Unlike most of the plays of the time, however, the central "tragic action" of the play centers not around the fate of a By opening up the old form of the minstrel show, Jacobs-Jenkins exposes old meanings and layers new ones onto them. [17] On white obsession with black male bodies in minstrel shows, see Lott, Love and Theft, 3, 9. 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). 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. Sign up today to unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. In the form of a stump speech (in minstrel performances a ridiculous lecture replete with malapropisms on a topical subject[20]), Topsy talks to the audience about what she hopes they have been enjoying so far. In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon." Themes. 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. Richard is horrified by the Crow familys moving in next door. In this respect her role anticipates that of the authorial figure BJJ in An Octoroon, who teaches his audience about melodrama. 1 (Fall 2018). Rachael makes a point of excusing both her father-in-laws anti-Semitism and what she sees as his racial prejudice because he cannot be held responsible for how he may have been brought up to feel or think about other people (40, 42). Summary. Jacobs-Jenkins himself took on the role of Br'er Rabbit and Captain Ratts.[14]. Instead of performing themselves, they put the (real) audience on display: We watch them. 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. The two scream expletives at each other Marina- and Ulay-style before BJJ gives up and they begin the play in earnest. 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. 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. I washed it away (97). Wahnotee murders MClosky. Advisory Editor: David Savran It's just so good and so fascinating! Zoe Peyton, , "The Octoroon", is the supposedly "freed" biological daughter of Judge Peyton, former owner of the plantation. [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?") 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). DORA played by a white actress or an actress who can pass as white. Intrageneric adaptation has received less theoretical attention than intergeneric or intermedial adaptation. In An Octoroon, the projection of a "lynching photograph" is an attempt towards an actual experience of finality. 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. [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. This strategy produces a general sense of familiarity that, as reviewer Erin Keene, observes, creates a comfort zone for audience members who are then periodically shocked out of their complacencywe know these people, we know this genreby the reemergence of the album.[32] The broadly familiar content of Appropriate is punctuated, too, by more precise allusions that Jacobs-Jenkins chooses to italicize and engage with in order to render visible within the parameters of the white American family play a discourse about blackness. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. 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. 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. She is currently working on ambivalent motherhood in contemporary adaptations of Medea. 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. In Appropriate Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the genre of American family drama. In the auction scene he has to fight himself over Zoe. Last Updated on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. 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. Foster, Meta-melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicaults The Octoroon, Modern Drama 59, no. Shepards dark vision of American plenty (the harvest of corn, carrots, potatoes that grow where the murdered baby was buried) rising out of the familys (symbolically Americas) destructive past informs and transforms into Jacobs-Jenkinss vision of an America falling apart, undermined by its legacy of racism.[41]. 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. Topsy, Sambo, and Mammy (Zip is busy fighting Richard) recite a litany of what white people readily enjoy about black performance, staged or otherwise. [28] In the end Bo is prevented from selling the photos because Franz feels called to cleanse himself and his family by jumping into the nearby lake, taking the photos with him: I took everythingall my pain, all Daddys pain, this familys pain, the picturesand I left it there. The archeology of Appropriate (2013) works in a rather different way. The gap between tone and content is at once disturbingly funny and appalling. 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! In Shepards play Shelly inquires about photographs, again unseen by the audience, that she has found upstairsphotos of a woman with red hair, a woman holding a baby, a farm, corn. His comments in interviews on the generic affiliation of Appropriate suggest that Jacobs-Jenkins assumed that audiences would already be sufficiently familiar with American family drama to interpret this plays complex stratigraphy without further pedagogical intervention on his part. By boasting that he was as good a hunter as the goddess Diana, Agamemnon had the gall to get uppity with the gods (291). Beth Osborne [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. Besides, it was being almost entirely recast for the new production, and there was concern that the original chemistry might evaporate. 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. This is the first of many such moments that straddle the line of sincerity and satire. Jim Crows song and dance, while not one of the formal Interludes, is a case in point. 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. [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). The owner, Mr. Peyton . [47] Their voices (borrowed from the dialect of contemporary sitcom) are the most vibrant and compelling in the play. There is a coda, which members of the audience leaving the theatre (according to Jacobs-Jenkinss stage directions) might or might not see. 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. I think the comedic elements in the play especially show how Jacobs-Jenkins breaks the racial protocol so condemned by Gilroy. Throughout the play the Crows rehearse and quarrel about who should do what in their upcoming show. Then Playwright and Assistant put on redface and blackface paint. It is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, which premiered in 1859. In "An Octoroon," the projection of a lynching photograph grounds this playfully postmodern riff on Dion Boucicault's "The Octoroon" in historical horror. Mary Wiseman and Austin Smith in "An Octoroon. This is the type of play I would love to dissect for a thesis project! 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. Possession, The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 4. While respecting her familys traditional show pieces, Topsy feels they are too commercial. She sees herself as a more forward-looking artist and expresses her own ideas about how art should deal with the shared human experiamentience. She presents to the audience summa the stuff she has been working on, which turns out to be the history of African Americans onstage crammed into three spectacular minutes of music, video projections, dance, etc., etc. 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. The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center [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]. But this is not all. She is considered to be property by law, but this is also presented as wrong. The older Indian man cares so deeply about the young black boy that he will remain on the plantation as long as Paul does, and he eventually murders Paul's killer (which is made to seem very just). Zoe falls in love with George as well, though others are shocked that the two would wish to marry (it being, of course, illegal at the time). [9] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, xvii, 6, 21. . The Crows have been on hiatusthe word is used repeatedly (231, 235, 242)after the death of Jim Crow, Sr. for an uncertain period of time, suggesting that they may have come literally from the nineteenth century, and are, like Pirandellos Six Characters, in search of their life on the stage in the form of their much-vaunted comeback (261). 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. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. As an object, the album is constantly presented to the audiences view and its unseen contents to their imagination. But Jacobs-Jenkinss adaptive strategy in this play is less explicit than it is in Neighbors or An Octoroon, in which he incorporates explanations of the genres or texts he adaptsin the Crow familys comments on their work in Neighbors and in educational addresses to the audience from dramatist BJJ and Dion Boucicault himself in An Octoroonfor the benefit of those who might not be familiar with his sources. 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. . 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. Bartleby the Scrivener, A Tale of Wall Street, The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child. He's quickly echoed in a snide tone by a white onlooker, who just so happens to be Dion Boucicault (Danny Wolohan). 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. 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. A photograph of a real murdered human contrasts with the original play's use of a photograph for justice.[4]. We then launch into a condensed rewrite of Boucicaults original: a mortgage melodrama in which the Peyton familys Louisiana plantation seems destined to fall into the unscrupulous hands of its former overseer, MClosky. New York NY 10016. The audience is catapulted into a space that plays to their stereotypes and questions our societys relationship to humanity and our history. 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. [13] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Neighbors. As such, among many other things, it provides a dramatization of and peek at the plantation pecking order in . [1] Jeff Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation To Confront Race And Identity In The US, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 16 February 2015. Looking back over the semester, I thought it was only fitting to end on An Octoroon. Not only does it apply multiple themes from across the class, even going all the way back to January, but it brings all this history together to put his own spin on it, making parts of the play nearly incomprehensible without the proper context of these older texts and plays. Intrageneric adaptation has received less theoretical attention than intergeneric or intermedial adaptation. Austin Smith and Amber Gray in a scene from Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss play. Rhoda lived her whole life "passing" as a white person. While atmospheric cicadas make symbolic noise in the background, the family members quarrel over long-standing grievances and over their inheritance, which, to their horror, includes an album filled with photographs of lynchings. The auction begins and MClosky aggressively bids on Zoe, winning her. In doing so, Brer Rabbitor the dramatist himselfassesses the political impact of Jacobs-Jenkinss adaptation. with Siobhan OFlynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 170. 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". Following Boucicault, Jacobs-Jenkins skillfully manipulates how his audience responds from moment to moment. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. The Crows wear black paint, have huge red lips, and, except for Jim, and Zip in his conversations with Jean, speak with the caricatured dialect and malapropisms of their nineteenth-century originals. And neither do you.". The book is about Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman who discovers she is one-sixteenth African American, after living her whole life as a white person. 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. Editorial Assistant: Cen Liu, Michael Y. Bennett 3 (Fall 2016): 286. What does your taste in theatre say about you? View our Privacy Policy. [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". Esther Kim Lee Minnie and Dido realize all the other slaves ran away. 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. Robert Vorlicky Through such Brechtian techniques as cross-casting and meta-commentary from the plays internal playwright, BJJ, Jacobs-Jenkins ironizes Boucicaults story and the racist attitudes of his characters. Ironically, The Octoroon premiered in New York four days after famed. You wouldn't want to miss that by dismissing it at face value. 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. Are the most vibrant and compelling in the play especially show how Jacobs-Jenkins breaks racial... In next door, 6, 21. 59, no by law, this... 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And especially in the play in earnest one of the authorial figure BJJ in Octoroon. For interpretation New York: Routledge, 2013 ), 170 '' as a white person recast the.: 286 hanging on the role of Br'er Rabbit and Captain Ratts [. More forward-looking artist and expresses her own ideas about how art should with! Provides space for interpretation 2 or 3 dates they represent his past: Your whole lifes up there hanging the! Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the genre American!

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