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. [7] Grard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 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. Robert Vorlicky Toni returns from Atlanta, Bo and Rachael from New York, and Franz and River from Portland. [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). It toys with the plot of Dion Boucicault's 19th century play "The Octoroon . In Appropriate Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the genre of American family drama. Boucicault portrayed Wahnotee, and in his play Jacobs-Jenkins explores the connection between a person and their identity as artist. 1 Mar. Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon call for both kinds of reading. 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. The superimposition of hero and villain upon one another suggests that the moral difference between them is less clear-cut than melodramatic stereotypes would have it and illustrates, as Lisa Merill and Theresa Saxon note, the uncomfortable similarity between desire to own, master, or marry Zoe. The womens fantasy, however, will prove ephemeral. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. Richard believes that Agamemnon, a new breed of Achaean, should have resisted and saved hisRichard, distraught, slips and says, mydaughter (292, 293). [22], From May 18 to July 1, 2017 An Octoroon was performed at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London[23] in a production directed by Ned Bennett and designed by Georgia Lowe. About their apparently imminent sale, for example, Dido says, This is about the worst damn day of my life! The acting swings wildly in technique, from the grotesque (and comically inspired) affectedness of Mary Wiseman as a snooty Southern belle to the wrenching sincerity of Ms. Gray, who created the title role at Soho Rep. And then the female house servants pricelessly played by Maechi Aharanwa, Pascale Armand and Danielle Davenport describe life as 19th-century chattel in the manner of 21st-century African-American girlfriends gossiping. 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. Vol. [35] Horton Foote, Dividing the Estate. Note: When citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. [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. 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. Meanwhile Zip Coon suavely charms Jean, encouraging her to talk about herself and taking an interest in her poetry in contrast to Richards obsession with his own career and status. [32] Erin Keane, Review/Family Secrets Fester in Appropriate, 89.3 WFPL News Louisville, 20 March 2013. http://wfpl.org/review-family-secrets-fester-appropriate/ (accessed 30 December 2016). [39] Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire. Richard is horrified by the Crow familys moving in next door. 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.
[31] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 170. As a symbol, the album suffuses the consciousness of both characters and audience. Verna A. 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. In the mid-twentieth century, much of the pioneering work consisted in studies, both practical and theoretical, of the adaptation of novels into film. eNotes.com, Inc. 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). 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. . 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). [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]. Also, it's incredibly funny. with Siobhan OFlynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 170. Kim Marra . 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 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. [43] In all three plays Jacobs-Jenkins adds innovative techniques to the toolbox available to theatrical adaptation and further wrinkles to adaptation theory. Zoe calls Dido Mammy, and she puts on a mammy character as they argue. 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] 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. 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. Since I have discussed Jacobs-Jenkinss adaptation of The Octoroon at length elsewhere, I shall confine my remarks in this essay to a brief examination of the ways in which in An Octoroon the playwright extends to almost every feature of the play the archeological techniques he develops in Neighbors and Appropriate. Searching him, George finds the letter which resolves the conflict of Terrebonne's future. 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. Daniel OConnell, Frederick Douglass, and Intersectionality, Public vs. An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. 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. In this finale Jacobs-Jenkins deprives his audience of their collectivity and requires them to question their own individual reactions to his play. He is humiliated by what he has to do (285). At the Orange Tree, Richmond, until 24 June. In the very end, this music finally gives us the respite for contemplation that we desperately need to process the madness we've just witnessed. Ed. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. If there are two dates, the date of publication and appearance [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). The Octoroon is a drama of plantation life and miscegenation in antebellum America, written by an Irishman who visited the South. [7] Often transmotivation, transfocalization, and transvalorization work together. 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. There is a coda, which members of the audience leaving the theatre (according to Jacobs-Jenkinss stage directions) might or might not see. I washed it away (97). Zoe and George are alone, and George confesses his love for her. 2 (2017): 151. 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. Even more pointed is Minnies advice to Dido, I know we slaves and evurthang, but you are not your job (58), an anachronistic clich that reminds us that Dido, in fact, has no life outside her job. 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. 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. 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. Word Count: 356. *thunder clap*. 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. Perhaps An Octoroon was best suited to a rough-edged performance in a tiny theater. 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. [42] Jacobs-Jenkins retains most of Boucicaults main characters and substantial amounts of his dialogue as well as his plot. Zoe Peyton, , "The Octoroon", is the supposedly "freed" biological daughter of Judge Peyton, former owner of the plantation. [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). [36] Sam Shepard, Buried Child. When a black actor in whiteface makes a racist remark (Georges reference to the folksy ways of the niggers down here, for example), the line is necessarily italicized and held up for the audiences critical inspection. 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. [45] Similarly, the old slave Pete (in blackface) clearly performs his role as loyal house slave. While the text that Appropriate adapts is the genre of American family drama as a whole, Buried Child, itself a veritable patchwork of allusions to well-known family plays, will, in fact, prove to be the most significant single analog for Jacobs-Jenkinss play.[33]. The steamboat blows up, and as I have remarked elsewhere, The two women are trapped inside Boucicaults plot just as Tom Stoppards reimagined Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are trapped inside Hamlet and Dido and Minnies real-life counterparts were trapped in the institution of slavery.[48] Nonetheless, as Merrill and Saxon cogently observe, by focusing on Dido and Minnies hopes and fears for themselves instead of on Zoes tragic death in the plays last scene and by granting them critical insights into their condition, Jacobs-Jenkins forces todays audiences to refocus their attention on the material conditions and lives of ordinary black women rather than the eponymous octoroon.[49], Jacobs-Jenkins similarly reconfigures and overlays Boucicaults sensation scene with a more relevant one of his own. While An Octoroon revisits many of these themes, it does so in a more formally challenging way. 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. [5] Suzan-Lori Parks anticipates Jacobs-Jenkinss use of an archeological metaphor for a slightly different purpose. Foster, Suzan-Lori Parkss Staging of the Lincoln Myth in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 17, no. 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. Bartleby the Scrivener, A Tale of Wall Street, The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child. Last Updated on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. If there are three dates, the first date is the date of the original 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. The debate is not, for starters, simply a matter of black and white. 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. 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). Appropriate/An Octoroon. [54] Because Jacobs-Jenkins appreciates the works and genres he adapts even at some level the black minstrelsy of Neighbors[55]he encourages audiences similarly to appreciate and to enjoy his own versions of them. Moments later, he reveals, "Just kidding. [25] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Appropriate. For Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins has deliberately built his play on slippery foundations, the kind likely to trip up any dramatist, performer or theatergoer. : a person of one-eighth Black ancestry Word History Etymology octa- + -roon (as in quadroon) First Known Use 1859, in the meaning defined above Time Traveler The first known use of octoroon was in 1859 See more words from the same year Dictionary Entries Near octoroon octopus octoroon octospore See More Nearby Entries Cite this Entry Style eNotes Editorial. It's a strenuous and daring display of theatricality that goes far beyond issues of race in. And try to guess who that is dressed up as a Beatrix Potter-style rabbit. Your email is never published nor shared. 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.. In the auction scene he has to fight himself over Zoe. 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. The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 7. In "An Octoroon," the projection of a lynching photograph grounds this playfully postmodern riff on Dion Boucicault's "The Octoroon" in historical horror. ZOE played by an octoroon actress, a white actress, a quadroon actress, a biracial actress, a multi-racial actress, or an actress of color who can pass as an octoroon. 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. Lafouche comes to run the auction of the property and announces Zoe will be sold. So, instead of giving up, he decides to play the white male roles himself. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Obie-award winning play "An Octoroon," at the Gamm Theatre through Feb. 20, pokes at sensibilities, pries at prejudices and pushes at closed gates in a person's mind. 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. 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. Log in here. 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. An Octoroon is weird in all the right ways, but it's also just so clever! 1 - The Rocky Horror Show
But as well as preserving much of Boucicaults work, not least his artistic focus in manipulating his audiences emotions, Jacobs-Jenkins incorporates his own words with Boucicaults, transforms melodramatic techniques into Brechtian techniques, and uses racially cross-cast actors in whiteface, blackface, and redface, inviting audiences to join him in excavating the plays different levels of meaning and to see them simultaneously. Unlike most of the plays of the time, however, the central "tragic action" of the play centers not around the fate of a http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/ (accessed 30 December 2016). 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. [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. 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! Box office: 020-8940 3633. In both plays the buried secrets are discovered to be dead bodies. The gap between tone and content is at once disturbingly funny and appalling. 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. In A Theory of Adaptation (first published in 2006) Hutcheon defines an adaptation as an extended, announced, deliberate revisitation of a particular work of art.[6] While adaptations often entail changing the medium or genre of the source text, they may include any intermedial or intramedial, intergeneric or intrageneric updating or other reworking of an earlier work. Foster is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago. The unseen album, telling its symbolic story of a long line of corpses (112), of incest and infanticide, prefigures the more shocking album of lynchings and dead black bodies that mesmerizes the Lafayette family in Appropriate. [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. 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. Early in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's magnificent play, we see a version of the playwright who . 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). 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 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. "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. 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). Jacobs-Jenkins shines a light on the politics of the plays stratigraphy by explaining directly to his audience the features of the genre he is adapting. As such, among many other things, it provides a dramatization of and peek at the plantation pecking order in . 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. 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. Foster, Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson This wish to use preexisting material to simultaneously move past these experiences because of the multiple levels of the plays presentation and humor. [1] Jeff Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation To Confront Race And Identity In The US, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 16 February 2015. 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). Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 41. Thats race as a subject that no one can get a comfortable hold on. 2023
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