Foster, Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson A Black playwright is struggling to find his voice among a chorus of people telling him what he should and should not be writing. Nataki Garrett directed the first production of An Octoroon outside of New York with Mixed Blood Theatre Company in the fall of 2015. Jacobs-Jenkins developed his take on The Octoroon while he was a Dorothy Strelsin Fellow at Soho Rep in the 2009/10 season. [2] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, quoted. In writing in this well-worked vein of white family drama, Jacobs-Jenkins aimed to produce a play in which, he says, blackness is invisible yet still charge[s] the room.[24], Appropriate is about a white familyoverbearing, divorced sister (Toni), conventional businessman brother and his Jewish wife (Bo and Rachael), prodigal brother and erstwhile sex offender (Franz), his much younger New Age fiance (River), and various children. Your email is never published nor shared. Kim Marra [3], Jacobs-Jenkins recommends the play be performed with 8 or 9 actors,[4] with male characters played using blackface/whiteface/redface, and female characters portrayed by actresses that match the characters' race.[1]. Unlock this. https:www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/16/383567104/one-playwright-s-obligation (accessed 11 February 2019). [7][8] It was originally directed by Gavin Quinn of the Irish theatre company Pan Pan, but Jacobs-Jenkins took over the role after Quinn quit several weeks into rehearsals. In one way Jacobs-Jenkins puts his whole play in quotation marks through his opening and closing sequences that stand outside stage time and outside the realism usually associated with American family drama. ", The book is about a "Tragic Mulatta" character, a stereotype used by 19th-century American authors to explore racial miscegenation. Jacobs-Jenkinss plays variously demonstrate how adaptation operates creatively in producing new works and also critically and politically, not in this instance by reinterpreting the adapted texts, but by exposing how their damaging and supposedly outdated racial assumptions continue to inform contemporary racial attitudes. It toys with the plot of Dion Boucicault's 19th century play "The Octoroon . Stacy Wolf, Frank Hentschker, Executive Director England, England, Foyer Security at Sondheim Theatre While all three plays perform similar kinds of cultural work, in each play Jacobs-Jenkins adapts a different historical form of theatrical entertainment and adopts correspondingly different kinds of innovative adaptive strategies designed to manipulate audiences into a self-conscious recognition of their own complicity in the racial assumptions he excavates. They give an almost Brechtian commentary on the main plot while letting us in on their own lives as slaves: While sweeping up the cotton, Minnie asks, "You really think Mrs. Peyton's upstairs dying from heartbreak?" In the main plot George, the white hero, falls in love with a beautiful octoroon, Zoe, who poisons herself rather than succumb to the white villain, MClosky, who has bought her; in the subplot, photographic evidence demonstrates that MClosky, not Native American Wahnotee, has murdered slave boy Paul in order to steal the document that would save Georges plantation and prevent Zoe from being sold. Eventually, Zoe takes the poison and runs off. [22] Isherwood, Caricatured Commentary.. Pete is Paul's grandfather. [22] Jacobs-Jenkinss final direction for Topsy, And maybe it ends with her masturbating with a banana. Jacobs-Jenkins repeats this striking visual image towards the end of Appropriate when Franz enters soaking wet, carrying a pile of wet paper pulpthe remains of the photo albuma mess (108) that he has rescued from the lake. Since I have discussed Jacobs-Jenkinss adaptation of The Octoroon at length elsewhere, I shall confine my remarks in this essay to a brief examination of the ways in which in An Octoroon the playwright extends to almost every feature of the play the archeological techniques he develops in Neighbors and Appropriate. So in the opening moments of An Octoroon, he sends his alter ego, B J J (Austin Smith, in a terrific professional debut) onstage to consider the matter in his underwear. The book is about Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman who discovers she is one-sixteenth African American, after living her whole life as a white person. [47] Their voices (borrowed from the dialect of contemporary sitcom) are the most vibrant and compelling in the play. DORA played by a white actress or an actress who can pass as white. (depending presumably on the resources of the theatre). After the conclusion of their show the Crows take a curtain call, but that is not the end. But the questions it never stops posing light up a very murky night. The fact that has the audience laughs at slavery and BJJ even encourages that laughter shows his belief that not only can these experiences can be joked about, they can also stop overshadowing African-American art to allow new black artistic forms to come into being. Though I cant remember any of them now. But it feels right that the people occupying this production, first seen last year at Soho Rep, should be required to move on what might be called terra infirma. Bill Demastes View our Privacy Policy. But Jacobs-Jenkinss adaptive strategy in this play is less explicit than it is in Neighbors or An Octoroon, in which he incorporates explanations of the genres or texts he adaptsin the Crow familys comments on their work in Neighbors and in educational addresses to the audience from dramatist BJJ and Dion Boucicault himself in An Octoroonfor the benefit of those who might not be familiar with his sources. Unlike most of the plays of the time, however, the central "tragic action" of the play centers not around the fate of a Advisory Editor: David Savran [45] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 20. I washed it away (97). In the form of a stump speech (in minstrel performances a ridiculous lecture replete with malapropisms on a topical subject[20]), Topsy talks to the audience about what she hopes they have been enjoying so far. Channeling perhaps Peter Handkes Offending the Audience, the Crows work to make the theatre audience, laminated onto their own dramatic audience, conscious of itself specifically as an audience and as consumers of black entertainment wittingly or unwittingly complicit in the stereotypes they have witnessed: the family point to people in the audience and whisper together, sometimes mockingly, sometimes out of concern. [5] Jacobs-Jenkinss innovative work makes possible a fresh and experiential interracial discussion of race relations in Americaa discussion that is much needed in the present tense political climate. Research Playwrights, Librettists, Composers and Lyricists. The latter is so sickeningly sweet and endearingly dumb, especially with his Indian sidekick Wahnotee (Wolohan in redface), he could have his own family television series circa 1955 (think antebellum Lassie). Paulwith the mailbagsstops to take a photo of himself with Georges camera. The tension between the old forms and the new meanings layered onto them generates uneasy and uncertain laughter that engages audiences in a much-needed, if in the theatre implicit, dialogue of their own about racial attitudes in contemporary America. His aggression that people always try to place these bigger cultural burdens, such as the adaptation of African folklore when he merely uses animals to illustrate his own point, shows that he wants for his work to speak for itself and not be as tied down to one specific meaning. The acting swings wildly in technique, from the grotesque (and comically inspired) affectedness of Mary Wiseman as a snooty Southern belle to the wrenching sincerity of Ms. Gray, who created the title role at Soho Rep. And then the female house servants pricelessly played by Maechi Aharanwa, Pascale Armand and Danielle Davenport describe life as 19th-century chattel in the manner of 21st-century African-American girlfriends gossiping. While An Octoroon revisits many of these themes, it does so in a more formally challenging way. His prologue perfectly shows how Jacobs-Jenkins feels trapped by his works being put into a different box because he is a black playwright although he [doesnt] know exactly what that means, and he just wants to create works to tell human stories, not necessarily always dealing with the race issue in America. Already a member? The crunch comes when the good-hearted George Peyton has to choose between his love for Zoe, of one-eighth black ancestry, and his need to save the estate by marrying a rich heiress. The blown-up photograph of a real-life lynchingagainst which background George makes an impassioned defense of Wahnotee against the wild and lawless proceeding of lynch-law (51)is profoundly shocking but also positions spectators as complicit in the voyeuristic gaze of the photographs enthralled white gawkers.[50], While this is the most disturbing moment in the play, there is no ambiguity about the kind of horrified response called for by the photograph of the lynching. Though she is legally a slave and the property of Mr. Peyton, she has not been treated as one; he tried to free her, not realizing that a legal loophole prevented it. Maybe they giggle (319). Can we ever fully trust anything said by these people who dress up in costumes and pretend to be other people? Where Boucicault cleverly uses a photograph of the real murderer of Paul to prevent a miscarriage of justice, Jacobs-Jenkins has to go further to produce a similarly sensational effect for his contemporary audience. Then Playwright and Assistant put on redface and blackface paint. The diverse ways in which Jacobs-Jenkins excavates old forms in these three plays both reveal and create new layers of historical meaning that call for new ways of seeing and thinking about Americas racial heritage. Before he died, the Judge granted Zoe's freedom. Early in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's magnificent play, we see a version of the playwright who . The protest becomes most explicit at the end of Neighbors when the Crows finally put on their show. [34] Tracy Letts, August: Osage County (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 12324. While the text that Appropriate adapts is the genre of American family drama as a whole, Buried Child, itself a veritable patchwork of allusions to well-known family plays, will, in fact, prove to be the most significant single analog for Jacobs-Jenkinss play.[33]. Complimentary and Deeply Discounted Shows. The Art of Dramatic Composition: A Prologue, "Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Feel That Thought", "The Great Work Continues: The 25 Best American Plays Since 'Angels in America', "Amber Gray on 'An Octoroon,' at Soho Rep", "The Octoroon Delayed Opens This Week at PS122", "Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Tries to Revive The Octoroon", "Disgruntled Cast Member Issues Invite to P.S.122's Troubled Octoroon", "Soho Rep Reading of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon to Feature Saycon Sengbloh and William Jackson Harper | Playbill", "Review: 'An Octoroon,' a Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Comedy About Race", "BERKELEY REPERTORY THEATRE | An Octoroon", "Cast announced for An Octoroon at Orange Tree", "Review: An Octoroon (Orange Tree Theatre)", "An Octoroon is taboo ridden, but thoughtful (Shaw Festival)", "Georgia Southern Theatre & Performance to Present "An Octoroon", "2017 Results | Critics' Circle Theatre Awards", For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=An_Octoroon&oldid=1138923673, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using infobox play with unknown parameters, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 12 February 2023, at 11:33. eNotes Editorial. date the date you are citing the material. So, instead of giving up, he decides to play the white male roles himself. He alludes both to tropes common across American family dramaa genre characterized by its content and its realism rather than by any particular structural featuresand to specific details from well-known plays. eNotes.com The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. Ironically, The Octoroon premiered in New York four days after famed. For the details of this argument see Verna A. [2], Jacobs-Jenkins also cites Peter Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination as an inspiration for his approach to melodrama. [52] See Foster, Meta-melodrama, 30001. in Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation.. [9] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, xvii, 6, 21. Orange Tree, RichmondBranden Jacobs-Jenkinss extraordinary play is both an adaptation of a 19th-century melodrama and a dazzling postmodernist critique of it. The debt-ridden, lost plantation over which the family quarrels evokes A Streetcar Named Desire and Dividing the Estate, as well as the play that lies behind both of them, The Cherry Orchard. Most notably with its racially swapped casting, Jacobs-Jenkins uses this practice as a means to show that race is somewhat arbitrary and a social construct. As a symbol, the album suffuses the consciousness of both characters and audience. Minnie and Dido realize all the other slaves ran away. George Peyton falls in love with Zoe, a young woman who is one-eighth blackshe has one great-grandparent who is black (on her mother's side)and thus, she is the "octoroon" referenced by the title. Directed by Sarah Benson, featuring music by Csar Alvarez (of The Lisps), choreography by David Neumann, set design by Mimi Lien, and lighting design by Matt Frey. George photographs Dora with his camera while she and Zoe plot to make George marry her. The most overt of this is Zoe's status as an "Octoroon," a person who is one-eighth black. Infinitely playful Ken Nwosu and Kevin Trainor in An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The production was critically acclaimed, winning an Obie Award for best new American play in 2014 (a tie with his previous play, Appropriate). At the Orange Tree, Richmond, until 24 June. [8] Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). He has written an American family drama about blackness in America that has no black characters in it but in which their absence pervades and powers the play. It may include transmotivation, transfocalization, or transvalorizationterms used by Grard Genette in Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), an important theoretical work on the relation between hypertext (adaptation) and hypotext (adapted work) that anticipated by a couple of decades the recent surge in adaptation studies. Jacobs-Jenkins has clearly done his research, and makes a hard case for the reader that we still have to talk in certain ways about certain topics. What ensues is an upside down, topsy-turvy world where race and morality are challenged and intensified. [28] In the end Bo is prevented from selling the photos because Franz feels called to cleanse himself and his family by jumping into the nearby lake, taking the photos with him: I took everythingall my pain, all Daddys pain, this familys pain, the picturesand I left it there. . Wahnotee murders MClosky. Both the white hero, George, and the white villain, MClosky, are played by the same black actor in whiteface. And in both plays verbal conflict degenerates into physical violence. The audiences self-reflections that Jacobs-Jenkins so carefully constructs in response to all three of his plays constitute a further layer in his archeology of seeing.. It's a strenuous and daring display of theatricality that goes far beyond issues of race in. Vol. This production designed with bountiful imagination by Mimi Lien (set), Wade Laboissonniere (costumes), Matt Frey (lighting) and Matt Tierney (sound) repeatedly calls attention to its own artifice. 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. His most recent play, Appropriate, is about a white family that discovers an album of lynching photos while cleaning out a deceased patriarch's home. all the way back to the grave (112). . Walking on a stage covered with cotton balls is a tricky business. Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 41. The Octoroon was a controversial play on both sides of the slavery debate when it debuted, as both abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates believed the play took the other camp's side. Bo hated the plantation with its bugs and its endless stories about Civil War ancestors. 3. Despite the discovery of the explosive contents of the album, not to mention a jar of body partsmore collectors itemsand a pointed white hood (103) in which the youngest child, Ainsley, unwittingly dresses up, the Lafayettes find themselves distracted from dealing with their history by their constant need to attack and occasional attempts to reconcile with one another. The evening starts with a confrontation between the two authors. Even the notion of what makes a play is up for grabs, as this tumultuous piece is both an adaptation of The Octoroon, a popular 19th-century melodrama by Dion Boucicault, and a postmodernist critique of it. BJJ explains, with the help of Boucicault, how melodrama works and how it has been necessary for An Octoroon to adapt some of the melodramatic features of the earlier play. David Krasner http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/ (accessed 30 December 2016). Three Plays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 76. [18], The play was presented at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia from March 16, 2016 to April 10, 2016, directed by Joanna Settle. [27] Kee-Yoon Nahm, Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, first presented in New York in 1859, bears more than a striking resemblance to its better-known stage sister, George Aiken's adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which premiered in 1852. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. More significant than these echoes is the familiar symbolic equation of the family home with America. [1] Jeff Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation To Confront Race And Identity In The US, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 16 February 2015. 365 Fifth Avenue The owner, Mr. Peyton . [40] The photo album in Appropriate, by contrast, belies the apparent absence of blackness in the play by embodying and giving it an explosive motivating power that forces the white characters to confront a legacy of racism that they prefer not to acknowledge. Intrageneric adaptation has received less theoretical attention than intergeneric or intermedial adaptation. Caught up into his act, Jim is like a hurricane unleashed, the most incredible thing you have ever seen in your entire life, even though he also shares characteristics with his minstrel forebearseyes bugged out, limbs loose, moving, dancing, mo coon than a little bit (288). This leads to another theme in the idea that what is legal is not always right, and what is illegal is not always wrong; the law is not necessarily just. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. She tells the family patriarch, Dodge, that they represent his past: Your whole lifes up there hanging on the wall. It is a past that Dodge refuses to recognize: That isnt me! In the auction scene he has to fight himself over Zoe. Jacobs-Jenkinss excavations in this play are broad rather than deep and as much literary as theatrical or performative. Hutcheon also notes the Darwinian implications of the term adaptation. A Theory of Adaptation, 31. Beth Osborne [19], Dobama Theater in Cleveland Heights, Ohio presented An Octoroon from October 21, 2016 to November 13, 2016, directed by Nathan Motta[20], The first West Coast premiere of An Octoroon was held at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed by Eric Ting with Sydney Morton in the title role. [47] Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something.. First performed at the Public Theater in New York in 2010, and subtitled an epic with cartoons,[12] Neighbors depicts what happens when the Crows, a family of minstrels played by actors in blackface, move in next door to the PattersonsRichard, a black classics professor, Jean, his white wife, and Melody, their teenage daughter. In this respect her role anticipates that of the authorial figure BJJ in An Octoroon, who teaches his audience about melodrama. This leads to a hilarious scene . The process of adaptation may entail retelling stories, reimagining characters, changing geographical and temporal contexts. More literally educational are Richards lectures on Greek tragedy, which can be seen as his form of performance, or his interludes. [13] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Neighbors. There is a coda, which members of the audience leaving the theatre (according to Jacobs-Jenkinss stage directions) might or might not see. Though Toni denies this accusation and is shocked when later Rhys refers to Rachael as the Jew bitch, her own unreflecting anti-Semitism is apparent when she thoughtlessly says that she is not some kind of shylock (77, 34). But white actors assume blackface and even, in the case of a Native American, redface in order to reinforce a key point: that, while Boucicaults original was progressive in its anti-slavery message, it also traded on racial stereotypes that are still deeply embedded in todays consciousness. Lafouche comes to run the auction of the property and announces Zoe will be sold. Stay abreast of discount offers for great theater, on Broadway or in select cities. Its story, of a romantic plantation owner and the girl of mixed race he adores, was set in the Old South the land of cotton, a kingdom built on the labor of African slaves. the Vietnam War. Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, 121. For much of the play Jim Crow refuses to take on the eponymous role of his late father, though by the end he too performs his part in a rousing version of the minstrel song and dance number Jump Jim Crow, his new-found talent inspired apparently by the admiration of Melody.[14]. Zoe falls in love with George as well, though others are shocked that the two would wish to marry (it being, of course, illegal at the time). BJJ is focused on a play, The Octoroon, but runs into issues staging it because the white actors quit, so he applies whiteface in order to play them himself. The Octoroon Themes Racial Identification and Discrimination Set in the pre-Civil War South, The Octoroondeals heavily with racial themes. He's quickly echoed in a snide tone by a white onlooker, who just so happens to be Dion Boucicault (Danny Wolohan). He gives it a try but quickly realizes that getting white, male actors of today to play evil slave owners is not an easy task. Through this strikingly original use of the photo album, Jacobs-Jenkins achieves his objective of writing a black playa play dealing with blackness in Americathat has no black characters in it.[38]. Most distinctively in An Octoroon and with far-reaching dramaturgical consequences, Jacobs-Jenkins racially cross-casts several of the characters. (London: Methuen Drama, 2012), 222. Rhoda's father was Mrs. Meredith's brother, a white man, and Rhoda's mother was a southern woman of one-eighth black ancestry. Zoe calls Dido Mammy, and she puts on a mammy character as they argue. In the mid-twentieth century, much of the pioneering work consisted in studies, both practical and theoretical, of the adaptation of novels into film. Theatre Communications Group: New York, 2019), 7374. Following the act three climax: the plot lines must converge, the moral is made clear, and the audience has to be hit with a "theatre trick" which overwhelms the audience with technical elements. In addition to the resourceful Nwosu, who deserves to be honoured in end-of-the-year awards, there is a host of fine performances. England, England, Front Of House at Prince of Wales Theatre In A Streetcar Named Desire only an unseen photograph of Belle Reve denotes Stellas past for the people she now lives among in New Orleans, and they are not much impressed. The emphasis on huge body parts, especially eyes, lips, and feet, was characteristic of representations of black people in minstrel shows. But even if your response is an emphatic "No", you should still check out this superb play that employs black, white, and redface in unexpected ways while reclaiming a lost gem of the American stage. Appropriate bears many of the generic markers of American family drama. Locating 'Dixie' in Newspaper Discourse and Theatrical Performance in Toronto, 1880s-1920s Jan 2018 Octoroon revisits many of the Theatre ) Assistant put on their show '' character, a used. 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