Jacobs-Jenkins developed his take on The Octoroon while he was a Dorothy Strelsin Fellow at Soho Rep in the 2009/10 season. [47] Their voices (borrowed from the dialect of contemporary sitcom) are the most vibrant and compelling in the play. 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. [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. think were related! (250). Foster is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago. [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]. [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. In fact, Jacobs-Jenkins hits on so many ideas per minute, you'll wish you had a little more time to catch your breath. Her publications include The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, the edited collection Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays, and numerous articles on early modern and modern drama. Summary. [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. MINNIE played by an African-American actress, a black actress, or an actress of color. Stacy Wolf, Frank Hentschker, Executive Director A photograph of a real murdered human contrasts with the original play's use of a photograph for justice.[4]. Brer Rabbits gaze is designed to ensure that spectators take note of their own and each others responses to racist stereotypes presented as comic. 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. 2 (2015). 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. But the questions it never stops posing light up a very murky night. [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. f I say that this bizarrely brilliant play is the work of a 32-year-old black American dramatist called. Stay abreast of discount offers for great theater, on Broadway or in select cities. 1 (Fall 2018). Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. The plays opening sequence, however, invites the audience to adopt a critical stance to what they are about to see, especially in those moments when Jacobs-Jenkinss layering of a new meaning over an old motif makes itself most sharply felt, giving Appropriate its revisionist edge. Zoe and George are presented very sympathetically, however, as characters who are good and moral, and this seems to indicate that the author recognizes and approves of their love. 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. It toys with the plot of Dion Boucicault's 19th century play "The Octoroon . Like stratigraphic layers in archeology, the layering of past and present in Neighbors requires complex seeing. What does your taste in theatre say about you? Directed by Sarah Benson, featuring music by Csar Alvarez (of The Lisps), choreography by David Neumann, set design by Mimi Lien, and lighting design by Matt Frey. 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. Jacobs-Jenkins introduces Jims real feelings. His use of humor during the play most clearly shows Jacobs-Jenkinss belief that there is now enough time passed between the days of The Octoroon and his own time that not only can he adapt and deconstruct the themes of the original play and its context, he can laugh at it. Zoe Peyton, , "The Octoroon", is the supposedly "freed" biological daughter of Judge Peyton, former owner of the plantation.
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. [26], An Octoroon was staged by the Georgia Southern University Theatre & Performance Program from November 8 to November 15, 2017.[27]. This leads to another theme in the idea that what is legal is not always right, and what is illegal is not always wrong; the law is not necessarily just. 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. And at the end of the act he holds a musical note so long that the cookie jar holding his fathers ashes explodes, releasing an enormous cloud of ash, whose haze should remain present for the rest of the play (289). As the house slaves Minnie and Dido, the hilarious Jocelyn Bioh and Marsha Stephanie Blake provide much-needed comic relief from this sentimental and contrived plot. 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. It is, however, precisely the similarities in formal attributes (and in dramatic adaptation, in styles of performance)not just resemblances in events or charactersbetween adapted work and adaptation that enable the complex layered seeing advocated by Jacobs-Jenkins. Jordan Schildcrout (During the lecture the audience can hear Melody giving her blowjob to Jim Crow.) Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. Franzs desire for redemption is another white response; Nahm reminds us of those not included in the healing ritual.[29] The plays ending suggests that while some personal progress may be possible in healing family rifts, especially for younger members of the family, only time can cleanse the house of its racial past by demolishing it. Maurya Wickstrom 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. More literally educational are Richards lectures on Greek tragedy, which can be seen as his form of performance, or his interludes. Grace wants to escapeshe is co-head of the Runaway Plannin Committee (40)and Minnie and Dido at least want to choose the nature of their servitude, supposing that if they can persuade Captain Ratts to buy them to work on his steamboat, they will enjoy a life of romantic adventure. 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. Though Toni denies this accusation and is shocked when later Rhys refers to Rachael as the Jew bitch, her own unreflecting anti-Semitism is apparent when she thoughtlessly says that she is not some kind of shylock (77, 34). David Krasner Anyone can read what you share. In between these striking bookends Jacobs-Jenkins follows his predecessors in his chosen genre from ONeill to Letts in depictingsometimes with an exaggeration so subtle that it barely puts a dent in the ostensible realism of his presentationfamily secrets, unhappy marriages, sibling rivalry, and conflicts between parents and children fueled by drugs or alcohol. The Art of Dramatic Composition: A Prologue, "Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Feel That Thought", "The Great Work Continues: The 25 Best American Plays Since 'Angels in America', "Amber Gray on 'An Octoroon,' at Soho Rep", "The Octoroon Delayed Opens This Week at PS122", "Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Tries to Revive The Octoroon", "Disgruntled Cast Member Issues Invite to P.S.122's Troubled Octoroon", "Soho Rep Reading of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon to Feature Saycon Sengbloh and William Jackson Harper | Playbill", "Review: 'An Octoroon,' a Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Comedy About Race", "BERKELEY REPERTORY THEATRE | An Octoroon", "Cast announced for An Octoroon at Orange Tree", "Review: An Octoroon (Orange Tree Theatre)", "An Octoroon is taboo ridden, but thoughtful (Shaw Festival)", "Georgia Southern Theatre & Performance to Present "An Octoroon", "2017 Results | Critics' Circle Theatre Awards", For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=An_Octoroon&oldid=1138923673, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using infobox play with unknown parameters, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 12 February 2023, at 11:33. 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. An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. [5] Jacobs-Jenkinss innovative work makes possible a fresh and experiential interracial discussion of race relations in Americaa discussion that is much needed in the present tense political climate. Richard is horrified by the Crow familys moving in next door. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [24] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Margaret Gray, Spotlight Shines Brighter on Appropriate Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Los Angeles Times, 24 September 2015. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-branden-jacobs-jenkins-20150927-story.html (accessed 27 April 2017). Richard believes that Agamemnon, a new breed of Achaean, should have resisted and saved hisRichard, distraught, slips and says, mydaughter (292, 293). 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. Richard then conflates Iphigenias willingness to sacrifice herself with what he sees as Melodys defection to the Crows. In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon." Themes. 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. One theme of this text has to do with the fact that everyone, no matter their race, has the capacity to feel and love deeply, and all should have the right to do so. An Octoroon, quite appropriately, ends in the dark. I think the comedic elements in the play especially show how Jacobs-Jenkins breaks the racial protocol so condemned by Gilroy. It's a strenuous and daring display of theatricality that goes far beyond issues of race in America. 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. [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). Yet as the production keeps switching approaches, it also finds inklings of validity in each one, including that of Boucicaults original script. She is considered to be property by law, but this is also presented as wrong. 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. Locating 'Dixie' in Newspaper Discourse and Theatrical Performance in Toronto, 1880s-1920s Jan 2018 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. Alistair Toovey and Vivian Oparah in An Octoroon. Richard, however, blames the sacrifice not on the gods (standing in for white people in his mind) but on the demands of Agamemnons uncouth, country-ass soldiers with no self-control, sitting in the port raping women and drinking all the time and aint got no jobs and dont talk Greek good (292)clearly, for Richard, a version of the Crows. 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. In An Octoroon Jacobs-Jenkins excavates and adapts both a specific play text whose racial content would otherwise preclude performance in the twenty-first century and the now unfamiliar genre of nineteenth-century melodrama to which it belongs, including the theatrical/performative features of that genre: sensational plot, stereotypical good and bad characters, mix of comedy and pathos, spectacle, tableaux, and mood music. 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