[10] Jane Barnette, Adapturgy: The Dramaturgs Art and Theatrical Adaptation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 55, 62. [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. 3 (Fall 2005): 2435. [37] Thomas P. Adler, Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, in Matthew Roudan, ed. In doing so, Brer Rabbitor the dramatist himselfassesses the political impact of Jacobs-Jenkinss adaptation. 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. It's just so good and so fascinating! Playwright taunts BJJ, and laments how theatre has changed since his death. As such, among many other things, it provides a dramatization of and peek at the plantation pecking order in . Research Playwrights, Librettists, Composers and Lyricists. Through this strikingly original use of the photo album, Jacobs-Jenkins achieves his objective of writing a black playa play dealing with blackness in Americathat has no black characters in it.[38]. 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. [13] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Neighbors. 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). 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. Rather than execute this, the actors explain and act out what happens. 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. Club members can see a different show every night of the week. An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. 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. 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. Daniel OConnell, Frederick Douglass, and Intersectionality, Public vs. The Crows uncomfortable, not to say embarrassing, interrogative gaze anticipates that of the zanier Brer Rabbit, who wanders through An Octoroon slyly inviting the audience of that play to reflect upon their own and each others responses. 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. with Siobhan OFlynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 170. Zoe and George are alone, and George confesses his love for her. In both plays the buried secrets are discovered to be dead bodies. . 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. 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). So in the opening moments of An Octoroon, he sends his alter ego, B J J (Austin Smith, in a terrific professional debut) onstage to consider the matter in his underwear. Lafouche comes to run the auction of the property and announces Zoe will be sold. One, simply called BJJ, explains the dilemmas facing a writer of colour whose every word is mined for its racial significance; the other figure, representing Boucicault, is a drunken showman who has no such self-doubt. . Stacy Wolf, Frank Hentschker, Executive Director 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. The album is deeply embedded in the action of the play as the characters try to figure out what it means and what to do with it. Rhoda's father was Mrs. Meredith's brother, a white man, and Rhoda's mother was a southern woman of one-eighth black ancestry. 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. Note: When citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. 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. An Octoroon is fearless, dangerous theater that challenges conventional notions of history and performance. Dido replies, "No. Wahnotee, accused by the members of Captain Ratts ship of killing Paul, is about to be lynched. [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. 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. (Psst, it could well be Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins himself.). 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. "An Octoroon," the play that drew us together, is a tricky work to pull off under optimal conditions, and I worried how this postmodern riff on Dion Boucicault's musty "The Octoroon" would fare. 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. The effect, according to the stage directions, is supposed to be absolutely nothing less than utter, utter transcendence (310). This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. Ostensibly 19th-century slaves, their diction is so modern in its wit and inflection, they could easily be transplanted to any stoop in Bedford-Stuyvesant without causing much of a stir. Early in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's magnificent play, we see a version of the playwright who . 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. In this finale Jacobs-Jenkins deprives his audience of their collectivity and requires them to question their own individual reactions to his play. [10] Vallejo Gantner, artistic director of PS 122 along with theatre critics Elisabeth Vincentelli and Adam Feldman, argued that although it was not unethical to publish the email, it may not have been "nice" to publish it. 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. 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. Though I cant remember any of them now. Maybe they giggle (319). An Interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lila Neugebauer, Signature Theatre. 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). Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. Abbey Theatre, Dublin . 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. Richard explains that the origin of Agamemnons tragedy lies in events that occurred before the action of the play begins. Effectively, he adapts melodramas audience for his own meta-melodramatic and political purposes. David Krasner 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 is speaking here of Everybody (2017), his adaptation of the medieval morality play Everyman. 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. 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. By layering African-American history onto Greek myth, Richard constructs an alternative archeology of seeing to Topsysand Jacobs-Jenkinssexcavation of the minstrel show that is the plays main focus. . [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. If there are two dates, the date of publication and appearance He does acknowledge, however, that his wife, Halie, has a family album that can explain the heritage . 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. 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. Pete sends Paul to go find a letter that would promise enough money to save Terrebonne. Unorthodox, highly stylized plays on incendiary topics tend to have limited shelf lives, especially when theyre wrenched out of their birthplaces. 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. 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. 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. When it opened in May to ecstatic reviews, An Octoroon became one of the towns hottest tickets. In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon." Themes. I don't have a therapist. This is the type of play I would love to dissect for a thesis project! 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. [26] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Wegener, About Appropriate, 147. 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. By opening up the old form of the minstrel show, Jacobs-Jenkins exposes old meanings and layers new ones onto them. 2 (2017): 151. [8] An adaptation may criticize either the assumptions of the adapted text or the adapters own society or both. Certainly, they belong to a different theatrical world and tradition than the Pattersons. Present in An Octoroon is the illusion of suffering and actual suffering. George proposes to Dora, but Zoe confesses their love, which turns off Dora. While An Octoroon revisits many of these themes, it does so in a more formally challenging way. 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. Assistant announces that the boat explodes. 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. George photographs Dora with his camera while she and Zoe plot to make George marry her. This leads to a hilarious scene . Esther Kim Lee 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. 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