Adaptation is a creative, interpretative, and political act. The same can be said about Wahnotee's love for Paul, a young slave. 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. [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. Maybe they giggle (319). In doing so, Brer Rabbitor the dramatist himselfassesses the political impact of Jacobs-Jenkinss adaptation. In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon. Asserting that he was not afraid of black images that would generally be found offensive, in the earliest play in the trilogy, Neighbors (2010), Jacobs-Jenkins adopts tropes from the nineteenth-century blackface minstrel show that are uncomfortably crude and undeniably racist. f I say that this bizarrely brilliant play is the work of a 32-year-old black American dramatist called. Jacobs-Jenkins himself took on the role of Br'er Rabbit and Captain Ratts.[14]. Jim Crows song and dance, while not one of the formal Interludes, is a case in point. 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). 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). [13] The cast featured Chris Myers as BJJ, in triple roles: the black playwright, George Peyton and M'Closky; Danny Wolohan as Dion Boucicault, Zo Winters as Dora, and Amber Gray as Zoe. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. (depending presumably on the resources of the theatre). [4] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Archeology of Seeing. Daniel OConnell, Frederick Douglass, and Intersectionality, Public vs. Myers gives a tour de force in his triple roles as the blas black playwright, the charming leading man, and the mustachioed villain. 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. 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. By opening up the old form of the minstrel show, Jacobs-Jenkins exposes old meanings and layers new ones onto them. 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. Most distinctively in An Octoroon and with far-reaching dramaturgical consequences, Jacobs-Jenkins racially cross-casts several of the characters. "An Octoroon," which opened in 2014 at Soho Rep. in New York, won an Obie award for best new American play. Ironically, The Octoroon premiered in New York four days after famed. The device of racial cross-casting inevitably creates a gap between actor and character, superimposing the stylization of Brechtian distance on the stylization of melodramatic stereotyping. 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. Checking on the audiences reactions is a whimsical giant Brer Rabbit (clearly an authorial figure and originally played by Jacobs-Jenkins himself) who wanders through the show at will, staring at the spectators (much as the Crows stare at their audience at the end of Neighbors). The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. In the main plot George, the white hero, falls in love with a beautiful octoroon, Zoe, who poisons herself rather than succumb to the white villain, MClosky, who has bought her; in the subplot, photographic evidence demonstrates that MClosky, not Native American Wahnotee, has murdered slave boy Paul in order to steal the document that would save Georges plantation and prevent Zoe from being sold. And in both plays verbal conflict degenerates into physical violence. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 249, 377. 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. The archeology of Appropriate (2013) works in a rather different way. [10] Jane Barnette, Adapturgy: The Dramaturgs Art and Theatrical Adaptation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 55, 62. Again, Wahnotee and Paul are presented so sympathetically (especially Wahnotee) that it seems to confirm the author's approval of their feelings and characters. Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. An Octoroon is fearless, dangerous theater that challenges conventional notions of history and performance. B J J isnt the only undressed playwright onstage for long. [2] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, quoted. This point goes all the way back to our early readings of Gilroy and theory, so Jacobs-Jenkins uses these well known texts as his foundation for An Octoroon, while also moving drastically past these notions. The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center BJJ clarifies that in the time of the play, a photograph was a novel/innovative/contemporary way for the plot to be resolved. That sense of uncertainty is part of the fun. An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The blown-up photograph of a real-life lynchingagainst which background George makes an impassioned defense of Wahnotee against the wild and lawless proceeding of lynch-law (51)is profoundly shocking but also positions spectators as complicit in the voyeuristic gaze of the photographs enthralled white gawkers.[50], While this is the most disturbing moment in the play, there is no ambiguity about the kind of horrified response called for by the photograph of the lynching. 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. [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?") [25], Artists Repertory Theatre, located in Portland, Oregon, was to stage An Octoroon from September 3 to October 1, 2017. At the end of the play the Crow Family Minstrels do not give us the comeback show that their rehearsals have perhaps led us to expect but something much more radical. [37] Thomas P. Adler, Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, in Matthew Roudan, ed. ", The book is about a "Tragic Mulatta" character, a stereotype used by 19th-century American authors to explore racial miscegenation. [42] Jacobs-Jenkins retains most of Boucicaults main characters and substantial amounts of his dialogue as well as his plot. [12] Charles Isherwood, Caricatured Commentary: Minstrel Meets Modern, The New York Times 9 March 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/theater/reviews/10neighbors.html (accessed 1 May 2017). The earliest minstrels were white performers in blackface, but there were also troupes of African-American performers. [11], Mark Ravenhill staged a workshop production of the play featuring Saycon Sengbloh in April 2012. in Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation.. The two scream expletives at each other Marina- and Ulay-style before BJJ gives up and they begin the play in earnest. [30] In Appropriate, contrary to Hutcheons exclusion of short intertextual allusions to other works from consideration as adaptations,[31] Jacobs-Jenkins works primarily through such brief allusions to adapt, not a particular prior text, but a whole genre. Infinitely playful Ken Nwosu and Kevin Trainor in An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. [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". . 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. 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). Jacobs-Jenkins developed his take on The Octoroon while he was a Dorothy Strelsin Fellow at Soho Rep in the 2009/10 season. The play reiterates a lot of themes I've heard before, but does it in a fresh way that's both thoughtful and provoking. Yet as the production keeps switching approaches, it also finds inklings of validity in each one, including that of Boucicaults original script. [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. Orange Tree, RichmondBranden Jacobs-Jenkinss extraordinary play is both an adaptation of a 19th-century melodrama and a dazzling postmodernist critique of it. Its story, of a romantic plantation owner and the girl of mixed race he adores, was set in the Old South the land of cotton, a kingdom built on the labor of African slaves. George proposes to Dora, but Zoe confesses their love, which turns off Dora. Stacy Wolf, Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Verna A. 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. [27] Kee-Yoon Nahm, Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. Make an argument for each side of the slavery argument here, analyzing how the play could be read as both anti- and pro-slavery. "An Octoroon" begins with BJJ an onstage realization of the melodrama's playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins talking to his imaginary therapist about the public's tendency to view most of his. 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. So, instead of giving up, he decides to play the white male roles himself. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. 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. Moments later, he reveals, "Just kidding. At the Plantation Terrebonne in Louisiana, Dido and Minnie chat about the arrival of George, and the passing of his uncle, their previous master. 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. 3. 1 Mar. 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. Even the notion of what makes a play is up for grabs, as this tumultuous piece is both an adaptation of The Octoroon, a popular 19th-century melodrama by Dion Boucicault, and a postmodernist critique of it. Its even worse than the first time I got sold! And Minnie replies, Yeah, I didnt wake up thinkin this was where my day was gonna go (41). In addition to the resourceful Nwosu, who deserves to be honoured in end-of-the-year awards, there is a host of fine performances. 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. online is the same, and will be the first date in the citation. Photographs, unsurprisingly, figure in many plays about families. 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. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); The Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT), http://www.signaturetheatre.org/News/An-Archeology-of-Seeing.aspx, http://archive.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2011/01/16/neighbors_exposes_racial_history_on_stage/, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/theater/reviews/10neighbors.html, http://blastmagazine.com/2011/01/14/stage-review-neighbors-at-company-one/, http://www.broadwayworld.com/boston/article/Company-One-Wants-You-to-Meet-the-Neighbors-20110117, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-branden-jacobs-jenkins-20150927-story.html, http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/, http://wfpl.org/review-family-secrets-fester-appropriate/, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, Creative Commons (CC) license unless otherwise noted, Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss, Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space by Jessica Brater, Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhls Plays of Mourning by Seokhun Choi. 3 (Fall 2005): 2435. 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. An Interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lila Neugebauer, Signature Theatre. [52] For his own political purposes, in An Octoroon he adapts not only his source play and the melodramatic genre in which it is written but also the swiftly changing responses that genre typically elicits, allowing, as Rosa Schneider notes, a twenty-first-century audience to feel some of the same effects as their nineteenth-century counterparts.[53]. The emphasis on huge body parts, especially eyes, lips, and feet, was characteristic of representations of black people in minstrel shows. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. 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). [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. The photograph album in Appropriate is particularly shocking because these photos are to be understood, not only as symbolic representations, but as literal artifacts of American history. 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. Paulwith the mailbagsstops to take a photo of himself with Georges camera. 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. Besides, it was being almost entirely recast for the new production, and there was concern that the original chemistry might evaporate. 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. While posing, MClosky comes from behind and kills Paul to take the letter. Robert Vorlicky Unorthodox, highly stylized plays on incendiary topics tend to have limited shelf lives, especially when theyre wrenched out of their birthplaces. Bo hated the plantation with its bugs and its endless stories about Civil War ancestors. [45] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 20. Jorge Huerta [27] The familys various responses are white, Kee-Yoon Nahm explains, because they are the reactions of people who can in no way share in the experiences documented by the photos. The Octoroon is a drama of plantation life and miscegenation in antebellum America, written by an Irishman who visited the South. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. The second date is today's On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. In one way Jacobs-Jenkins puts his whole play in quotation marks through his opening and closing sequences that stand outside stage time and outside the realism usually associated with American family drama. [53] Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something., [54] For Jacobs-Jenkinss knowledge of American family drama see Wegener, About Appropriate, 146. [38] Verna A. And neither do you.". In "An Octoroon," the projection of a lynching photograph grounds this playfully postmodern riff on Dion Boucicault's "The Octoroon" in historical horror. 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. In her 1994 essay Possession, she argues that it is necessary to dig for bones in order to locate and recreate unrecorded African-American history. 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. Then Playwright and Assistant put on redface and blackface paint. [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. 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