It toys with the plot of Dion Boucicault's 19th century play "The Octoroon . : a person of one-eighth Black ancestry Word History Etymology octa- + -roon (as in quadroon) First Known Use 1859, in the meaning defined above Time Traveler The first known use of octoroon was in 1859 See more words from the same year Dictionary Entries Near octoroon octopus octoroon octospore See More Nearby Entries Cite this Entry Style In front of a strobe light (310), comically undercuts the utter, utter transcendence he has just described, but it does so in such a way as to mock (give the fingeror the bananato) what has been historically a largely white and often exploitative entertainment industry rather than the artists themselves. [1] [2] [3]. 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. Kim Marra 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. [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. The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 112. Your email is never published nor shared. 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. 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). The image of Franz holding the sodden remains of the photos of dead black people laminated onto Shepards image of Tilden holding the remains of the dead baby elicits especially clearly what Jacobs-Jenkins calls an archeology of seeing. The meaning of this moment in Appropriate lies in the stratigraphy, and especially in the gap between layers that provides space for interpretation. [13] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Neighbors. 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?" Jims brilliant performance contains so much pain and anger that it breaks open his familys theatrical past with lingering consequences. 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. [1] England, England, Foyer Security at Sondheim Theatre An Imperative Duty Full text HTML version scanned from 1893 edition published by Harper . Anyone can read what you share. 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. As an object, the album is constantly presented to the audiences view and its unseen contents to their imagination. [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. Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 41. 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. [47] Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something.. Meanwhile Zip Coon suavely charms Jean, encouraging her to talk about herself and taking an interest in her poetry in contrast to Richards obsession with his own career and status. (Psst, it could well be Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins himself.). Jacobs-Jenkins has clearly done his research, and makes a hard case for the reader that we still have to talk in certain ways about certain topics. Cellist Lester St. Louis helps create the dun dun dun with his live accompaniment, which underscores much of the show. 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). Zoe heads out to the slave quarters to ask Dido for poison. He is joined by a cranky, drunken Boucicault (Haynes Thigpen), who is annoyed by how completely his star has sunk since his death some hundred years ago. 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. 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. Jacobs-Jenkinss plays variously demonstrate how adaptation operates creatively in producing new works and also critically and politically, not in this instance by reinterpreting the adapted texts, but by exposing how their damaging and supposedly outdated racial assumptions continue to inform contemporary racial attitudes. The 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.. [2], Jacobs-Jenkins researched Boucicault heavily while working on An Octoroon and found an unfinished essay at the New York Public Library saying that theatre is a place for dramatic illusionthe most believable illusion of sufferingand catharsis. Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications But the show must go on, and the writers, it seems, are short on actors, for reasons political as well as practical. Early in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's magnificent play, we see a version of the playwright who . This leads to a hilarious scene in which he switches between the two characters engaged in a fight to the death. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. For the details of this argument see Verna A. BJJ explains, with the help of Boucicault, how melodrama works and how it has been necessary for An Octoroon to adapt some of the melodramatic features of the earlier play. Bo hated the plantation with its bugs and its endless stories about Civil War ancestors. [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. Gain full access to show guides, character breakdowns, auditions, monologues and more! 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. A Black playwright is struggling to find his voice among a chorus of people telling him what he should and should not be writing. Complimentary and Deeply Discounted Shows. 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. Brer Rabbits gaze is designed to ensure that spectators take note of their own and each others responses to racist stereotypes presented as comic. Significantly, the character of Zoe loses the definite article she has in Boucicaults title to become simply an octoroon: one of many rather than a symbol of her race. Yet in its current incarnation, An Octoroon feels even richer and more resonant than it did before, both funnier and more profoundly tragic. The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center . Private Life in McCanns Transatlantic, The Application of A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms to The Black and Green Atlantic, The Tyranny of Monarchy in A Voyage to Lilliput, Gullivers Difficult Decision to Return Home. 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. In doing so, Brer Rabbitor the dramatist himselfassesses the political impact of Jacobs-Jenkinss adaptation. [16] Jacobs-Jenkins takes these grotesque depictions to a new level, savagely satirizing white obsession with black male sexuality and white appropriation of black female fecundity. As reported by one reviewer of Company Ones production of Neighbors in Boston in 2011, for example, the cast keeps you uncertain of whether youre expected to laugh or cringe, engage or retreat, and sends you off wondering why you reacted in whatever, inevitably complex ways you did.[18] Another reviewer of this production commented that it feels like we should applaud [the Crows] shtick as members of the fictional audience, but not as the actual audience.[19]. Certainly, they belong to a different theatrical world and tradition than the Pattersons. 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. 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. Pete pleads for MClosky to not be lynched, so George demands that M'Closky be taken away, not revenged by Wahnotee, but M'Closky escapes and sets fire to the boat. Jacobs-Jenkins looks at the consequences of putting oneself onstage in their own work, if it is a real self or a fake self, which Jacobs-Jenkins embodied himself in the roles of Br'er Rabbit and Captain Ratts. 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). transform as a part of life. Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon all attest to Jacobs-Jenkinss fascination with genre or old forms as interesting artifacts. But it is his detailed, scholarly knowledge of minstrel shows, American family drama, and nineteenth-century melodrama that enables him to manipulate these forms and the audience responses they typically generate to elicit an archeology of seeing. Jacobs-Jenkinss sensitivity to and command over the forms he appropriates are apparent in the tropes of the plays themselves, in the characters own commentary on the genres they are inhabiting, especially in Neighbors and An Octoroon, and in the playwrights numerous comments in interviews on the generic affiliations of his work. 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. [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). with Siobhan OFlynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 170. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: 'theatre is about controversial ideas', Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Already a member? [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". England, England, Accessibility Statement Terms Privacy |StageAgent 2020. Yet as the production keeps switching approaches, it also finds inklings of validity in each one, including that of Boucicaults original script. Toni returns from Atlanta, Bo and Rachael from New York, and Franz and River from Portland. [8] An adaptation may criticize either the assumptions of the adapted text or the adapters own society or both. Ed. Unlike historical excavations, which lead archeologists ever deeper into the past, in Neighbors Jacobs-Jenkins excavates upwards into the present, reaching his deepest layer in the feelings of a putative contemporary actor beneath those of a reluctant performer beneath those of a minstrel character. [17] On white obsession with black male bodies in minstrel shows, see Lott, Love and Theft, 3, 9. Maurya Wickstrom View our Privacy Policy. 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. Boucicault portrayed Wahnotee, and in his play Jacobs-Jenkins explores the connection between a person and their identity as artist. Intrageneric adaptation has received less theoretical attention than intergeneric or intermedial adaptation. [27] Kee-Yoon Nahm, Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. 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. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Sign up today to unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. A theater and a slave plantation in Louisiana, College/University, Diverse Cast, Ensemble Cast, Mature Audiences, Regional Theatre, Front Of House at Prince of Wales Theatre. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The tension between the old forms and the new meanings layered onto them generates uneasy and uncertain laughter that engages audiences in a much-needed, if in the theatre implicit, dialogue of their own about racial attitudes in contemporary America. 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. While posing, MClosky comes from behind and kills Paul to take the letter. [41] Bottoms suggests that Buried Child is dealing metaphorically with Americas collective tendency to bury the intolerable memories of its bloody history of slavery and genocide, and so forth (The Theatre of Sam Shepard, 176). 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]. 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]. The most significant precursor of Jacobs-Jenkinss deployment of the photo album in Appropriate occurs in Buried Child. 1 Mar. Bartleby the Scrivener, A Tale of Wall Street, The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child. ", The book is about a "Tragic Mulatta" character, a stereotype used by 19th-century American authors to explore racial miscegenation. An Octoroon is weird in all the right ways, but it's also just so clever! It's a strenuous and daring display of theatricality that goes far beyond issues of race in America. Like many another melodrama of the period, The Octoroon presents its audi- ence with a dashing hero, a dastardly villain, a bumbling spokesman for goodness, and a woman who almost loses her family home. 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. [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). 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. 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. 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. Adler adds that the nations guilty past in Buried Child might be racism, or religious and ethnic prejudice, or . [25], Artists Repertory Theatre, located in Portland, Oregon, was to stage An Octoroon from September 3 to October 1, 2017. . 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