[24] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Margaret Gray, Spotlight Shines Brighter on Appropriate Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Los Angeles Times, 24 September 2015. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-branden-jacobs-jenkins-20150927-story.html (accessed 27 April 2017). This is Terrebonne, a Louisiana plantation that George Peyton (Myers in whiteface) inherited after the death of his uncle, the Judge. . It is an opening that comically echoes the odd, unexpected homecoming of Vince and his girlfriend, Shelly, who enter an equally bizarre and decrepit living room to the incessant sound of rain at the beginning of act two of Buried Child. The audience is catapulted into a space that plays to their stereotypes and questions our societys relationship to humanity and our history. Adaptation has increasingly become a major object of study by literary scholars. The Crows uncomfortable, not to say embarrassing, interrogative gaze anticipates that of the zanier Brer Rabbit, who wanders through An Octoroon slyly inviting the audience of that play to reflect upon their own and each others responses. [49] Merrill and Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, 152. But the questions it never stops posing light up a very murky night. [36] Sam Shepard, Buried Child. all the way back to the grave (112). BJJ clarifies that in the time of the play, a photograph was a novel/innovative/contemporary way for the plot to be resolved. The two scream expletives at each other Marina- and Ulay-style before BJJ gives up and they begin the play in earnest. Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon are all intrageneric adaptations; that is, they are plays that adapt other plays, or in the case of Neighbors other performances, in the same dramatic genre. the Vietnam War. Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, 121. Also, it's incredibly funny. Can we ever fully trust anything said by these people who dress up in costumes and pretend to be other people? A theater and a slave plantation in Louisiana, College/University, Diverse Cast, Ensemble Cast, Mature Audiences, Regional Theatre, Front Of House at Prince of Wales Theatre. He is humiliated by what he has to do (285). The owner, Mr. Peyton . Research Playwrights, Librettists, Composers and Lyricists. 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). But the show must go on, and the writers, it seems, are short on actors, for reasons political as well as practical. Through Brechtian elements such as direct address, Jacobs-Jenkins explores "the idea that you could feel something and then be aware that youre feeling it". As a punishment Diana denies him wind to sail to Troy and requires the sacrifice of his daughter to appease her. [42] On nineteenth-century American melodrama, including its depiction of slavery, see Rosa Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 31, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 2435. Word Count: 465. Jacobs-Jenkins looks at the consequences of putting oneself onstage in their own work, if it is a real self or a fake self, which Jacobs-Jenkins embodied himself in the roles of Br'er Rabbit and Captain Ratts. 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. Mr. Bloomingdale, Rhoda's first suitor, a white man, Dr. Olney, Mrs. Meredith's physician and Rhoda's eventual suitor, a white man, Mrs. Meredith, Rhoda's aunt, a white woman, This page was last edited on 23 January 2023, at 21:41. [52] See Foster, Meta-melodrama, 30001. AN OCTOROON. Appropriate/An Octoroon. [9] Prior to the first performance, Alexis Soloski for The Village Voice published an email from cast member Karl Allen who wrote, "the play has transformed from an engaging piece of contemporary theatre directed by Gavin Quinn to a piece of crap that wouldn't hold a candle to some of the community theater I did in high school". It's a strenuous and daring display of theatricality that goes far beyond issues of race in America. Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. If there are two dates, the date of publication and appearance 3. In An Octoroon, the projection of a "lynching photograph" is an attempt towards an actual experience of finality. More significant than these echoes is the familiar symbolic equation of the family home with America. As the house slaves Minnie and Dido, the hilarious Jocelyn Bioh and Marsha Stephanie Blake provide much-needed comic relief from this sentimental and contrived plot. As both the most recent text of the course as well as our last, I think Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss An Octoroon points to the complex hope of a world in which black artists can create works which are separate from the recycling of previous black narratives in America. [7] Grard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). The process of adaptation may entail retelling stories, reimagining characters, changing geographical and temporal contexts. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Stuart Hecht 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. Jim Crows song and dance, while not one of the formal Interludes, is a case in point. She is considered to be property by law, but this is also presented as wrong. In fact, Jacobs-Jenkins hits on so many ideas per minute, you'll wish you had a little more time to catch your breath. 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. Kevin Byrne Meanwhile Zip Coon suavely charms Jean, encouraging her to talk about herself and taking an interest in her poetry in contrast to Richards obsession with his own career and status. Suddenly, the back wall of the stage falls forward, blasting us with a gush of air and revealing a snow-white stage, covered in cotton (design by Mimi Lien). document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); The Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT), http://www.signaturetheatre.org/News/An-Archeology-of-Seeing.aspx, http://archive.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2011/01/16/neighbors_exposes_racial_history_on_stage/, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/theater/reviews/10neighbors.html, http://blastmagazine.com/2011/01/14/stage-review-neighbors-at-company-one/, http://www.broadwayworld.com/boston/article/Company-One-Wants-You-to-Meet-the-Neighbors-20110117, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-branden-jacobs-jenkins-20150927-story.html, http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/, http://wfpl.org/review-family-secrets-fester-appropriate/, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, Creative Commons (CC) license unless otherwise noted, Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss, Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space by Jessica Brater, Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhls Plays of Mourning by Seokhun Choi. [27] Kee-Yoon Nahm, Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. The second is the date of Brer Rabbits gaze is designed to ensure that spectators take note of their own and each others responses to racist stereotypes presented as comic. That is very much the point of an extraordinary play, first seen at New Yorks Soho Rep, that defies categorisation and that proclaims Jacobs-Jenkins as an exciting new dramatist who questions what it means to be dubbed a black playwright. Early in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's magnificent play, we see a version of the playwright who . [1] Jeff Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation To Confront Race And Identity In The US, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 16 February 2015. The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 112. ZOE played by an octoroon actress, a white actress, a quadroon actress, a biracial actress, a multi-racial actress, or an actress of color who can pass as an octoroon. Besides race, what are some representations of slaves and slavery that are not complicity with the dominant ideology of this time? Your email is never published nor shared. They represent for him his worst nightmare about how his white neighbors might perceive him despite his education and professional, middle-class standing: People will see them and . Log in here. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. 1 Mar. By excavating one of the most memorable stage images in the drama of the American family and layering his own meaning on top of it, Jacobs-Jenkins italicizes his original contribution to the genre. BJJ stops the action of the play. He is able to perform only by becoming almost like a man possessed (288). It toys with the plot of Dion Boucicault's 19th century play "The Octoroon . As an object, the album is constantly presented to the audiences view and its unseen contents to their imagination. [6], The sensation scene of the original play is deconstructed in act four. Walking on a stage covered with cotton balls is a tricky business. . Myers gives a tour de force in his triple roles as the blas black playwright, the charming leading man, and the mustachioed villain. 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. At the beginning of the play, upon hearing the approach of white people, Pete drops his normal conversational voice and transforms into some sort of folk figure speaking the dialect constructed by Boucicault: Drop dat banana fo I murdah you! (19).[46]. [30] In Appropriate, contrary to Hutcheons exclusion of short intertextual allusions to other works from consideration as adaptations,[31] Jacobs-Jenkins works primarily through such brief allusions to adapt, not a particular prior text, but a whole genre. In play, the lovers, Zoe and the judge's prodigal nephew, George Peyton, are thwarted in their quest by race and the the evil maneuverings of a material-obsessed overseer named Jacob M'Closky. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [8] Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 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. But as audiences laugh (or squirm) at the Crows outrageous minstrel show turns, or speculate knowingly about the quarrels of the Lafayettes, or weep for Zoe and laugh at the performances of Minnie, Dido, and Pete, Jacobs-Jenkins simultaneously compels contemporary spectators to confront the racial assumptions he has excavated along with the dramatic forms that contain them and to worry about their own and each others complicity in the continuing legacy of those assumptions. Csar Alvarez of The Lisps has composed additional music, some of which sounds straight out of Ken Burns' The Civil War, to create the world of the Old South. The Octoroon was a controversial play when it debuted, given its focus on slavery when the pre-Civil War United States was engaged in a heated debate over the institution. [53] Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something., [54] For Jacobs-Jenkinss knowledge of American family drama see Wegener, About Appropriate, 146. [18], The play was presented at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia from March 16, 2016 to April 10, 2016, directed by Joanna Settle. [55] See Collins-Hughes, Provocative Play Sees the Faces Behind the Blackface, and note 11 above. [4] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Archeology of Seeing. The actor who plays BJJ - in this case, the astonishing Ken Nwosu - goes on to don whiteface and appear as both the heroic George and the villainous M'Closky. Rhoda lived her whole life "passing" as a white person. [10] Jane Barnette, Adapturgy: The Dramaturgs Art and Theatrical Adaptation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 55, 62. Jims brilliant performance contains so much pain and anger that it breaks open his familys theatrical past with lingering consequences. Private Life in McCanns Transatlantic, The Application of A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms to The Black and Green Atlantic, The Tyranny of Monarchy in A Voyage to Lilliput, Gullivers Difficult Decision to Return Home. Most distinctively in An Octoroon and with far-reaching dramaturgical consequences, Jacobs-Jenkins racially cross-casts several of the characters. Boucicault portrayed Wahnotee, and in his play Jacobs-Jenkins explores the connection between a person and their identity as artist. By opening up the old form of the minstrel show, Jacobs-Jenkins exposes old meanings and layers new ones onto them. 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. [37] Thomas P. Adler, Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, in Matthew Roudan, ed. In Appropriate Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the genre of American family drama. Topsy, Sambo, and Mammy (Zip is busy fighting Richard) recite a litany of what white people readily enjoy about black performance, staged or otherwise. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 7. (Psst, it could well be Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins himself.). The play reiterates a lot of themes I've heard before, but does it in a fresh way that's both thoughtful and provoking. [32] Erin Keane, Review/Family Secrets Fester in Appropriate, 89.3 WFPL News Louisville, 20 March 2013. http://wfpl.org/review-family-secrets-fester-appropriate/ (accessed 30 December 2016). [43] In all three plays Jacobs-Jenkins adds innovative techniques to the toolbox available to theatrical adaptation and further wrinkles to adaptation theory. While posing, MClosky comes from behind and kills Paul to take the letter. The photograph album in Appropriate is particularly shocking because these photos are to be understood, not only as symbolic representations, but as literal artifacts of American history. The novel explores the idea of "passing" through the racially mixed character of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman whose aunt informs her that she is one-sixteenth African American. I will discuss the three plays separately in order to bring out their distinctive qualities as intrageneric dramatic adaptations. [21] See Isherwood, Caricatured Commentary. At one point in the published text Jacobs-Jenkins calls for a rearrangement of Sister Sledges We Are Family (263). Before he died, the Judge granted Zoe's freedom. So, instead of giving up, he decides to play the white male roles himself. Melody, looking different now, meets Jim at the stage door and asks him how he feels, and the actor playing Jim Crow starts to tell her how he really feels (319). [8] An adaptation may criticize either the assumptions of the adapted text or the adapters own society or both. The Octoroon Themes Racial Identification and Discrimination Set in the pre-Civil War South, The Octoroondeals heavily with racial themes. [1] Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer, 2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Through such Brechtian techniques as cross-casting and meta-commentary from the plays internal playwright, BJJ, Jacobs-Jenkins ironizes Boucicaults story and the racist attitudes of his characters. Still, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being a black playwright, without knowing exactly what that means. 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. Zoe and George are presented very sympathetically, however, as characters who are good and moral, and this seems to indicate that the author recognizes and approves of their love. https:www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/16/383567104/one-playwright-s-obligation (accessed 11 February 2019). [45] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 20. It is a fitting prologue for a play that perpetually examines itself, from every possible angle, and yet manages to transform self-consciousness from something that paralyzes into something that propels. We watch each other (319). Finally, by placing his minstrel characters in a contemporary context and eliciting empathy for them as human beings and as artists, Jacobs-Jenkins opens up a yet more complicated and difficult way of seeing his nineteenth-century source material while confronting audiences with the ways in which the minstrel stereotypes continued to operate in popular culture and populist politics throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Jacobs-Jenkins pulls the camera back to capture the angst-ridden playwriting process itself: A monotone young black playwright, BJJ (Chris Myers), stands before the audience in his undies and recalls a therapy session. Richard is horrified by the Crow familys moving in next door. Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 41. Kevin Trainor as the bombastic Boucicault, Vivian Oparah and Emmanuella Cole as a pair of closely bonded slaves, Celeste Dodwell as a cracked Southern belle and Iola Evans as the eponymous heroine are all first rate. He comes across a therapist who recommends adapting his favorite play, The Octoroon by Dion Boucicault, as a jumping off point out of his writers block. And his assistant (Ian Lassiter), who looks rather like a Native American, blackens up to embody both an old family retainer and an addlebrained boy slave. [6], An Octoroon had a workshop production at Performance Space 122 from June 19 July 3, 2010, featuring Travis York, Karl Allen, Chris Manley, Ben Beckley, Gabe Levey, Jake Hart, Margaret Flanagan, Amber Gray, Mary Wiseman, LaToya Lewis, Kim Gainer, and Sasheer Zamata. [51] Jacobs-Jenkinss well-attested concern with evoking strong and complicated individual responses from his audiences adds a new wrinkle to adaptation theory. It is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, which premiered in 1859. The play begins with BJJ, in a black box telling the audience a conversation he and his therapist had, to get him excited about playwriting and to overcome depression. The Crows have been on hiatusthe word is used repeatedly (231, 235, 242)after the death of Jim Crow, Sr. for an uncertain period of time, suggesting that they may have come literally from the nineteenth century, and are, like Pirandellos Six Characters, in search of their life on the stage in the form of their much-vaunted comeback (261). It uses satire and archival re-creation, jolting anachronisms and subliminally seductive music (performed by the cellist Lester St. Louis) to try to get at its horrible, elusive center: the imponderably far-reaching legacy of American slavery. [15] In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley called the play this decades most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today.[16] The production transferred to Theatre for A New Audience's Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn and ran from February 14, 2015 to March 29, 2015. In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon. While respecting her familys traditional show pieces, Topsy feels they are too commercial. She sees herself as a more forward-looking artist and expresses her own ideas about how art should deal with the shared human experiamentience. She presents to the audience summa the stuff she has been working on, which turns out to be the history of African Americans onstage crammed into three spectacular minutes of music, video projections, dance, etc., etc. If I say that this bizarrely brilliant play is the work of a 32-year-old black American dramatist called Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, I am already subscribing to an idea the piece seeks to subvert: that our identities can be defined by convenient labels. The show was directed by Peter Hinton and designed by Gillian Gallow. 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. [27] The familys various responses are white, Kee-Yoon Nahm explains, because they are the reactions of people who can in no way share in the experiences documented by the photos. [39] Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire. "[2] This examination of race as a social construct is also in Appropriate and Neighbors. Beth Osborne According to Jacobs-Jenkins, Toni represents the New South with its feeling of being betrayed by the rest of the country; the West represents new possibilities, enabling Franz to reinvent himself; and New York connects Bo (with his smart phone) to a bigger world and forward momentum.[26]. Its even worse than the first time I got sold! And Minnie replies, Yeah, I didnt wake up thinkin this was where my day was gonna go (41). Anyone can read what you share. The audience is catapulted into a space that plays to their stereotypes and questions our society's relationship to humanity and our history. Infinitely playful Ken Nwosu and Kevin Trainor in An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Zoe heads out to the slave quarters to ask Dido for poison. Even more thoroughly than in Neighbors and Appropriate, adapted work and adaptation bleed into one another. Toni complains that she has always done most of the work; Rachael believes that her father-in-law was anti-Semitic. In talking directly to the audience about the show they are watching, Topsy serves an educational function, metatheatrically drawing attention to Jacobs-Jenkinss work of theatrical excavation. The Crows wear black paint, have huge red lips, and, except for Jim, and Zip in his conversations with Jean, speak with the caricatured dialect and malapropisms of their nineteenth-century originals. The emphasis on huge body parts, especially eyes, lips, and feet, was characteristic of representations of black people in minstrel shows. 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). Gain full access to show guides, character breakdowns, auditions, monologues and more! [31] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 170. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. This cultural stratigraphy is especially apparent in the sequence late in the play in which the Crows encourage Jim not to be nervous in the upcoming show because, Mammy says, the audience luvs evathang we does (317). Unlike historical excavations, which lead archeologists ever deeper into the past, in Neighbors Jacobs-Jenkins excavates upwards into the present, reaching his deepest layer in the feelings of a putative contemporary actor beneath those of a reluctant performer beneath those of a minstrel character. This leads to a hilarious scene in which he switches between the two characters engaged in a fight to the death. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins An Octoroon is a whirlwind of images and dialogue that leaves no one out of the conversation and makes no apologies for asking the hard questions. View our Privacy Policy. 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. Pete pleads for MClosky to not be lynched, so George demands that M'Closky be taken away, not revenged by Wahnotee, but M'Closky escapes and sets fire to the boat. Moments later, he reveals, "Just kidding. Rhoda's father was Mrs. Meredith's brother, a white man, and Rhoda's mother was a southern woman of one-eighth black ancestry. . The earliest minstrels were white performers in blackface, but there were also troupes of African-American performers. A panel of scholars and artists discuss the contemporary relevance and themes of Branden Jenkins-Jacobs play "An Octoroon"Featured panelists are:Dr. Theda Pe. Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Into the familiar dramatic context of this white familys absorption in its own dysfunction Jacobs-Jenkins inserts the photo album as a reminder of the familys and Americas deadly legacy of racism. Jacobs-Jenkins is speaking here of Everybody (2017), his adaptation of the medieval morality play Everyman. Both the white hero, George, and the white villain, MClosky, are played by the same black actor in whiteface. Stacy Wolf, Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Kim Marra I can't afford one." [46] In Definition Theatre Companys 2017 production of An Octoroon in Chicago, Pete and Paul were played by an African-American actress in blackface, producing an even more pointed Brechtian comment on the absurdity of Boucicaults racist and gendered characterizations. In his second lectureon Euripidess Iphigenia at AulisRichard layers his own experience as a black man in America onto the story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia. An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins's riff on Boucicault's 1859 classic The Octoroon, which had a 2010 workshop at PS122, bows this month at Soho Rep in a production directed by Sarah Benson. [44] The Native American Wahnotee is played by a white actor in redface. (London: Methuen Drama, 2012), 222. [23] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Amy Wegener, About Appropriate, Appropriate. Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon enable the multiple-layered seeing that Jacobs-Jenkins is talking about because they require comparative viewing across the adapted and adaptive works themselves and across the cultures or historical periods that produced them. This archeology of seeing goes beyond the oscillation between texts that Hutcheon suggests is characteristic of audience members reception of adaptations; rather it entails what she calls their palimpsestuous experience as layers of text are multilaminated onto one another. 2023
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