[53] Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something., [54] For Jacobs-Jenkinss knowledge of American family drama see Wegener, About Appropriate, 146. Dion Boucicault's drama was inspired by his visit to the American South and The Quadroon (1856), a novel by Thomas Mayne Reid. 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. Moments later, he reveals, "Just kidding. Just because the law forbids or permits something doesn't mean the law is morally right or just. For the details of this argument see Verna A. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Austin Smith and Amber Gray in a scene from Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss play. It all culminates in a thrillingly ridiculous duel with himself (ingeniously choreographed by J. David Brimmer). An Octoroon, you see, is all about race in these United States, as it was and is and unfortunately probably shall be for a considerable time. [22] Jacobs-Jenkinss final direction for Topsy, And maybe it ends with her masturbating with a banana. Zip Coon, very well-dressed, sporting a top hat, and walking jauntily and dandily (250, 230, 238) is the classic dandy of nineteenth-century minstrel shows; Mammy, ample of bosom (301) and forceful of manner, channels Hattie McDaniels character in Gone with the Wind (310), while Topsy is both picaninni and a version of Josephine Baker. Infinitely playful Ken Nwosu and Kevin Trainor in An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The emphasis on huge body parts, especially eyes, lips, and feet, was characteristic of representations of black people in minstrel shows. Boucicault puts his audience on a thrilling emotional roller-coaster for its own sake as is typical of melodrama; Jacobs-Jenkins abruptly alternates not only pathos with laughter and laughter with horror but also emotional engagement with critical detachment to produce in his contemporary audience a Brechtian self-consciousness about their own and other spectators reactions. Sound No. [11], Mark Ravenhill staged a workshop production of the play featuring Saycon Sengbloh in April 2012. Jacobs-Jenkins nods most explicitly towards his sources in American family drama when Rachael, trying to draw her squabbling in-laws back to the topic of what to do about the photo album, says, Can we sit around being casually dysfunctional later and focus for one second? (59). Transcript. For Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins has deliberately built his play on slippery foundations, the kind likely to trip up any dramatist, performer or theatergoer. 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. 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. . all the way back to the grave (112). 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]. [1] [2] [3]. 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). Your email is never published nor shared. An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. 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. If there are two dates, the date of publication and appearance The production ran from January 29 to February 27, 2016. https:www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/16/383567104/one-playwright-s-obligation (accessed 11 February 2019). 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. [32] Erin Keane, Review/Family Secrets Fester in Appropriate, 89.3 WFPL News Louisville, 20 March 2013. http://wfpl.org/review-family-secrets-fester-appropriate/ (accessed 30 December 2016). The Octoroon Themes Racial Identification and Discrimination Set in the pre-Civil War South, The Octoroondeals heavily with racial themes. The archeology of Appropriate (2013) works in a rather different way. Ed. Minnie and Dido realize all the other slaves ran away. Wahnotee murders MClosky. Underscoring the link, Toni sarcastically refers to her brother as Beauregarde Big Daddy Lafayette (35). 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. Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. [10] Jane Barnette, Adapturgy: The Dramaturgs Art and Theatrical Adaptation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 55, 62. Zoe and George are alone, and George confesses his love for her. It's a strenuous and daring display of theatricality that goes far beyond issues of race in America. This use of make-up reverses the nineteenth-century theatres casting of white actors in blackface to play the enslaved characters and comments ironically on racist stereotypes and the theatrical convention that perpetuated them. Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon enable the multiple-layered seeing that Jacobs-Jenkins is talking about because they require comparative viewing across the adapted and adaptive works themselves and across the cultures or historical periods that produced them. [6], The sensation scene of the original play is deconstructed in act four. Download the entire The Octoroon study guide as a printable PDF! Dido replies, "No. In talking directly to the audience about the show they are watching, Topsy serves an educational function, metatheatrically drawing attention to Jacobs-Jenkinss work of theatrical excavation. The kind of dramatic excavation practiced in Neighbors is thus a form of both pedagogy and political protest. 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. England, England, Accessibility Statement Terms Privacy |StageAgent 2020. Jacobs-Jenkins introduces Jims real feelings. About their apparently imminent sale, for example, Dido says, This is about the worst damn day of my life! with Siobhan OFlynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 170. 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]. Nataki Garrett directed the first production of An Octoroon outside of New York with Mixed Blood Theatre Company in the fall of 2015. Then Playwright and Assistant put on redface and blackface paint. 3 (Fall 2016): 286. 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. [15] In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley called the play this decades most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today.[16] The production transferred to Theatre for A New Audience's Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn and ran from February 14, 2015 to March 29, 2015. I don't have a therapist. This is the first of many such moments that straddle the line of sincerity and satire. . 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. I think the comedic elements in the play especially show how Jacobs-Jenkins breaks the racial protocol so condemned by Gilroy. Complimentary and Deeply Discounted Shows. [18], The play was presented at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia from March 16, 2016 to April 10, 2016, directed by Joanna Settle. Enjoy live events at insider prices. An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. In play, the lovers, Zoe and the judge's prodigal nephew, George Peyton, are thwarted in their quest by race and the the evil maneuverings of a material-obsessed overseer named Jacob M'Closky. 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. 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. Minnie comforts Dido and they look forward to their new lives on Captain Ratts boat. 2 (2017): 151. 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. 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. Robert Vorlicky (During the lecture the audience can hear Melody giving her blowjob to Jim Crow.) Brer Rabbits gaze is designed to ensure that spectators take note of their own and each others responses to racist stereotypes presented as comic. This is not the first time Jacobs-Jenkins has grappled with race: His 2010 show Neighbors featured a cast of white actors playing an offensively stereotypical black family. He does acknowledge, however, that his wife, Halie, has a family album that can explain the heritage . [40] Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 13. Eventually, Zoe takes the poison and runs off. Bartleby the Scrivener, A Tale of Wall Street, The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child. [49] Merrill and Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, 152. First performed at the Public Theater in New York in 2010, and subtitled an epic with cartoons,[12] Neighbors depicts what happens when the Crows, a family of minstrels played by actors in blackface, move in next door to the PattersonsRichard, a black classics professor, Jean, his white wife, and Melody, their teenage daughter. The audience is catapulted into a space that plays to their stereotypes and questions our society's relationship to humanity and our history. 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). He is humiliated by what he has to do (285). In the auction scene he has to fight himself over Zoe. The most significant precursor of Jacobs-Jenkinss deployment of the photo album in Appropriate occurs in Buried Child. [51] Jacobs-Jenkinss well-attested concern with evoking strong and complicated individual responses from his audiences adds a new wrinkle to adaptation theory. In A Theory of Adaptation (first published in 2006) Hutcheon defines an adaptation as an extended, announced, deliberate revisitation of a particular work of art.[6] While adaptations often entail changing the medium or genre of the source text, they may include any intermedial or intramedial, intergeneric or intrageneric updating or other reworking of an earlier work. [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). While posing, MClosky comes from behind and kills Paul to take the letter. 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. [45] Similarly, the old slave Pete (in blackface) clearly performs his role as loyal house slave. Orange Tree, RichmondBranden Jacobs-Jenkinss extraordinary play is both an adaptation of a 19th-century melodrama and a dazzling postmodernist critique of it. 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. Jim Crows song and dance, while not one of the formal Interludes, is a case in point. Early in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's magnificent play, we see a version of the playwright who . I can't afford one." And the slaves Pete and Paul, according to Jacobs-Jenkinss textual directions, are to be played by a Native American actor (or an actor who can pass as Native American) in blackface. Can we ever fully trust anything said by these people who dress up in costumes and pretend to be other people? Vivian Oparah and Cassie Clare in An Octoroon. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=An_Imperative_Duty&oldid=1135306582, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Rhoda Aldgate, a woman of one-sixteenth black ancestry, Rev. Similarly, Ben Horner (in blackface) gives committed performances in the dual roles of Uncle Tom-esque Pete and adorable slave boy Paul. Kevin Byrne By presenting characters in whiteface, blackface, and redface, Jacobs-Jenkins can look at "blackness and how to represent social constructs onstage that are so tied to a specific culture of nation. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Obie-award winning play "An Octoroon," at the Gamm Theatre through Feb. 20, pokes at sensibilities, pries at prejudices and pushes at closed gates in a person's mind. In creating his plays Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has repeatedly chosen to rewrite, adapt, or otherwise appropriate earlier theatrical styles or dramatic texts. The latter is so sickeningly sweet and endearingly dumb, especially with his Indian sidekick Wahnotee (Wolohan in redface), he could have his own family television series circa 1955 (think antebellum Lassie). 1 (Fall 2018). 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. Rather than execute this, the actors explain and act out what happens. 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. [25], Artists Repertory Theatre, located in Portland, Oregon, was to stage An Octoroon from September 3 to October 1, 2017. Zoe calls Dido Mammy, and she puts on a mammy character as they argue. That b*tch is dying cuz she old as hell." It then manipulates us by just such means, including one truly upsetting video projection toward the end. [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). Again, Wahnotee and Paul are presented so sympathetically (especially Wahnotee) that it seems to confirm the author's approval of their feelings and characters. Wahnotee, accused by the members of Captain Ratts ship of killing Paul, is about to be lynched. Even more thoroughly than in Neighbors and Appropriate, adapted work and adaptation bleed into one another. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 249, 377. In Buried Child, Halies and Tildens murdered baby (apparently drowned by Dodge, as Franz tries to drown the photos of lynchings) has been literally buried in the soil behind the house. Intrageneric adaptation has received less theoretical attention than intergeneric or intermedial adaptation. 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. Study Guide! We watch each other (319). [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). Perhaps An Octoroon was best suited to a rough-edged performance in a tiny theater. in Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation.. Unorthodox, highly stylized plays on incendiary topics tend to have limited shelf lives, especially when theyre wrenched out of their birthplaces. AN OCTOROON. "[2] This examination of race as a social construct is also in Appropriate and Neighbors. Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, first presented in New York in 1859, bears more than a striking resemblance to its better-known stage sister, George Aiken's adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which premiered in 1852. Old times there, it seems, are not forgotten at all. Our Essay Lab can help you tackle any essay assignment within seconds, whether youre studying Macbeth or the American Revolution. BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant explain the significance of the fourth act, the sensation scene in melodrama. As an object, the album is constantly presented to the audiences view and its unseen contents to their imagination. "An Octoroon," which opened in 2014 at Soho Rep. in New York, won an Obie award for best new American play. *thunder clap*. 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. [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. 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. think were related! (250). 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 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. His aggression that people always try to place these bigger cultural burdens, such as the adaptation of African folklore when he merely uses animals to illustrate his own point, shows that he wants for his work to speak for itself and not be as tied down to one specific meaning. 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. Unlike most of the plays of the time, however, the central "tragic action" of the play centers not around the fate of a 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. In the very end, this music finally gives us the respite for contemplation that we desperately need to process the madness we've just witnessed. [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. Toni complains that she has always done most of the work; Rachael believes that her father-in-law was anti-Semitic. The production was critically acclaimed, winning an Obie Award for best new American play in 2014 (a tie with his previous play, Appropriate). Mary Wiseman and Austin Smith in "An Octoroon. Maybe they giggle (319). The actor who plays BJJ - in this case, the astonishing Ken Nwosu - goes on to don whiteface and appear as both the heroic George and the villainous M'Closky. In Adaptation and Appropriation (2006) Sanders notes that while adaptations serve to perpetuate and confirm the canonicity of adapted works, they also frequently subvert the assumptions of their source texts or reinterpret them from a contemporary political perspective to make them fit, in a quasi-Darwinian sense, for new cultural environments. Box office: 020-8940 3633. 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. Richard believes that Agamemnon, a new breed of Achaean, should have resisted and saved hisRichard, distraught, slips and says, mydaughter (292, 293). 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. A Black playwright is struggling to find his voice among a chorus of people telling him what he should and should not be writing. publication online or last modification online. Both the white hero, George, and the white villain, MClosky, are played by the same black actor in whiteface. In An Octoroon, the projection of a "lynching photograph" is an attempt towards an actual experience of finality. All of these historically situated stereotypes, Jacobs-Jenkins implies, are based in white views of black performative behavior deriving ultimately from the minstrel shows. Instead of performing themselves, they put the (real) audience on display: We watch them. 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