Reviewer Chase Quinn observed that the audience at Soho Rep was in an unceasing state of anxiety, as each audience member was left to negotiate for him or herself when and how much to laugh. 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. Jacobs-Jenkins further makes The Octoroon fit for its twenty-first century theatrical environment through the adaptive processes of transmotivation, transfocalization, and transvalorization described by Genette. While An Octoroon revisits many of these themes, it does so in a more formally challenging way. The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center An Imperative Duty is a short realist novel by William Dean Howells published in 1891. 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). 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. As a symbol, the album suffuses the consciousness of both characters and audience. 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. When it opened in May to ecstatic reviews, An Octoroon became one of the towns hottest tickets. At the Plantation Terrebonne in Louisiana, Dido and Minnie chat about the arrival of George, and the passing of his uncle, their previous master. [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. 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. BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant explain the significance of the fourth act, the sensation scene in melodrama. 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. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. http://www.signaturetheatre.org/News/An-Archeology-of-Seeing.aspx (accessed 19 May 2017). Jims performance, so admired by Melody that she gives the dazed Jim a blowjob, seems, according to Jacobs-Jenkinss stage directions, designed to be genuinely remarkable and worthy of the theatre audiences admiration as well as Melodys. What ensues is an upside down, topsy-turvy world where race and morality are challenged and intensified. Searching him, George finds the letter which resolves the conflict of Terrebonne's future. Over the course of the play the album is passed from one family member to another, eliciting various white responses (including shock, disgust, curiosity, fascination, disregard, aversion) as each of them has to try to find a way to deal with what it represents about their father, their family history, their own racial attitudesand whether or not they can sell the photos for a substantial sum as collectors items. 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. 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. 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. Even more thoroughly than in Neighbors and Appropriate, adapted work and adaptation bleed into one another. 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). Toni returns from Atlanta, Bo and Rachael from New York, and Franz and River from Portland. This is Terrebonne, a Louisiana plantation that George Peyton (Myers in whiteface) inherited after the death of his uncle, the Judge. 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. Pete is Paul's grandfather. Present in An Octoroon is the illusion of suffering and actual suffering. The Octoroon is a drama of plantation life and miscegenation in antebellum America, written by an Irishman who visited the South. 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. Anyone can read what you share. [15] Zip struggles to transport an armful of musical instruments, drops them, and with his pants falling down finally succeeds in carrying a bugle in his anus. [9] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, xvii, 6, 21. 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). [19] Nancy Grossman, Company One Wants You to Meet the Neighbors, Broadway World, 17 January 2011. http://www.broadwayworld.com/boston/article/Company-One-Wants-You-to-Meet-the-Neighbors-20110117 (accessed 5 December 2016). Jim Crows song and dance, while not one of the formal Interludes, is a case in point. This place has historyour history.[25] If the plantation clearly symbolizes Americas history, the members of the Lafayette family represent its contemporary cultural geography. The audience is catapulted into a space that plays to their stereotypes and questions our societys relationship to humanity and our history. Adaptation is a creative, interpretative, and political act. 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. For the details of this argument see Verna A. It all culminates in a thrillingly ridiculous duel with himself (ingeniously choreographed by J. David Brimmer). Tonis diatribes may be more unrelenting than Violets in August: Osage County, but the two matriarchal figures engage in similarly vitriolic attacks against members of their family. Its all too easy to slip into a pratfall. 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. 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]. 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?" [17] On white obsession with black male bodies in minstrel shows, see Lott, Love and Theft, 3, 9. Mary Wiseman and Austin Smith in "An Octoroon. 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! On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 2 (2017): 151. At the end of the play the Crow Family Minstrels do not give us the comeback show that their rehearsals have perhaps led us to expect but something much more radical. Cellist Lester St. Louis helps create the dun dun dun with his live accompaniment, which underscores much of the show. Our Essay Lab can help you tackle any essay assignment within seconds, whether youre studying Macbeth or the American Revolution. Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer, 2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center One, simply called BJJ, explains the dilemmas facing a writer of colour whose every word is mined for its racial significance; the other figure, representing Boucicault, is a drunken showman who has no such self-doubt. Kim Marra 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. The implicit contrast is hilarious, and harrowing. 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. 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. 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. The family return after their fathers/grandfathers death to the old family home in Arkansas: a decaying mansion with ancestral and slave graveyards on the property of what was once a plantation. 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. *thunder clap*. Pete sends Paul to go find a letter that would promise enough money to save Terrebonne. But Jacobs-Jenkins finds a good balance between drama and comedy, which shows that he can maneuver previous ideas set by racial thinking to fit his own style while still being respectful to his predecessors. Most distinctively in An Octoroon and with far-reaching dramaturgical consequences, Jacobs-Jenkins racially cross-casts several of the characters. 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. 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). 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. Pete, George, and Dora acquaint themselves when Zoe enters to meet George. Stay abreast of discount offers for great theater, on Broadway or in select cities. "Branden is like a performer whose material is text," Benson observes. [44] Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, Theatre Journal 69, no. While posing, MClosky comes from behind and kills Paul to take the letter. [36] Sam Shepard, Buried Child. It is in the interstices between adapted work and adaptation, or to use Jacobs-Jenkinss archeological metaphor, in the stratigraphy, that the important cultural and political work of adaptation takes place. Boucicaults melodrama was a great hit in its day but is now almost never performed, except possibly as a camp diversion for private amusement. 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. 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. Richard is horrified by the Crow familys moving in next door. I will discuss the three plays separately in order to bring out their distinctive qualities as intrageneric dramatic adaptations. 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. Try it today! For instance, a white baby doll, standing in for an infant slave, is given a partly blacked-up face. [2] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, quoted. "An Octoroon" and the Modern Black and Green Atlantic As both the most recent text of the course as well as our last, I think Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's "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. The evil overseer M'Closky (Myers) desires Zoe for himself and plots to re-enslave her to Terrebonne and buy her at a forthcoming creditors' auction. 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. Myers gives a tour de force in his triple roles as the blas black playwright, the charming leading man, and the mustachioed villain. (During the lecture the audience can hear Melody giving her blowjob to Jim Crow.) An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Robert Vorlicky 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 . Download the entire The Octoroon study guide as a printable PDF! [51] Jacobs-Jenkinss well-attested concern with evoking strong and complicated individual responses from his audiences adds a new wrinkle to adaptation theory. Foster, Suzan-Lori Parkss Staging of the Lincoln Myth in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 17, no. Jacobs-Jenkins shines a light on the politics of the plays stratigraphy by explaining directly to his audience the features of the genre he is adapting. Then Playwright and Assistant put on redface and blackface paint. 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 whole of An Octoroon (first produced in 2014 and remounted in 2015 by Soho Rep in New York) works through an even more radical process of layering and drawing attention to the gaps between layers to produce this kind of multiple seeing. [11] Jacobs-Jenkins grew up in a home full of black memorabilia such as mammy dolls and Colored Only signs, according to Laura Collins-Hughes in Provocative Play Sees the Faces Behind the Blackface, The Boston Globe, 16 January 2011. http://archive.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2011/01/16/neighbors_exposes_racial_history_on_stage/ (accessed 5 December 2016). 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. But this is not all. Wahnotee murders MClosky. 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. Adler adds that the nations guilty past in Buried Child might be racism, or religious and ethnic prejudice, or . As such, among many other things, it provides a dramatization of and peek at the plantation pecking order in . Jacobs-Jenkinss excavations in this play are broad rather than deep and as much literary as theatrical or performative. the Vietnam War. Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, 121. England, England, Front Of House at Prince of Wales Theatre Racial thinking has the potential to limit black authors to a very specific style because of fears of being insensitive to racial issues as youve hinted at. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. The tension slackens slightly in the second half when Jacobs-Jenkins summarises Boucicaults sensational climax. 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. Looking back over the semester, I thought it was only fitting to end on An Octoroon. Not only does it apply multiple themes from across the class, even going all the way back to January, but it brings all this history together to put his own spin on it, making parts of the play nearly incomprehensible without the proper context of these older texts and plays. . The gap between tone and content is at once disturbingly funny and appalling. In addition to the resourceful Nwosu, who deserves to be honoured in end-of-the-year awards, there is a host of fine performances. The effect, according to the stage directions, is supposed to be absolutely nothing less than utter, utter transcendence (310). Maybe they giggle (319). 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. 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The dead patriarch has counterparts in Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Beverly in August: Osage County, both of whom are absent (dying or dead) for much of their respective plays. Humana Festival 2013 The Complete Plays, edited by Amy Wegener and Sarah Lunnie (New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2014), 146. Summary. Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. That sense of uncertainty is part of the fun. 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! The owner, Mr. Peyton . Topsys Interlude late in the play (labeled Interlude/Interruption [309] to mark its difference from the other Interludes) contributes in a different way to Jacobs-Jenkinss creation of an archeology of seeing in Neighbors. This is the type of play I would love to dissect for a thesis project! [50] Chase Quinn, Laughing (and Crying, and Laughing Again) about Slavery, Hyperallergic 24 February 2015. http.//hyperallergic.com/185346/laughing-and-crying-and-laughing-again-about-slavery/ (accessed 20 May 2015). This leads to a hilarious scene in which he switches between the two characters engaged in a fight to the death. An Octoroon is weird in all the right ways, but it's also just so clever! From the get-go, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins is cannily exploiting the assumption of false identity that is the starting point for theater, to make us question who is who or who is what. He's quickly echoed in a snide tone by a white onlooker, who just so happens to be Dion Boucicault (Danny Wolohan). Zoe Peyton, , "The Octoroon", is the supposedly "freed" biological daughter of Judge Peyton, former owner of the plantation. An Octoroon is set way down yonder in the land of cotton during the antebellum period. 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. [17], The representations of minstrelsy in Neighbors send ambiguousor multilayeredmessages to the plays audiences, who have responded accordingly with embarrassed, confused, and uncertain laughter or have not known whether they should laugh at all. 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). 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. Before he died, the Judge granted Zoe's freedom. 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. date the date you are citing the material. [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". 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. In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon." Themes. 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). Start your 48-hour free trial to get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts. "[2] This examination of race as a social construct is also in Appropriate and Neighbors. 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