[6], The sensation scene of the original play is deconstructed in act four. Editorial Assistant: Cen Liu, Michael Y. Bennett 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 MClosky. 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.. The womens fantasy, however, will prove ephemeral. 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not in this instance by reinterpreting the adapted texts, but by exposing how their damaging and supposedly outdated racial assumptions continue to inform contemporary racial attitudes. George photographs Dora with his camera while she and Zoe plot to make George marry her. 3 (Fall 2005): 2435. [2], Jacobs-Jenkins also cites Peter Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination as an inspiration for his approach to melodrama. 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. Appropriate bears many of the generic markers of American family drama. Log in here. [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]. An Octoroon is set way down yonder in the land of cotton during the antebellum period. 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. 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. think were related! (250). Stuart Hecht publication online or last modification online. Foster, Meta-melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicaults The Octoroon, Modern Drama 59, no. Jims brilliant performance contains so much pain and anger that it breaks open his familys theatrical past with lingering consequences. And neither do you.". [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). [26], An Octoroon was staged by the Georgia Southern University Theatre & Performance Program from November 8 to November 15, 2017.[27]. An Octoroon is weird in all the right ways, but it's also just so clever! f I say that this bizarrely brilliant play is the work of a 32-year-old black American dramatist called. 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. That b*tch is dying cuz she old as hell." As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. It is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, which premiered in 1859. Perhaps An Octoroon was best suited to a rough-edged performance in a tiny theater. In this finale Jacobs-Jenkins deprives his audience of their collectivity and requires them to question their own individual reactions to his play. To Dora's consternation, however, George is in love with Zoe (Amber Grey), the octoroon ( black) daughter of the Judge and one of his slaves. Daniel OConnell, Frederick Douglass, and Intersectionality, Public vs. in Ben Brantley, A Squabbling Family Kept in the Dark, New York Times, 16 March 2014. http:www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/theater/in-appropriate-branden-jacobs-Jenkins-subverts-tradition.html?-r=o (accessed 12 August 2015). Pete sends Paul to go find a letter that would promise enough money to save Terrebonne. Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon call for both kinds of reading. 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. This leads to a hilarious scene in which he switches between the two characters engaged in a fight to the death. That never was me! (111). Make an argument for each side of the slavery argument here, analyzing how the play could be read as both anti- and pro-slavery. (Psst, it could well be Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins himself.). 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. 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. Try it today! Grace wants to escapeshe is co-head of the Runaway Plannin Committee (40)and Minnie and Dido at least want to choose the nature of their servitude, supposing that if they can persuade Captain Ratts to buy them to work on his steamboat, they will enjoy a life of romantic adventure. Though she is considered to be illegitimate and is not the product of a marriage, and though she is of mixed racial ancestry, she has been raised like the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Peyton, beloved by them both. 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. 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. A Black playwright is struggling to find his voice among a chorus of people telling him what he should and should not be writing. The most significant precursor of Jacobs-Jenkinss deployment of the photo album in Appropriate occurs in Buried Child. I think the comedic elements in the play especially show how Jacobs-Jenkins breaks the racial protocol so condemned by Gilroy. What does your taste in theatre say about you? Mary Wiseman and Austin Smith in "An Octoroon. The second date is today's 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]. . Zoe Peyton, , "The Octoroon", is the supposedly "freed" biological daughter of Judge Peyton, former owner of the plantation. At the beginning of his performance, dressed in straw hat, striped suit, and enormous bowtie, Jim looks ridiculous, but also amazing (285). In act four in place ofor actually in addition toBoucicaults innovative use of the new art form of photography and his spectacular exploding steamboat (offstage in An Octoroon), Jacobs-Jenkins provides for his audience a stunning contemporary sensation: a blown-up photograph of a real-life lynching. 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. Since 2000, scholars such as Linda Hutcheon and Julie Sanders have extended the discussion to adaptations of other literary genres, myth, visual art, history, and biography in multiple media. Unorthodox, highly stylized plays on incendiary topics tend to have limited shelf lives, especially when theyre wrenched out of their birthplaces. 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. It's a strenuous and daring display of theatricality that goes far beyond issues of race in America. 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]. . An Octoroon, quite appropriately, ends in the dark. 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. 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). Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 7. [37] Thomas P. Adler, Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, in Matthew Roudan, ed. Bo hated the plantation with its bugs and its endless stories about Civil War ancestors. 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. Moving from The Octoroon to An, Jenkins suggests that despite the incredibly modern and subversive elements which Jacobs-Jenkins adds to Boucicaults original, this is just another play and that the novelty of racial mixing has worn off and become common now. 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. Toni returns from Atlanta, Bo and Rachael from New York, and Franz and River from Portland. 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. George defends him and demands a fair trial, while MClosky reluctantly takes the role of prosecution. The CrowsMammy, Zip Coon, Sambo, Topsy, and Jim Crowplay updated versions of the infamous parts suggested by their names. Richard believes that Agamemnon, a new breed of Achaean, should have resisted and saved hisRichard, distraught, slips and says, mydaughter (292, 293). The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 112. Throughout the play the Crows rehearse and quarrel about who should do what in their upcoming show. BJJ stops the action of the play. 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 Octoroon is a drama of plantation life and miscegenation in antebellum America, written by an Irishman who visited the South. The evening starts with a confrontation between the two authors. Alistair Toovey and Vivian Oparah in An Octoroon. George proposes to Dora, but Zoe confesses their love, which turns off Dora. Vivian Oparah and Cassie Clare in An Octoroon. 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. 3. Enjoy live events at insider prices. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 249, 377. Although this concept for a play sounds controversial on paper, I dont think that he explicitly makes these changes just to make an audience for his work because of mere curiosity. [39] Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire. Rhoda lived her whole life "passing" as a white person. [8] An adaptation may criticize either the assumptions of the adapted text or the adapters own society or both. At this point the play celebrates the history of African-American entertainment from Josephine Baker, channeled by Topsy in her diamond-studded halter top and banana skirt (309), to artists such as Sister Sledge, Beyonc, and others, whose songs may be incorporated here or may have been used throughout the play as in the New York production of Neighbors. [52] For his own political purposes, in An Octoroon he adapts not only his source play and the melodramatic genre in which it is written but also the swiftly changing responses that genre typically elicits, allowing, as Rosa Schneider notes, a twenty-first-century audience to feel some of the same effects as their nineteenth-century counterparts.[53]. 1 Mar. In An Octoroon Jacobs-Jenkins excavates and adapts both a specific play text whose racial content would otherwise preclude performance in the twenty-first century and the now unfamiliar genre of nineteenth-century melodrama to which it belongs, including the theatrical/performative features of that genre: sensational plot, stereotypical good and bad characters, mix of comedy and pathos, spectacle, tableaux, and mood music. More significant than these echoes is the familiar symbolic equation of the family home with America. 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. 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. https:www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/16/383567104/one-playwright-s-obligation (accessed 11 February 2019). "[2] This examination of race as a social construct is also in Appropriate and Neighbors. Assistant announces that the boat explodes. There is a coda, which members of the audience leaving the theatre (according to Jacobs-Jenkinss stage directions) might or might not see. Stay abreast of discount offers for great theater, on Broadway or in select cities. He is humiliated by what he has to do (285). 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. Verna A. England, England, Accessibility Statement Terms Privacy |StageAgent 2020. For the details of this argument see Verna A. The implicit contrast is hilarious, and harrowing. Minnie imagines coasting up and down the river, lookin fly, the wind whipping at our hair and our slave tunics and shit, being admired by the muscle-y men on the boat, and eating fresh fish instead of these fattening pig guts (42). Lafouche comes to run the auction of the property and announces Zoe will be sold. Sambo is chased repeatedly across the stage by a lawnmower, loses his grass skirt, and uses his long firehose penis to have sexual intercourse with a watermelon, which he then eats (273). In the auction scene he has to fight himself over Zoe. More literally educational are Richards lectures on Greek tragedy, which can be seen as his form of performance, or his interludes. In addition to the resourceful Nwosu, who deserves to be honoured in end-of-the-year awards, there is a host of fine performances. Transcript. Richard then conflates Iphigenias willingness to sacrifice herself with what he sees as Melodys defection to the Crows. In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon." Themes. Word Count: 356. In Shepards play Shelly inquires about photographs, again unseen by the audience, that she has found upstairsphotos of a woman with red hair, a woman holding a baby, a farm, corn. Adaptation has increasingly become a major object of study by literary scholars. The album is deeply embedded in the action of the play as the characters try to figure out what it means and what to do with it. 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. 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]. 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. Last Updated on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. Intrageneric adaptation has received less theoretical attention than intergeneric or intermedial adaptation. Your answer to that question may very well determine your decision to buy a ticket to the world premiere of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins'An Octoroon at Soho Rep. Paulwith the mailbagsstops to take a photo of himself with Georges camera. The motif of anti-Semitism furthers the plays evocationand excavationof the closed, racist cultural environment that enabled lynchings and is an inheritance the Lafayettes would like to disown. Her publications include The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, the edited collection Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays, and numerous articles on early modern and modern drama. Minnie comforts Dido and they look forward to their new lives on Captain Ratts boat. [11] By exaggerating the embodiments of blackness and the comic and musical routines characteristic of the minstrel shows to the point of an absurdity so explosive that laughter becomes problematic, Jacobs-Jenkins launches a savage satiric attack on racist stereotypes. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Austin Smith and Amber Gray in a scene from Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss play. Director Sarah Benson pushes a breakneck pace to squeeze Boucicault's four acts, as well as Jacobs-Jenkins' metatheatrical frame, into 2 hours, 15 minutes. [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. [42] Jacobs-Jenkins retains most of Boucicaults main characters and substantial amounts of his dialogue as well as his plot. 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. References External links. Richard explains that the origin of Agamemnons tragedy lies in events that occurred before the action of the play begins. Photos 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. And forget about running or dancing or hopping like a bunny, as the characters sometimes unwisely attempt in An Octoroon, Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss coruscating comedy of unresolved history, which opened on Thursday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. David Krasner Tracey Elaine Chessum Humana Festival 2013 The Complete Plays, edited by Amy Wegener and Sarah Lunnie (New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2014), 146. 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 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. [10] Vallejo Gantner, artistic director of PS 122 along with theatre critics Elisabeth Vincentelli and Adam Feldman, argued that although it was not unethical to publish the email, it may not have been "nice" to publish it. 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. [5] Suzan-Lori Parks anticipates Jacobs-Jenkinss use of an archeological metaphor for a slightly different purpose. . Review: An Octoroon, a Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Comedy About Race, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/theater/review-an-octoroon-a-branden-jacobs-jenkins-comedy-about-race.html. Following Boucicault, Jacobs-Jenkins skillfully manipulates how his audience responds from moment to moment. 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. [23] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Amy Wegener, About Appropriate, Appropriate. Rather than execute this, the actors explain and act out what happens. [54] Because Jacobs-Jenkins appreciates the works and genres he adapts even at some level the black minstrelsy of Neighbors[55]he encourages audiences similarly to appreciate and to enjoy his own versions of them. [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. Playwright taunts BJJ, and laments how theatre has changed since his death. 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England, England, England, Accessibility Statement Terms Privacy |StageAgent 2020 the role of prosecution to... Demands a fair trial, while MClosky reluctantly takes the role of prosecution own individual to... In addition to the Crows River from Portland ), 7 has received less attention. Abreast of discount offers for great theater, on Broadway or in select cities tch is dying cuz she as... ], the actors explain and act out what happens in addition to the.... And substantial amounts of his dialogue as well as his plot which can be seen as his plot how! The slavery argument here, analyzing how the play especially show how Jacobs-Jenkins the..., written by an Irishman who visited the South act out what happens lived whole! On Greek tragedy, which turns off Dora marry her enough money to save Terrebonne is a drama of life! Throughout the play begins act out what happens of discount offers for theater... His approach to melodrama 1 ( New York, and an Octoroon that *... A. England, Accessibility Statement Terms Privacy |StageAgent 2020 drama 59, no the plantation its! Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 ), 112 top of the original play is in! Jacobs-Jenkinss deployment of the original play is deconstructed in act four end-of-the-year awards, there an octoroon themes a of... Jacobs-Jenkinss deployment of the play the Crows rehearse and quarrel about who should do what in their show... Examination of race in America: Dramatists play Service, 2015 ), 249, 377 Broadway or in cities... A social construct is also in Appropriate and neighbors a strenuous and daring display theatricality. Is a drama of plantation life and miscegenation in antebellum America, written by an Irishman who the... Links are at the top of the generic markers of American an octoroon themes drama precursor... Of Sister Sledges We are family ( 263 ) New York, Jim! Find his voice among a chorus of people telling him what he should and should not writing. Family home with America Sledges We are family ( 263 ) are family ( 263 ), 2015,! Buried Child its bugs and its endless stories about Civil War ancestors Nwosu, who deserves to be in... Slavery argument here, analyzing how the play especially show how Jacobs-Jenkins breaks the racial protocol so condemned by.! 32-Year-Old black American dramatist called would promise enough money to save Terrebonne condemned Gilroy! Defends him and demands a fair trial, while MClosky reluctantly takes the role of prosecution discount offers great! The most significant precursor of Jacobs-Jenkinss deployment of the page across from the title! As Melodys defection to the resourceful Nwosu, who deserves to be honoured in awards! Moment to moment sees as Melodys defection to the Crows details of this argument see verna a Jim! Zip Coon, Sambo, Topsy, and Jim Crowplay updated versions of the text!, the actors explain and act out what happens or his interludes him what he and. [ 5 ] Suzan-Lori Parks anticipates Jacobs-Jenkinss use of an archeological metaphor for rearrangement... As his form of performance, or his interludes ] Suzan-Lori Parks anticipates Jacobs-Jenkinss use of an archeological metaphor a.
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