But the questions it never stops posing light up a very murky night. Most distinctively in An Octoroon and with far-reaching dramaturgical consequences, Jacobs-Jenkins racially cross-casts several of the characters. Besides, it was being almost entirely recast for the new production, and there was concern that the original chemistry might evaporate. For much of the play Jim Crow refuses to take on the eponymous role of his late father, though by the end he too performs his part in a rousing version of the minstrel song and dance number Jump Jim Crow, his new-found talent inspired apparently by the admiration of Melody.[14]. This is Terrebonne, a Louisiana plantation that George Peyton (Myers in whiteface) inherited after the death of his uncle, the Judge. Most notably with its racially swapped casting, Jacobs-Jenkins uses this practice as a means to show that race is somewhat arbitrary and a social construct. David Krasner Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 41. Dido replies, "No. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. [40] The photo album in Appropriate, by contrast, belies the apparent absence of blackness in the play by embodying and giving it an explosive motivating power that forces the white characters to confront a legacy of racism that they prefer not to acknowledge. Foster, Suzan-Lori Parkss Staging of the Lincoln Myth in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 17, no. For instance, a white baby doll, standing in for an infant slave, is given a partly blacked-up face. 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. 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. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. An Octoroon most closely adheres to, though it also transcends, Hutcheons definition of an adaptation as an extended, announced, deliberate revisitation of a particular work of art. Neighbors and Appropriate expand the parameters of adaptation in other ways, the former by adapting and recontextualizing an historical form of popular entertainment, the latter by adapting not a particular play, but an entire dramatic subgenre. B J J isnt the only undressed playwright onstage for long. "An Octoroon" begins with BJJ an onstage realization of the melodrama's playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins talking to his imaginary therapist about the public's tendency to view most of his. He is humiliated by what he has to do (285). As a symbol, the album suffuses the consciousness of both characters and audience. Boucicault portrayed Wahnotee, and in his play Jacobs-Jenkins explores the connection between a person and their identity as artist. 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". Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. BJJ stops the action of the play. 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. [1] [37] Thomas P. Adler, Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, in Matthew Roudan, ed. Adler adds that the nations guilty past in Buried Child might be racism, or religious and ethnic prejudice, or . Its story, of a romantic plantation owner and the girl of mixed race he adores, was set in the Old South the land of cotton, a kingdom built on the labor of African slaves. The gap between tone and content is at once disturbingly funny and appalling. The Octoroon Themes Racial Identification and Discrimination Set in the pre-Civil War South, The Octoroondeals heavily with racial themes. [49] Merrill and Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, 152. "An Octoroon," which opened in 2014 at Soho Rep. in New York, won an Obie award for best new American play. In August: Osage County, for example, Barbara conflates the decay of home and family with the decay of America: This country, this experiment, America, this hubris: what a lament, if no one saw it go.[34] In Dividing the Estate when family members, no longer able to depend on money from their land, contemplate getting jobs at Whataburger, schoolteacher Pauline comments, Thats what they say America is becoming, you know, a service economy.[35] And in Buried Child when Shelly tells Vince that his home is like a Norman Rockwell cover, Vince replies, Its American.[36] This American house with its fraught relationships and dark secrets is explicitly Vinces inheritance (128), willed to him by his grandfather, Dodge. Similarly, Ben Horner (in blackface) gives committed performances in the dual roles of Uncle Tom-esque Pete and adorable slave boy Paul. At the Plantation Terrebonne in Louisiana, Dido and Minnie chat about the arrival of George, and the passing of his uncle, their previous master. Boucicaults melodrama was a great hit in its day but is now almost never performed, except possibly as a camp diversion for private amusement. 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! The next time we see River, she has taken over the kitchen as Shelly eventually does to make bouillon for Dodge. 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). Jacobs-Jenkins developed his take on The Octoroon while he was a Dorothy Strelsin Fellow at Soho Rep in the 2009/10 season. 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. 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. 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. Three Plays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 76. Sign up today to unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. [52] See Foster, Meta-melodrama, 30001. Old times there, it seems, are not forgotten at all. Intrageneric adaptation has received less theoretical attention than intergeneric or intermedial adaptation. The detailed variations on this theme multiply into dizziness. 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. At the same time by theorizing and teaching his audience about the history of blackface entertainment through the dialogue of the minstrels themselves, Jacobs-Jenkins invites a more dispassionate Brechtian evaluation of the emotionally charged minstrel show devices he depicts. 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. 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. (No.) "Branden is like a performer whose material is text," Benson observes. publication in traditional print. 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). The most overt of this is Zoe's status as an "Octoroon," a person who is one-eighth black. After setting a pile of leaves on fire with a cigarette, Mammy puts out the fire with milk spurting from her enormous breasts, with which she also feeds two white babies, twirling them around in the air from her appendages. Our Essay Lab can help you tackle any essay assignment within seconds, whether youre studying Macbeth or the American Revolution. . 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. Also, it's incredibly funny. [43] In all three plays Jacobs-Jenkins adds innovative techniques to the toolbox available to theatrical adaptation and further wrinkles to adaptation theory. 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 photo albums in Buried Child and Appropriate reveal what has been kept hidden. all the way back to the grave (112). It toys with the plot of Dion Boucicault's 19th century play "The Octoroon . 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. Unlike most of the plays of the time, however, the central "tragic action" of the play centers not around the fate of a Pete, George, and Dora acquaint themselves when Zoe enters to meet George. 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. [7] Grard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). [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]. That never was me! (111). Stuart Hecht 3 (Fall 2005): 2435. 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]. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. This led Jacobs-Jenkins to see doubles and pairs in Boucicault's play, through relationships between characters e.g. In scenes added to Boucicaults play Jacobs-Jenkins humanizes Dido, Minnie, and Grace by giving them distinct backgrounds and personalities and voices, desires, and agency of their own. [6] Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. The archeology of Appropriate (2013) works in a rather different way. After the conclusion of their show the Crows take a curtain call, but that is not the end. An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. I can't afford one." [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. ", The book is about a "Tragic Mulatta" character, a stereotype used by 19th-century American authors to explore racial miscegenation. This leads to a hilarious scene . 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. The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 112. [10] Simultaneous tak[ing] in implies the audiences experiential engagement with what they see and hear; consideration of separate layers (as in archeology) requires Brechtian critical distance and analysis. Toni complains that she has always done most of the work; Rachael believes that her father-in-law was anti-Semitic. Zoe heads out to the slave quarters to ask Dido for poison. [5] Suzan-Lori Parks anticipates Jacobs-Jenkinss use of an archeological metaphor for a slightly different purpose. Esther Kim Lee Ariel Nereson As an object, the album is constantly presented to the audiences view and its unseen contents to their imagination. For his research into Boucicaults aesthetic principles and into melodrama see Foster, Meta-melodrama, 286, 290, 293 and Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something.. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: 'theatre is about controversial ideas', Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Such plays, with their focus on family dysfunction and buried secrets,[23] include Eugene ONeills Long Days Journey into Night, Tennessee Williamss Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sam Shepards Buried Child, Horton Footes Dividing the Estate, and Tracy Lettss August: Osage County. [19], Dobama Theater in Cleveland Heights, Ohio presented An Octoroon from October 21, 2016 to November 13, 2016, directed by Nathan Motta[20], The first West Coast premiere of An Octoroon was held at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed by Eric Ting with Sydney Morton in the title role. They give an almost Brechtian commentary on the main plot while letting us in on their own lives as slaves: While sweeping up the cotton, Minnie asks, "You really think Mrs. Peyton's upstairs dying from heartbreak?" In "An Octoroon," the projection of a lynching photograph grounds this playfully postmodern riff on Dion Boucicault's "The Octoroon" in historical horror. [2] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, quoted. . An Imperative Duty Full text HTML version scanned from 1893 edition published by Harper . The blown-up photograph of a real-life lynchingagainst which background George makes an impassioned defense of Wahnotee against the wild and lawless proceeding of lynch-law (51)is profoundly shocking but also positions spectators as complicit in the voyeuristic gaze of the photographs enthralled white gawkers.[50], While this is the most disturbing moment in the play, there is no ambiguity about the kind of horrified response called for by the photograph of the lynching. 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. The audience is catapulted into a space that plays to their stereotypes and questions our societys relationship to humanity and our history. [18] Jason Rabin, Stage Review: Neighbors at Company One, Blast Magazine, 14 January 2011. http://blastmagazine.com/2011/01/14/stage-review-neighbors-at-company-one/ (accessed 27 April 2017). Even the title shows this sense of exhaustion with the abundance of the race question and critics viewing his work through a racial lens. Research Playwrights, Librettists, Composers and Lyricists. 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. [13] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Neighbors. 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. 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. 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. 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. In creating his plays Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has repeatedly chosen to rewrite, adapt, or otherwise appropriate earlier theatrical styles or dramatic texts. 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. [21] At the same time, as Charles Isherwood of the New York Times notes, Jacobs-Jenkinss contextualization of the performances of these later artists within Topsys act suggests that they too can be seen as just another form of minstrelsy. 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. But Toni says, I always liked Grandmas stories. 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. Then Playwright and Assistant put on redface and blackface paint. Though she is legally a slave and the property of Mr. Peyton, she has not been treated as one; he tried to free her, not realizing that a legal loophole prevented it. 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]. Her neighbor, Eunice, describes the plantation house matter-of-factly as a great big place with white columns; Stanley boasts that he pulled Stella down off them columns, and she loved it.[39] In Suzan-Lori Parkss Topdog/Underdog a raggedy family photo album (13), its photos also unseen, represents the uncertain history of brothers Linc and Booth and symbolizes as well the absence of African Americans from American history. A plate from George's camera is presented, showing both Paul sitting, and MClosky murdering him is presented and proves M'Closky's guilt. In her 1994 essay Possession, she argues that it is necessary to dig for bones in order to locate and recreate unrecorded African-American history. [6], The sensation scene of the original play is deconstructed in act four. 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. Minnie and Dido realize all the other slaves ran away. [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. 1 Mar. Alistair Toovey and Vivian Oparah in An Octoroon. More significant than these echoes is the familiar symbolic equation of the family home with America. A theatrical, melodramatic reality is created to tell the story of an octoroon woman (a person who is black) named Zoe and her quest for identity and love. The implicit contrast is hilarious, and harrowing. At the same time his plays push the boundaries of what adaptation can accomplish and offer further refinements to the current discourse on adaptation theory. 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. Abbey Theatre, Dublin . [45] Similarly, the old slave Pete (in blackface) clearly performs his role as loyal house slave. He's quickly echoed in a snide tone by a white onlooker, who just so happens to be Dion Boucicault (Danny Wolohan). I washed it away (97). In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon." Themes. That, however, is only the bare outline of a work that is infinitely playful and deeply serious and which dazzlingly questions the nature of theatrical illusion. 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. 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. Minnie comforts Dido and they look forward to their new lives on Captain Ratts boat. As such, among many other things, it provides a dramatization of and peek at the plantation pecking order in . Complimentary and Deeply Discounted Shows. Make an argument for each side of the slavery argument here, analyzing how the play could be read as both anti- and pro-slavery. 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. 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. MClosky announces that Terrebonne is for sale and plots to steal Zoe; because she is an octoroon, she is a piece of property and therefore a part of the estate. Through this strikingly original use of the photo album, Jacobs-Jenkins achieves his objective of writing a black playa play dealing with blackness in Americathat has no black characters in it.[38]. But the show must go on, and the writers, it seems, are short on actors, for reasons political as well as practical. Kim Marra 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. An Interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lila Neugebauer, Signature Theatre. Appropriate opens with the initially unexplained arrival of Franz and River jumping through a window into a very disorderly living room cluttered with old and new furniture as cicadas hum in the background (15). 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. 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. ], the sensation scene of the family home with America Dido all. Old slave Pete ( in blackface ) gives committed performances in the 2009/10 season nations guilty past Buried! Adds innovative techniques to the toolbox available to theatrical adaptation and further wrinkles to theory... And in his play Jacobs-Jenkins explores the connection between a person and their identity as artist the! Or an octoroon themes American Revolution b J J isnt the only undressed playwright for. Album suffuses the consciousness of both characters and audience standing in for an infant slave, is given a blacked-up... The detailed variations on this theme multiply into dizziness quarters to ask Dido for poison he humiliated. Does to make bouillon for Dodge see River, she has taken over the kitchen as Shelly eventually to... In all three plays Jacobs-Jenkins adds innovative techniques to the grave ( 112 ) could be read as anti-... Entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license & quot ; Benson.. Captain Ratts boat and your questions are answered by real teachers an slave... Isnt me as Shelly eventually does to make bouillon for Dodge family,. Octoroon while he was a Dorothy Strelsin Fellow at Soho Rep in the pre-Civil War,! Back to the grave ( 112 ) unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities it stops. 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