, who takes us to Arkansas in his Appropriate, now being presented by Planet Ant Theatre. Here, we have a dysfunctional trio of angry white siblings who have gathered at the family homestead to auction off the sad remainders of their dead father’s things, the house, and shut everything that took place in this crumbling, sad plantation away in the graveyards that haunt the property and their souls.

There is Toni ( Kelly Ann Komlen) who has all the warmth and attractiveness of a leaky cask of gasoline in a living room of smokers, cracked in so many places from having to raise her two brothers after her Mother died, caring for her father in his demise, being betrayed by her son who torpedoed her career and a husband who left her. She just continuously leaks pain, poison and internal suffering that flashes hot with hate and sarcasm. She is, in short, a nightmare to be around or to have a relationship with, and Komlen plays her relentlessly, loudly and with acid tears. But she does not lose us. We feel her pain, and wish somebody in the family would do something, anything!, to make the load easier and let a good person we know lies beneath her barbed-wire exterior out of prison. She comes to this dead house with her teen son, Rhys (Shane Nelson), who has been kicked out of high school for selling pills to his friends.

Bo (Joel Mitchell) has come to Arkansas with his wife, Rachel (Melissa Beckwith), a Brooklyn Jewess about as welcome in this antebellum scene as a skunk at a baby shower, and his teenage daughter Cassidy, played by Meredith Deighton, who perfectly embodies the teen daughter who has no interest in her parents’ opinion and asserts that she “IS grown up” every ten minutes. They also have an ADD-son (Forrest Gabel) who can’t seem to stop running, even through the small Planet Ant black-box space.

Then there is Frank (Donny Reidel), the wayward youngest brother who is going by the name Franz now. He arrives, clean and sober, stammering with almost every speech as if his brain is not fully programmed, with his fiancée, River, (Jaclyn Cherry). Frank hasn’t been seen for ten years after years of alcohol and drug abuse and an incident with a local girl that ran him out of town. Cherry has some of the best moments of the play, and makes them work with understated delivery. She is the calm, Reiki-practicing yoga gal, who serves as a contrast to the rest of the family. She is the glass of chamomile tea to the rest of the family’s kerosene cocktails, and a simple well-timed, ”So what’s happening?” as she enters the room gets guffaws.

This reunion of angry resentful, broken siblings is loud, crackling, like a fire that they keep adding dry wood to in Act 1. We start to wonder if these actors are going to have any voices left by the end of the play, or at least by the end of the weekend. There is suspicion about motives around Frank’s return, talk of the house being auctioned to help pay down the bank debt incurred by their father, and how any money might be divided.

And there is a mounting case against their dead father, a judge who was one considered for the US Supreme Court. In going through his things, they find a photo album of lynchings, seemingly well preserved. Then, there are other things found in the house that cause great distress and stimulate a new conflict among them. Who was their father…really?

Under the direction of Joe Bailey, this tight cast works beautifully to deliver on Jacobs-Jenkins’ story of a family in denial, broken by their own family traditions and reluctant to trade them in no matter how evil and corrupted.

Well deserved credit, too, goes to Jennifer Maiseloff’s set, which perfectly captures the detail of a crumbling 19^th century house in modern times, right down to the details of the hoarding of the late patriarch. Brandy Jo Plambeck as stage manager sound designer also shines with all the right chirps of a rural Arkansas home in summer, down to the crickets and cicadas, adroitly woven in throughout the play.

Appropriate runs three hours with two intermissions. But don’t let that keep you away. The story moves briskly, and the heat on stage will more than keep you awake in Planet Ant’s intimate space. Mature themes make it inappropriate for kids under age-16.