Richard, however, blames the sacrifice not on the gods (standing in for white people in his mind) but on the demands of Agamemnons uncouth, country-ass soldiers with no self-control, sitting in the port raping women and drinking all the time and aint got no jobs and dont talk Greek good (292)clearly, for Richard, a version of the Crows. 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. 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. 2 (2017): 151. [2], Jacobs-Jenkins also cites Peter Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination as an inspiration for his approach to melodrama. [55] See Collins-Hughes, Provocative Play Sees the Faces Behind the Blackface, and note 11 above. [9] Following Hutcheon, Jane Barnette notes that a palimpsest can be read simultaneously or sequentiallythat is, (to an extent) one can isolate layers for consideration, or take in the entirety of the palimpsest at once, and, importantly, she reminds us that the stage palimpsest will necessarily be based more on image and sound than on the words in the play text. Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. Abolitionist John Brown was hanged just three days before the play's debut, which is seen as one of the catalyst events that started the Civil War. date the date you are citing the material. 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. Jacobs-Jenkins himself took on the role of Br'er Rabbit and Captain Ratts.[14]. He is able to perform only by becoming almost like a man possessed (288). Assistant announces that the boat explodes. [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. Boucicault portrayed Wahnotee, and in his play Jacobs-Jenkins explores the connection between a person and their identity as artist. 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. The production was critically acclaimed, winning an Obie Award for best new American play in 2014 (a tie with his previous play, Appropriate). 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. The CrowsMammy, Zip Coon, Sambo, Topsy, and Jim Crowplay updated versions of the infamous parts suggested by their names. 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. 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). The superimposition of hero and villain upon one another suggests that the moral difference between them is less clear-cut than melodramatic stereotypes would have it and illustrates, as Lisa Merill and Theresa Saxon note, the uncomfortable similarity between desire to own, master, or marry Zoe. All of these historically situated stereotypes, Jacobs-Jenkins implies, are based in white views of black performative behavior deriving ultimately from the minstrel shows. (Psst, it could well be Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins himself.). . with Siobhan OFlynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 170. 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. Unorthodox, highly stylized plays on incendiary topics tend to have limited shelf lives, especially when theyre wrenched out of their birthplaces. Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications [25], Artists Repertory Theatre, located in Portland, Oregon, was to stage An Octoroon from September 3 to October 1, 2017. 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. 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. Appropriate/An Octoroon. By layering African-American history onto Greek myth, Richard constructs an alternative archeology of seeing to Topsysand Jacobs-Jenkinssexcavation of the minstrel show that is the plays main focus. There was excitement when it was announced that Theater for a New Audience would be restaging Ms. Bensons Soho Rep production, but also a certain apprehension. 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. An Octoroon, quite appropriately, ends in the dark. There is a coda, which members of the audience leaving the theatre (according to Jacobs-Jenkinss stage directions) might or might not see. As a symbol, the album suffuses the consciousness of both characters and audience. [44] The Native American Wahnotee is played by a white actor in redface. Pete is Paul's grandfather. Directed by Sarah Benson, in a style that perfectly matches its mutating content, An Octoroon is a shrewdly awkward riff on Dion Boucicaults The Octoroon (notice the change in article), a 19th-century chestnut about illicit interracial love. Mary Wiseman and Austin Smith in "An Octoroon. 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 . Maurya Wickstrom Zoe Peyton, , "The Octoroon", is the supposedly "freed" biological daughter of Judge Peyton, former owner of the plantation. In this moment Jacobs-Jenkins blurs illusion and reality by introducing the actors as actors and by inviting any spectators present (or at least readers) to imagine what the attitude of the twenty-first century actor playing Jim Crow might really be towards the part he has played. 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. [24], The Canadian premiere of An Octoroon was produced by The Shaw Festival for its 2017 season. . Possession, The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 4. While the minstrel show provides the bedrock of his dramatic archeology, Jacobs-Jenkins also exposes the later cultural and political stereotypes of blackness that have been layered onto the tropes of minstrelsy. Perhaps An Octoroon was best suited to a rough-edged performance in a tiny theater. 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. At the Plantation Terrebonne in Louisiana, Dido and Minnie chat about the arrival of George, and the passing of his uncle, their previous master. It is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, which premiered in 1859. 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. In addition to the resourceful Nwosu, who deserves to be honoured in end-of-the-year awards, there is a host of fine performances. They begin with the repertoire of minstrel shows and the comic roles played by black characters in the early films and television programs that succeeded them, move on to the repertoire of contemporary cultural stereotypes, and conclude with the repertoire of protest: They luvs when we dance, When we guffaws and slaps our thighs lak dis, When we be misprunoudenencing wards wrongs en stuff, When we make our eyes big and rolls em lak dis; When we be hummin in church and wear big hats and be like, Mmmm! . In An Octoroon, the projection of a "lynching photograph" is an attempt towards an actual experience of finality. The precise resemblance of the two visual images creates a palimpsestic layering that enables the audience to see the human reality of the black flesh and bones that the now pulpy photos represent. Bill Demastes Adaptation has increasingly become a major object of study by literary scholars. About their apparently imminent sale, for example, Dido says, This is about the worst damn day of my life! Austin Smith and Amber Gray in a scene from Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss play. Theatre Communications Group: New York, 2019), 7374. [40] Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 13. And try to guess who that is dressed up as a Beatrix Potter-style rabbit. 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. Stacy Wolf, Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Editorial Assistant: Cen Liu, Michael Y. Bennett [25] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Appropriate. 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.. [8] Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). Foster, Meta-melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicaults The Octoroon, Modern Drama 59, no. When a black actor in whiteface makes a racist remark (Georges reference to the folksy ways of the niggers down here, for example), the line is necessarily italicized and held up for the audiences critical inspection. Vol. And at the end of the act he holds a musical note so long that the cookie jar holding his fathers ashes explodes, releasing an enormous cloud of ash, whose haze should remain present for the rest of the play (289). 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. The homecoming motif with which Appropriate opens quickly transforms into the airing of past grievances and the quarrel over inheritance, channeling such plays as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Dividing the Estate. 1 (Fall 2018). [9] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, xvii, 6, 21. [42] Jacobs-Jenkins retains most of Boucicaults main characters and substantial amounts of his dialogue as well as his plot. As act 1 begins . Brer Rabbits gaze is designed to ensure that spectators take note of their own and each others responses to racist stereotypes presented as comic. The unseen photographs of lynchings in Appropriate anticipate the even more profoundly shocking real-life photograph of a lynching that audiences do see in An Octoroon. Ostensibly 19th-century slaves, their diction is so modern in its wit and inflection, they could easily be transplanted to any stoop in Bedford-Stuyvesant without causing much of a stir. DORA played by a white actress or an actress who can pass as white. Your email is never published nor shared. This strategy is most apparent in his depiction of the enslaved female characters, who are little more than comic props in The Octoroon. The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center The most overt of this is Zoe's status as an "Octoroon," a person who is one-eighth black. 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. Franz and River are startled by the waking of a figure on the couch, who turns out to be Rhys, Tonis son, just as Shelley is startled by Dodge, Vinces grandfather, whom she arouses from sleep. 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. The last date is today's Jacobs-Jenkins reframes Boucicault's play using its original characters and plot, speaking much of Boucicault's dialogue, and critiques its portrayal of race using Brechtian devices. 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. [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). The device of racial cross-casting inevitably creates a gap between actor and character, superimposing the stylization of Brechtian distance on the stylization of melodramatic stereotyping. http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/ (accessed 30 December 2016). A photograph of a real murdered human contrasts with the original play's use of a photograph for justice.[4]. Through the familiarity of the contemporary comic idiom Jacobs-Jenkins induces the audience to laughin effect, at slaveryand then to question their own and other audience members laughter. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. [41] Bottoms suggests that Buried Child is dealing metaphorically with Americas collective tendency to bury the intolerable memories of its bloody history of slavery and genocide, and so forth (The Theatre of Sam Shepard, 176). Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159. 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. 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. What ensues is an upside down, topsy-turvy world where race and morality are challenged and intensified. Topsy, Sambo, and Mammy (Zip is busy fighting Richard) recite a litany of what white people readily enjoy about black performance, staged or otherwise. I will discuss the three plays separately in order to bring out their distinctive qualities as intrageneric dramatic adaptations. Testify!, When we ax all sad and be like, Dats de bluez, When we say stuff lak, My baby mama!; They luvs it when we soliloquizing like, The white maaann!, The white man put me in jail!, I cant get out the ghettooooo!, Respect me, white maaaaan!, Cause Im so angrrryyyy! (31718). But Toni says, I always liked Grandmas stories. [51] Jacobs-Jenkinss well-attested concern with evoking strong and complicated individual responses from his audiences adds a new wrinkle to adaptation theory. 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. Daniel OConnell, Frederick Douglass, and Intersectionality, Public vs. More significant than these echoes is the familiar symbolic equation of the family home with America. As reported by one reviewer of Company Ones production of Neighbors in Boston in 2011, for example, the cast keeps you uncertain of whether youre expected to laugh or cringe, engage or retreat, and sends you off wondering why you reacted in whatever, inevitably complex ways you did.[18] Another reviewer of this production commented that it feels like we should applaud [the Crows] shtick as members of the fictional audience, but not as the actual audience.[19]. An Imperative Duty is a short realist novel by William Dean Howells published in 1891. The photo albums in Buried Child and Appropriate reveal what has been kept hidden. [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. In fact, Jacobs-Jenkins hits on so many ideas per minute, you'll wish you had a little more time to catch your breath. [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. Strange as it seems, a work based on a terminally dated play from more than 150 years ago may turn out to be this decades most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today. 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. Richard believes that Agamemnon, a new breed of Achaean, should have resisted and saved hisRichard, distraught, slips and says, mydaughter (292, 293). In the mid-twentieth century, much of the pioneering work consisted in studies, both practical and theoretical, of the adaptation of novels into film. So B J J puts on whiteface, the better to portray both the hero (the idealistic young heir to a plantation) and villain (a wicked, lust-ridden, newly rich overseer). Word Count: 356. The evening starts with a confrontation between the two authors. I can't afford one." More literally educational are Richards lectures on Greek tragedy, which can be seen as his form of performance, or his interludes. . Even the title shows this sense of exhaustion with the abundance of the race question and critics viewing his work through a racial lens. The two scream expletives at each other Marina- and Ulay-style before BJJ gives up and they begin the play in earnest. Mr. Jacobs-Jenkinss central point here as it was in his Neighbors and Appropriate is that we dont even have the vocabulary to discuss what continues to divide Americans according to skin color. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. Beth Osborne "You're melodramatic," BJJ screams into a mirror. 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. The same can be said about Wahnotee's love for Paul, a young slave. 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). Ed. [34] Tracy Letts, August: Osage County (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 12324. Moments later, he reveals, "Just kidding. Checking on the audiences reactions is a whimsical giant Brer Rabbit (clearly an authorial figure and originally played by Jacobs-Jenkins himself) who wanders through the show at will, staring at the spectators (much as the Crows stare at their audience at the end of Neighbors). BJJ clarifies that in the time of the play, a photograph was a novel/innovative/contemporary way for the plot to be resolved. [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. As well as giving vigorous contemporary voices to Dido, Minnie, and Grace, Jacobs-Jenkins replaces their unquestioning loyalty to their owners in Boucicaults play with aspirations and dreams of their own. Robert Vorlicky In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon." Themes. Most of the black works we have read that touch on race have been incredibly serious dramas, but Jacobs-Jenkins is able to depict racial issues while still giving the reader a good laugh. An Obie award winner, it seemed to confirm the reputation of its author as one of this countrys most original and illuminating writers about race. View our Privacy Policy. 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. But as well as preserving much of Boucicaults work, not least his artistic focus in manipulating his audiences emotions, Jacobs-Jenkins incorporates his own words with Boucicaults, transforms melodramatic techniques into Brechtian techniques, and uses racially cross-cast actors in whiteface, blackface, and redface, inviting audiences to join him in excavating the plays different levels of meaning and to see them simultaneously. The plays opening sequence, however, invites the audience to adopt a critical stance to what they are about to see, especially in those moments when Jacobs-Jenkinss layering of a new meaning over an old motif makes itself most sharply felt, giving Appropriate its revisionist edge. 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). In Neighbors Jacobs-Jenkins updates blackface minstrelsy; in Appropriate he borrows, or appropriates, characters, situations, and motifs from every play that [he] liked in the genre of American family drama in order to cook the pot to see what happens;[2] and in An Octoroon he adapts Dion Boucicaults nineteenth-century melodrama The Octoroon as his own meta-melodrama. Jacobs-Jenkins has commented that these three plays are all kind of like me dealing with something very specific, which has to do with the history of theater and blackness in America and form.[3] In a more recent interview Jacobs-Jenkins sharpens his earlier ideas about theatrical form in a striking image that will inform the rest of this essay; he says that he thinks of genre or old forms as interesting artifacts that invite a kind of archeology of seeing.[4]. [ 2 ], Jacobs-Jenkins also cites Peter Brooks ' the Melodramatic Imagination as an inspiration for his approach melodrama... 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