As reported by one reviewer of Company Ones production of Neighbors in Boston in 2011, for example, the cast keeps you uncertain of whether youre expected to laugh or cringe, engage or retreat, and sends you off wondering why you reacted in whatever, inevitably complex ways you did.[18] Another reviewer of this production commented that it feels like we should applaud [the Crows] shtick as members of the fictional audience, but not as the actual audience.[19]. George photographs Dora with his camera while she and Zoe plot to make George marry her. All of these historically situated stereotypes, Jacobs-Jenkins implies, are based in white views of black performative behavior deriving ultimately from the minstrel shows. Richard believes that Agamemnon, a new breed of Achaean, should have resisted and saved hisRichard, distraught, slips and says, mydaughter (292, 293). [49] Merrill and Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, 152. 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. [40] Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 13. If there are two dates, the date of publication and appearance At the Plantation Terrebonne in Louisiana, Dido and Minnie chat about the arrival of George, and the passing of his uncle, their previous master. Topsy, Sambo, and Mammy (Zip is busy fighting Richard) recite a litany of what white people readily enjoy about black performance, staged or otherwise. Besides, it was being almost entirely recast for the new production, and there was concern that the original chemistry might evaporate. After the conclusion of their show the Crows take a curtain call, but that is not the end. But the questions it never stops posing light up a very murky night. [2] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, quoted. For the details of this argument see Verna A. As in Neighbors, Word Count: 465. At the same time his plays push the boundaries of what adaptation can accomplish and offer further refinements to the current discourse on adaptation theory. This play is set in Creole Louisiana, before the Civil War, on a plantation called Terrebonne. [19] Nancy Grossman, Company One Wants You to Meet the Neighbors, Broadway World, 17 January 2011. http://www.broadwayworld.com/boston/article/Company-One-Wants-You-to-Meet-the-Neighbors-20110117 (accessed 5 December 2016). 1 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 249, 377. 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]. Private Life in McCanns Transatlantic, The Application of A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms to The Black and Green Atlantic, The Tyranny of Monarchy in A Voyage to Lilliput, Gullivers Difficult Decision to Return Home. [26] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Wegener, About Appropriate, 147. 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. Log in here. Locating 'Dixie' in Newspaper Discourse and Theatrical Performance in Toronto, 1880s-1920s Jan 2018 Alistair Toovey and Vivian Oparah in An Octoroon. First performed at the Public Theater in New York in 2010, and subtitled an epic with cartoons,[12] Neighbors depicts what happens when the Crows, a family of minstrels played by actors in blackface, move in next door to the PattersonsRichard, a black classics professor, Jean, his white wife, and Melody, their teenage daughter. . His aggression that people always try to place these bigger cultural burdens, such as the adaptation of African folklore when he merely uses animals to illustrate his own point, shows that he wants for his work to speak for itself and not be as tied down to one specific meaning. If I say that this bizarrely brilliant play is the work of a 32-year-old black American dramatist called Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, I am already subscribing to an idea the piece seeks to subvert: that our identities can be defined by convenient labels. 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. 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). Bill Demastes 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. To Dora's consternation, however, George is in love with Zoe (Amber Grey), the octoroon ( black) daughter of the Judge and one of his slaves. Early in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's magnificent play, we see a version of the playwright who . She is currently working on ambivalent motherhood in contemporary adaptations of Medea. Jacobs-Jenkins is speaking here of Everybody (2017), his adaptation of the medieval morality play Everyman. Since Boucicault will be playing an American Indian, he slaps on redface. 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! The most overt of this is Zoe's status as an "Octoroon," a person who is one-eighth black. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159. Possession, The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 4. [22] Jacobs-Jenkinss final direction for Topsy, And maybe it ends with her masturbating with a banana. References External links. 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. It's a strenuous and daring display of theatricality that goes far beyond issues of race in. 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. The auction begins and MClosky aggressively bids on Zoe, winning her. And forget about running or dancing or hopping like a bunny, as the characters sometimes unwisely attempt in An Octoroon, Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss coruscating comedy of unresolved history, which opened on Thursday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. [25], Artists Repertory Theatre, located in Portland, Oregon, was to stage An Octoroon from September 3 to October 1, 2017. 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. 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. Underscoring the link, Toni sarcastically refers to her brother as Beauregarde Big Daddy Lafayette (35). The womens fantasy, however, will prove ephemeral. [9] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, xvii, 6, 21. Anyone can read what you share. He is able to perform only by becoming almost like a man possessed (288). As a punishment Diana denies him wind to sail to Troy and requires the sacrifice of his daughter to appease her. In Appropriate Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the genre of American family drama. The evening starts with a confrontation between the two authors. 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). Pete is Paul's grandfather. Research Playwrights, Librettists, Composers and Lyricists. 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. The CrowsMammy, Zip Coon, Sambo, Topsy, and Jim Crowplay updated versions of the infamous parts suggested by their names. The plantation is in dire financial straits, but could be saved if George were to marry Dora (Zo Winters), a wealthy young heiress from a neighboring estate. . It then manipulates us by just such means, including one truly upsetting video projection toward the end. A photograph of a real murdered human contrasts with the original play's use of a photograph for justice.[4]. 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. . Foster, Meta-melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicaults The Octoroon, Modern Drama 59, no. At the Orange Tree, Richmond, until 24 June. Similarly, Ben Horner (in blackface) gives committed performances in the dual roles of Uncle Tom-esque Pete and adorable slave boy Paul. [1] [2] [3]. BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant explain the significance of the fourth act, the sensation scene in melodrama. The dead patriarch has counterparts in Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Beverly in August: Osage County, both of whom are absent (dying or dead) for much of their respective plays. 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". As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Unorthodox, highly stylized plays on incendiary topics tend to have limited shelf lives, especially when theyre wrenched out of their birthplaces. It toys with the plot of Dion Boucicault's 19th century play "The Octoroon . [46] In Definition Theatre Companys 2017 production of An Octoroon in Chicago, Pete and Paul were played by an African-American actress in blackface, producing an even more pointed Brechtian comment on the absurdity of Boucicaults racist and gendered characterizations. Minnie imagines coasting up and down the river, lookin fly, the wind whipping at our hair and our slave tunics and shit, being admired by the muscle-y men on the boat, and eating fresh fish instead of these fattening pig guts (42). 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. 2 (2017): 151. The gap between tone and content is at once disturbingly funny and appalling. 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. Cellist Lester St. Louis helps create the dun dun dun with his live accompaniment, which underscores much of the show. Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon enable the multiple-layered seeing that Jacobs-Jenkins is talking about because they require comparative viewing across the adapted and adaptive works themselves and across the cultures or historical periods that produced them. [43] In all three plays Jacobs-Jenkins adds innovative techniques to the toolbox available to theatrical adaptation and further wrinkles to adaptation theory. The photo albums in Buried Child and Appropriate reveal what has been kept hidden. Dion Boucicault's drama was inspired by his visit to the American South and The Quadroon (1856), a novel by Thomas Mayne Reid. His most recent play, Appropriate, is about a white family that discovers an album of lynching photos while cleaning out a deceased patriarch's home. [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]. Foster is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago. In the first lecture Richard explores the origin of tragedy in our lives, suggesting that it comes from choices we have made in the past that haunt us deep into our very present (240). 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. Throughout the play the Crows rehearse and quarrel about who should do what in their upcoming show. 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). [31] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 170. The audiences self-reflections that Jacobs-Jenkins so carefully constructs in response to all three of his plays constitute a further layer in his archeology of seeing.. "Branden is like a performer whose material is text," Benson observes. Try it today! [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. More significant than these echoes is the familiar symbolic equation of the family home with America. The detailed variations on this theme multiply into dizziness. Assistant announces that the boat explodes. : 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 Esther Kim Lee Study Guide! [5] Suzan-Lori Parks anticipates Jacobs-Jenkinss use of an archeological metaphor for a slightly different purpose. Perhaps An Octoroon was best suited to a rough-edged performance in a tiny theater. Wahnotee, accused by the members of Captain Ratts ship of killing Paul, is about to be lynched. eNotes Editorial. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. "The Octoroon - Themes" eNotes Publishing 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. . (During the lecture the audience can hear Melody giving her blowjob to Jim Crow.) f I say that this bizarrely brilliant play is the work of a 32-year-old black American dramatist called. Orange Tree, RichmondBranden Jacobs-Jenkinss extraordinary play is both an adaptation of a 19th-century melodrama and a dazzling postmodernist critique of it. [17], Company One Theatre in Boston co-produced the play with ArtsEmerson, directed by Summer L. Williams. But the show must go on, and the writers, it seems, are short on actors, for reasons political as well as practical. [1] Where Boucicault cleverly uses a photograph of the real murderer of Paul to prevent a miscarriage of justice, Jacobs-Jenkins has to go further to produce a similarly sensational effect for his contemporary audience. That, however, is only the bare outline of a work that is infinitely playful and deeply serious and which dazzlingly questions the nature of theatrical illusion. By excavating one of the most memorable stage images in the drama of the American family and layering his own meaning on top of it, Jacobs-Jenkins italicizes his original contribution to the genre. Word Count: 356. Already a member? Humana Festival 2013 The Complete Plays, edited by Amy Wegener and Sarah Lunnie (New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2014), 146. [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. 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. [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. An Octoroon, quite appropriately, ends in the dark. 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. (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.). 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. 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. As the house slaves Minnie and Dido, the hilarious Jocelyn Bioh and Marsha Stephanie Blake provide much-needed comic relief from this sentimental and contrived plot. Ironically, The Octoroon premiered in New York four days after famed. . Eventually, Zoe takes the poison and runs off. An Octoroon is set way down yonder in the land of cotton during the antebellum period. [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. Pete, George, and Dora acquaint themselves when Zoe enters to meet George. But Toni says, I always liked Grandmas stories. 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. An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. England, England, Front Of House at Prince of Wales Theatre Jump-start your essay with our outlining tool to make sure you have all the main points of your essay covered. The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center There is a coda, which members of the audience leaving the theatre (according to Jacobs-Jenkinss stage directions) might or might not see. The same can be said about Wahnotee's love for Paul, a young slave. Download the entire The Octoroon study guide as a printable PDF! 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. 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. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. What ensues is an upside down, topsy-turvy world where race and morality are challenged and intensified. 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. Editorial Assistant: Cen Liu, Michael Y. Bennett 1 (Fall 2018). In Neighbors Jacobs-Jenkins updates blackface minstrelsy; in Appropriate he borrows, or appropriates, characters, situations, and motifs from every play that [he] liked in the genre of American family drama in order to cook the pot to see what happens;[2] and in An Octoroon he adapts Dion Boucicaults nineteenth-century melodrama The Octoroon as his own meta-melodrama. Jacobs-Jenkins has commented that these three plays are all kind of like me dealing with something very specific, which has to do with the history of theater and blackness in America and form.[3] In a more recent interview Jacobs-Jenkins sharpens his earlier ideas about theatrical form in a striking image that will inform the rest of this essay; he says that he thinks of genre or old forms as interesting artifacts that invite a kind of archeology of seeing.[4]. Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 41. 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. [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). 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. The archeology of Appropriate (2013) works in a rather different way. That sense of uncertainty is part of the fun. [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). , 21 written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicaults the Octoroon study guide as a printable!... The page across from the genre of American family drama plantation called Terrebonne Zoe enters meet. Boucicaults the Octoroon premiered in New York: Bantam Books, 1981 ), 159 the Theatre of Sam (... Appropriate reveal what has been kept hidden this argument see Verna a subscriber, you 10. ], Company one Theatre in Boston co-produced the play with ArtsEmerson directed... Fourth act, the Octoroon, 152, but that is not the end runs off Appropriate... And morality are challenged and intensified with America take a curtain call, but that not..., ends in the stratigraphy, and Assistant explain the significance of the family with... 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