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An Octoroon is weird in all the right ways, but it's also just so clever! 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. Dido replies, "No. 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. It all culminates in a thrillingly ridiculous duel with himself (ingeniously choreographed by J. David Brimmer). Themes Questions & Answers Critical Essays . 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. As a punishment Diana denies him wind to sail to Troy and requires the sacrifice of his daughter to appease her. In An Octoroon, the projection of a "lynching photograph" is an attempt towards an actual experience of finality. 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. 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 . An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Early in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's magnificent play, we see a version of the playwright who . 1 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 249, 377. He gives it a try but quickly realizes that getting white, male actors of today to play evil slave owners is not an easy task. 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. Beth Osborne in Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation.. Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer, 2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center It is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, which premiered in 1859. 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. 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. In this finale Jacobs-Jenkins deprives his audience of their collectivity and requires them to question their own individual reactions to his play. By signing up you are confirming you are 16 or over. [1] Jacobs-Jenkins considers An Octoroon and his other works Appropriate and Neighbors linked in the exploration of theatre, genre, and how theatre interacts with questions of identity, along with how these questions (such as "Why do we think of a social issue as something that can be solved?") Then Playwright and Assistant put on redface and blackface paint. More literally educational are Richards lectures on Greek tragedy, which can be seen as his form of performance, or his interludes. This place has historyour history.[25] If the plantation clearly symbolizes Americas history, the members of the Lafayette family represent its contemporary cultural geography. [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". [2], Jacobs-Jenkins also cites Peter Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination as an inspiration for his approach to melodrama. An Octoroon is fearless, dangerous theater that challenges conventional notions of history and performance. As Thomas P. Adler observes, Shepard displays a peculiar power in his highly symbolic family problem plays of allegorizing the American experience, of deflating the myth of America as the New Eden.[37] Jacobs-Jenkins transforms Shepards implied equation of literal and symbolic inheritanceembodied in Appropriate in the photo album of lynchingsinto an explicit and particular indictment of Americas racial and racist history and its present-day consequences. [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. 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. 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. The Octoroon was a controversial play on both sides of the slavery debate when it debuted, as both abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates believed the play took the other camp's side. Playwright taunts BJJ, and laments how theatre has changed since his death. *thunder clap*. That b*tch is dying cuz she old as hell." http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/ (accessed 30 December 2016). Like stratigraphic layers in archeology, the layering of past and present in Neighbors requires complex seeing. [8] An adaptation may criticize either the assumptions of the adapted text or the adapters own society or both. Word Count: 465. Vivian Oparah and Cassie Clare in An Octoroon. [1] Jeff Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation To Confront Race And Identity In The US, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 16 February 2015. The debt-ridden, lost plantation over which the family quarrels evokes A Streetcar Named Desire and Dividing the Estate, as well as the play that lies behind both of them, The Cherry Orchard. [21] See Isherwood, Caricatured Commentary. At one point in the published text Jacobs-Jenkins calls for a rearrangement of Sister Sledges We Are Family (263). 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. 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. [14] For the history and content of nineteenth-century minstrel shows see Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), especially 2557; and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). We watch each other (319). In "An Octoroon," the projection of a lynching photograph grounds this playfully postmodern riff on Dion Boucicault's "The Octoroon" in historical horror. His intolerance alienates his wife and daughter, who turn to the Crows for love and support. Buhahahaha! Similarly, Ben Horner (in blackface) gives committed performances in the dual roles of Uncle Tom-esque Pete and adorable slave boy Paul. Maurya Wickstrom The Crows, to the best of my knowledge, have always been played by black actors in blackface, although a note in the text states, the ethnicity and/or gender of the actors playing the Crows is not specified.[13] The play combines dramatic realism in the scenes involving the Pattersons with satirically exaggerated blackface minstrelsy. The kind of dramatic excavation practiced in Neighbors is thus a form of both pedagogy and political protest. The emphasis on huge body parts, especially eyes, lips, and feet, was characteristic of representations of black people in minstrel shows. 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. [40] Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 13. Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon call for both kinds of reading. [34] Tracy Letts, August: Osage County (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 12324. Even the title shows this sense of exhaustion with the abundance of the race question and critics viewing his work through a racial lens. 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. The show pauses to note how the theater used to manipulate its audiences with jerry-built plots and plot-hole-covering sensationalism. 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 second is the date of The Octoroon is a drama of plantation life and miscegenation in antebellum America, written by an Irishman who visited the South. [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. [47] Their voices (borrowed from the dialect of contemporary sitcom) are the most vibrant and compelling in the play. [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). 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. 2 (2015). 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. The earliest minstrels were white performers in blackface, but there were also troupes of African-American performers. 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". Jorge Huerta Although this concept for a play sounds controversial on paper, I dont think that he explicitly makes these changes just to make an audience for his work because of mere curiosity. Foster, Suzan-Lori Parkss Staging of the Lincoln Myth in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 17, no. [11], Mark Ravenhill staged a workshop production of the play featuring Saycon Sengbloh in April 2012. This is the type of play I would love to dissect for a thesis project! Present in An Octoroon is the illusion of suffering and actual suffering. [3] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, quoted. Toni complains that she has always done most of the work; Rachael believes that her father-in-law was anti-Semitic. Eventually, Zoe takes the poison and runs off. 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. 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. 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. Though I cant remember any of them now. After the conclusion of their show the Crows take a curtain call, but that is not the end. 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. "The Octoroon - Themes" eNotes Publishing Moving from The Octoroon to An, Jenkins suggests that despite the incredibly modern and subversive elements which Jacobs-Jenkins adds to Boucicaults original, this is just another play and that the novelty of racial mixing has worn off and become common now. 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. At the Plantation Terrebonne in Louisiana, Dido and Minnie chat about the arrival of George, and the passing of his uncle, their previous master. 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. 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. Underscoring the link, Toni sarcastically refers to her brother as Beauregarde Big Daddy Lafayette (35). 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. 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. Directed by Sarah Benson, in a style that perfectly matches its mutating content, "An Octoroon" is a shrewdly awkward riff on Dion Boucicault's "The Octoroon" (notice the change in article), a. Most of the black works we have read that touch on race have been incredibly serious dramas, but Jacobs-Jenkins is able to depict racial issues while still giving the reader a good laugh. Searching him, George finds the letter which resolves the conflict of Terrebonne's future. 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. While posing, MClosky comes from behind and kills Paul to take the letter. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: 'theatre is about controversial ideas', Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Following the act three climax: the plot lines must converge, the moral is made clear, and the audience has to be hit with a "theatre trick" which overwhelms the audience with technical elements. 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. 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. [27] Kee-Yoon Nahm, Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. 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. Box office: 020-8940 3633. "[2] This examination of race as a social construct is also in Appropriate and Neighbors. Ariel Nereson 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. The technique is explicitly pedagogical and in An Octoroon inventively meta-adaptive as the contemporary playwright BJJa stand-in for Jacobs-Jenkinsis joined by the Playwrightthe author of the source play Dion Boucicault in teaching the audience how they should respond to the adaptation. Possession, The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 4. . 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. 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. 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 MClosky. . [43] In all three plays Jacobs-Jenkins adds innovative techniques to the toolbox available to theatrical adaptation and further wrinkles to adaptation theory. eNotes.com, Inc. In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon. 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. 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). all the way back to the grave (112). [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). The diverse ways in which Jacobs-Jenkins excavates old forms in these three plays both reveal and create new layers of historical meaning that call for new ways of seeing and thinking about Americas racial heritage. 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. In Appropriate Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the genre of American family drama. 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. Amy E. Hughes An Interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lila Neugebauer, Signature Theatre. 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. eNotes.com I think this play is a work of genius. 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). Three of his plays, in particular, Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroondescribed by one critic as a trilogy of highly provocative and fantastical explorations of race in America[1]radically excavate and revise historical styles of performance or dramatic literature to explore ideas of blackness and racial attitudes in contemporary America. Richard then conflates Iphigenias willingness to sacrifice herself with what he sees as Melodys defection to the Crows. Download the entire The Octoroon study guide as a printable PDF! 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. David Krasner Alistair Toovey and Vivian Oparah in An Octoroon. The homecoming motif with which Appropriate opens quickly transforms into the airing of past grievances and the quarrel over inheritance, channeling such plays as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Dividing the Estate. 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. The archeology of Appropriate (2013) works in a rather different way. The photo albums in Buried Child and Appropriate reveal what has been kept hidden. 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 the plays final sequence, representing an indeterminate period of time marked by stylized blackouts followed immediately by the lights coming up again, the audience bears witness as the house, established by now as a representation of America, is casually inhabited by various strangers and literally falls apart. 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. 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]. [49] Merrill and Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, 152. 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. He does acknowledge, however, that his wife, Halie, has a family album that can explain the heritage . Tracey Elaine Chessum 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. (depending presumably on the resources of the theatre). An Imperative Duty is a short realist novel by William Dean Howells published in 1891. At the beginning of his performance, dressed in straw hat, striped suit, and enormous bowtie, Jim looks ridiculous, but also amazing (285). 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.. . . Cellist Lester St. Louis helps create the dun dun dun with his live accompaniment, which underscores much of the show. Yet as the production keeps switching approaches, it also finds inklings of validity in each one, including that of Boucicaults original script. Throughout the play the Crows rehearse and quarrel about who should do what in their upcoming show. Anyone can read what you share. [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]. [22] Isherwood, Caricatured Commentary.. 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). The Octoroon Themes Racial Identification and Discrimination Set in the pre-Civil War South, The Octoroondeals heavily with racial themes. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. Abolitionist John Brown was hanged just three days before the play's debut, which is seen as one of the catalyst events that started the Civil War. 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Accessed 30 December 2016 ) a short realist novel by William Dean Howells published in 1891 and. Love and support Krasner Alistair Toovey and Vivian Oparah in an Octoroon is a play by. Cuz she old as hell. dying cuz she old as hell. America play and Other Works New! Practiced in Neighbors is thus a form of performance, or his interludes should do what in their show! A form of both pedagogy and political protest the adapters own society both... Validity in each one, including that of Boucicaults Original script performers in blackface but! The abundance of the Lafayette family represent its contemporary cultural geography ideas ', Original reporting incisive. African-American performers accompaniment, which can be seen as his form of both and! Construct is also in Appropriate Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the dialect contemporary!

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