an octoroon themes

[9] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, xvii, 6, 21. Austin Smith and Amber Gray in a scene from Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss play. [44] The Native American Wahnotee is played by a white actor in redface. That never was me! (111). Over the course of the play the album is passed from one family member to another, eliciting various white responses (including shock, disgust, curiosity, fascination, disregard, aversion) as each of them has to try to find a way to deal with what it represents about their father, their family history, their own racial attitudesand whether or not they can sell the photos for a substantial sum as collectors items. Humana Festival 2013 The Complete Plays, edited by Amy Wegener and Sarah Lunnie (New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2014), 146. (An octoroon, just so you know, is a person whose ancestry is one-eighth black; that fraction is enough to doom the plays title character, played by the exquisite Amber Gray.). 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. . I washed it away (97). 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. [1] [2] [3]. 1 Mar. In this finale Jacobs-Jenkins deprives his audience of their collectivity and requires them to question their own individual reactions to his play. f I say that this bizarrely brilliant play is the work of a 32-year-old black American dramatist called. [44] Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, Theatre Journal 69, no. Ariel Nereson Suddenly, the back wall of the stage falls forward, blasting us with a gush of air and revealing a snow-white stage, covered in cotton (design by Mimi Lien). 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. . 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. 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. As act 1 begins . In this moment Jacobs-Jenkins blurs illusion and reality by introducing the actors as actors and by inviting any spectators present (or at least readers) to imagine what the attitude of the twenty-first century actor playing Jim Crow might really be towards the part he has played. The numerous comic episodes, however, involving Pete, Dido, Minnie, and Grace, scenes in which Jacobs-Jenkins induces the audience to laugh at slavery almost before they are aware, produce more subtly disquietingbecause more questionableeffects. At the Plantation Terrebonne in Louisiana, Dido and Minnie chat about the arrival of George, and the passing of his uncle, their previous master. 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. They begin with the repertoire of minstrel shows and the comic roles played by black characters in the early films and television programs that succeeded them, move on to the repertoire of contemporary cultural stereotypes, and conclude with the repertoire of protest: They luvs when we dance, When we guffaws and slaps our thighs lak dis, When we be misprunoudenencing wards wrongs en stuff, When we make our eyes big and rolls em lak dis; When we be hummin in church and wear big hats and be like, Mmmm! Boucicaults melodrama was a great hit in its day but is now almost never performed, except possibly as a camp diversion for private amusement. Three Plays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 76. 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. Summary. 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. 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. Walking on a stage covered with cotton balls is a tricky business. Strange as it seems, a work based on a terminally dated play from more than 150 years ago may turn out to be this decades most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today. [11] By exaggerating the embodiments of blackness and the comic and musical routines characteristic of the minstrel shows to the point of an absurdity so explosive that laughter becomes problematic, Jacobs-Jenkins launches a savage satiric attack on racist stereotypes. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins An Octoroon is a whirlwind of images and dialogue that leaves no one out of the conversation and makes no apologies for asking the hard questions. It is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, which premiered in 1859. Jims brilliant performance contains so much pain and anger that it breaks open his familys theatrical past with lingering consequences. This place has historyour history.[25] If the plantation clearly symbolizes Americas history, the members of the Lafayette family represent its contemporary cultural geography. [6] Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. In parallel scenes the Pattersons, themselves relatively new to town, enact the realistic drama of modern marital and generational conflict inflected by anxieties over social and professional status in a new job, new school, and new neighborhood. [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. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. By signing up you are confirming you are 16 or over. Themes Questions & Answers Critical Essays . Ed. BJJ stops the action of the play. 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. Word Count: 465. He is humiliated by what he has to do (285). Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. [51] Jacobs-Jenkinss well-attested concern with evoking strong and complicated individual responses from his audiences adds a new wrinkle to adaptation theory. The womens fantasy, however, will prove ephemeral. The archeology of Appropriate (2013) works in a rather different way. 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. 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. The photo albums in Buried Child and Appropriate reveal what has been kept hidden. The most significant precursor of Jacobs-Jenkinss deployment of the photo album in Appropriate occurs in Buried Child. 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]. Appropriate opens with the initially unexplained arrival of Franz and River jumping through a window into a very disorderly living room cluttered with old and new furniture as cicadas hum in the background (15). American Next Wave: Four Contemporary Plays from HighTide Festival Theatre. The next time we see River, she has taken over the kitchen as Shelly eventually does to make bouillon for Dodge. 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. BJJ clarifies that in the time of the play, a photograph was a novel/innovative/contemporary way for the plot to be resolved. It is a fitting prologue for a play that perpetually examines itself, from every possible angle, and yet manages to transform self-consciousness from something that paralyzes into something that propels. Since Boucicault will be playing an American Indian, he slaps on redface. Jacobs-Jenkins quotes from Lopakhins speech after he buys the estate on which his father and grandfather were slaves as an epigraph for his own play (11). (During the lecture the audience can hear Melody giving her blowjob to Jim Crow.) Box office: 020-8940 3633. It's a strenuous and daring display of theatricality that goes far beyond issues of race in. [9] Following Hutcheon, Jane Barnette notes that a palimpsest can be read simultaneously or sequentiallythat is, (to an extent) one can isolate layers for consideration, or take in the entirety of the palimpsest at once, and, importantly, she reminds us that the stage palimpsest will necessarily be based more on image and sound than on the words in the play text. Study Guide! Her neighbor, Eunice, describes the plantation house matter-of-factly as a great big place with white columns; Stanley boasts that he pulled Stella down off them columns, and she loved it.[39] In Suzan-Lori Parkss Topdog/Underdog a raggedy family photo album (13), its photos also unseen, represents the uncertain history of brothers Linc and Booth and symbolizes as well the absence of African Americans from American history. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. [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). 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. The unseen photographs of lynchings in Appropriate anticipate the even more profoundly shocking real-life photograph of a lynching that audiences do see in An Octoroon. [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. Log in here. [2] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, quoted. The play reiterates a lot of themes I've heard before, but does it in a fresh way that's both thoughtful and provoking. [6], An Octoroon had a workshop production at Performance Space 122 from June 19 July 3, 2010, featuring Travis York, Karl Allen, Chris Manley, Ben Beckley, Gabe Levey, Jake Hart, Margaret Flanagan, Amber Gray, Mary Wiseman, LaToya Lewis, Kim Gainer, and Sasheer Zamata. Underscoring the link, Toni sarcastically refers to her brother as Beauregarde Big Daddy Lafayette (35). Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer, 2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center But even if your response is an emphatic "No", you should still check out this superb play that employs black, white, and redface in unexpected ways while reclaiming a lost gem of the American stage. Franz and River are startled by the waking of a figure on the couch, who turns out to be Rhys, Tonis son, just as Shelley is startled by Dodge, Vinces grandfather, whom she arouses from sleep. 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. Already a member? Advisory Editor: David Savran The second is the date of 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. But as audiences laugh (or squirm) at the Crows outrageous minstrel show turns, or speculate knowingly about the quarrels of the Lafayettes, or weep for Zoe and laugh at the performances of Minnie, Dido, and Pete, Jacobs-Jenkins simultaneously compels contemporary spectators to confront the racial assumptions he has excavated along with the dramatic forms that contain them and to worry about their own and each others complicity in the continuing legacy of those assumptions. About their apparently imminent sale, for example, Dido says, This is about the worst damn day of my life! Topsys Interlude late in the play (labeled Interlude/Interruption [309] to mark its difference from the other Interludes) contributes in a different way to Jacobs-Jenkinss creation of an archeology of seeing in Neighbors. 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. As both the most recent text of the course as well as our last, I think Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss An Octoroon points to the complex hope of a world in which black artists can create works which are separate from the recycling of previous black narratives in America. Familiar character types, too, reappear in Appropriate, further establishing the plays generic affiliation with the American family drama that Jacobs-Jenkins set out to adapt for his own purposes. In August: Osage County, for example, Barbara conflates the decay of home and family with the decay of America: This country, this experiment, America, this hubris: what a lament, if no one saw it go.[34] In Dividing the Estate when family members, no longer able to depend on money from their land, contemplate getting jobs at Whataburger, schoolteacher Pauline comments, Thats what they say America is becoming, you know, a service economy.[35] And in Buried Child when Shelly tells Vince that his home is like a Norman Rockwell cover, Vince replies, Its American.[36] This American house with its fraught relationships and dark secrets is explicitly Vinces inheritance (128), willed to him by his grandfather, Dodge. [2] In a 2018 poll by critics of The New York Times, the work was ranked the second-greatest American play of the past 25 years. So, instead of giving up, he decides to play the white male roles himself. Jacobs-Jenkinss excavations in this play are broad rather than deep and as much literary as theatrical or performative. online is the same, and will be the first date in the citation. [1] This leads to a hilarious scene . [25], Artists Repertory Theatre, located in Portland, Oregon, was to stage An Octoroon from September 3 to October 1, 2017. 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. Melody, looking different now, meets Jim at the stage door and asks him how he feels, and the actor playing Jim Crow starts to tell her how he really feels (319). For much of the play Jim Crow refuses to take on the eponymous role of his late father, though by the end he too performs his part in a rousing version of the minstrel song and dance number Jump Jim Crow, his new-found talent inspired apparently by the admiration of Melody.[14]. 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 cultural stratigraphy is especially apparent in the sequence late in the play in which the Crows encourage Jim not to be nervous in the upcoming show because, Mammy says, the audience luvs evathang we does (317). [39] Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire. 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]. [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). (Psst, it could well be Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins himself.). 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. [47] Their voices (borrowed from the dialect of contemporary sitcom) are the most vibrant and compelling in the play. 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. 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. Reactions to his play Plays ( Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 2008!, which premiered in 1859 theatrical past with lingering consequences works in a rather different way goes far issues... Plays ( Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008 ), 76 of both and... A new wrinkle to Adaptation Theory slaps on redface ( 285 ) a Streetcar Desire. Octoroon, which premiered in 1859 will be the first date in the play finale deprives... 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