The second date is today's : 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 Jacobs-Jenkinss plays variously demonstrate how adaptation operates creatively in producing new works and also critically and politically, not in this instance by reinterpreting the adapted texts, but by exposing how their damaging and supposedly outdated racial assumptions continue to inform contemporary racial attitudes. 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. Boucicault portrayed Wahnotee, and in his play Jacobs-Jenkins explores the connection between a person and their identity as artist. 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. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159. [52] See Foster, Meta-melodrama, 30001. Mary Wiseman and Austin Smith in "An Octoroon. He is joined by a cranky, drunken Boucicault (Haynes Thigpen), who is annoyed by how completely his star has sunk since his death some hundred years ago. Orange Tree, RichmondBranden Jacobs-Jenkinss extraordinary play is both an adaptation of a 19th-century melodrama and a dazzling postmodernist critique of it. Jacobs-Jenkins uses Melody and Jean to introduce the audience to the Crow family as people rather than cartoons. A romantic relationship develops between rebellious Melody and shy Jim Crow, beginning with the awkward tenderness of the moment when Jim gently removes an eyelash from Melodys face (232). [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. Three of his plays, in particular, Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroondescribed by one critic as a trilogy of highly provocative and fantastical explorations of race in America[1]radically excavate and revise historical styles of performance or dramatic literature to explore ideas of blackness and racial attitudes in contemporary America. [31] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 170. Mr. Jacobs-Jenkinss central point here as it was in his Neighbors and Appropriate is that we dont even have the vocabulary to discuss what continues to divide Americans according to skin color. Testify!, When we ax all sad and be like, Dats de bluez, When we say stuff lak, My baby mama!; They luvs it when we soliloquizing like, The white maaann!, The white man put me in jail!, I cant get out the ghettooooo!, Respect me, white maaaaan!, Cause Im so angrrryyyy! (31718). Following Boucicault, Jacobs-Jenkins skillfully manipulates how his audience responds from moment to moment. An Imperative Duty Full text HTML version scanned from 1893 edition published by Harper . 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. Maurya Wickstrom Photographs, unsurprisingly, figure in many plays about families. 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. [12], An Octoroon premiered Off-Broadway at Soho Rep on April 23, 2014 and closed on June 8. Word Count: 465. And in both plays verbal conflict degenerates into physical violence. 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). Through the familiarity of the contemporary comic idiom Jacobs-Jenkins induces the audience to laughin effect, at slaveryand then to question their own and other audience members laughter. [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. 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. 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. 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. Download the entire The Octoroon study guide as a printable PDF! Both the white hero, George, and the white villain, MClosky, are played by the same black actor in whiteface. I think this play is a work of genius. An Octoroon most closely adheres to, though it also transcends, Hutcheons definition of an adaptation as an extended, announced, deliberate revisitation of a particular work of art. Neighbors and Appropriate expand the parameters of adaptation in other ways, the former by adapting and recontextualizing an historical form of popular entertainment, the latter by adapting not a particular play, but an entire dramatic subgenre. 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. eNotes Editorial. And his assistant (Ian Lassiter), who looks rather like a Native American, blackens up to embody both an old family retainer and an addlebrained boy slave. Jacobs-Jenkins himself took on the role of Br'er Rabbit and Captain Ratts.[14]. 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]. Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss Neighbors Appropriate, and An Octoroon by Verna A. The debate is not, for starters, simply a matter of black and white. Adaptation is a creative, interpretative, and political act. [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. His prologue perfectly shows how Jacobs-Jenkins feels trapped by his works being put into a different box because he is a black playwright although he [doesnt] know exactly what that means, and he just wants to create works to tell human stories, not necessarily always dealing with the race issue in America. In the mid-twentieth century, much of the pioneering work consisted in studies, both practical and theoretical, of the adaptation of novels into film. Richard then conflates Iphigenias willingness to sacrifice herself with what he sees as Melodys defection to the Crows. [25], Artists Repertory Theatre, located in Portland, Oregon, was to stage An Octoroon from September 3 to October 1, 2017. You may use these HTML tags and attributes

. 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. Still, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being a black playwright, without knowing exactly what that means. In writing in this well-worked vein of white family drama, Jacobs-Jenkins aimed to produce a play in which, he says, blackness is invisible yet still charge[s] the room.[24], Appropriate is about a white familyoverbearing, divorced sister (Toni), conventional businessman brother and his Jewish wife (Bo and Rachael), prodigal brother and erstwhile sex offender (Franz), his much younger New Age fiance (River), and various children. Minnie comforts Dido and they look forward to their new lives on Captain Ratts boat. . We watch each other (319). AN OCTOROON. [11], Mark Ravenhill staged a workshop production of the play featuring Saycon Sengbloh in April 2012. 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). Unlike most of the plays of the time, however, the central "tragic action" of the play centers not around the fate of a Ironically, The Octoroon premiered in New York four days after famed. 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 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). [28] In the end Bo is prevented from selling the photos because Franz feels called to cleanse himself and his family by jumping into the nearby lake, taking the photos with him: I took everythingall my pain, all Daddys pain, this familys pain, the picturesand I left it there. Jacobs-Jenkins here invites audiences to engage in an act of complex seeing, requiring them simultaneously to cheer Jim for his newfound expertise and to censure his embodiment of his nominal stereotype, to admire aesthetically what they must also condemn historically. [34] Tracy Letts, August: Osage County (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 12324. [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). [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). It's a strenuous and daring display of theatricality that goes far beyond issues of race in America. Vivian Oparah and Cassie Clare in An Octoroon. Playwright taunts BJJ, and laments how theatre has changed since his death. Walking on a stage covered with cotton balls is a tricky business. Instead of performing themselves, they put the (real) audience on display: We watch them. The play begins with BJJ, in a black box telling the audience a conversation he and his therapist had, to get him excited about playwriting and to overcome depression. [26] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Wegener, About Appropriate, 147. The Octoroon is a drama of plantation life and miscegenation in antebellum America, written by an Irishman who visited the South. What ensues is an upside down, topsy-turvy world where race and morality are challenged and intensified. 1 - The Rocky Horror Show By uprooting every plank in the stage to create a pit for a slave auction, Ned Bennetts inventive production and Georgia Lowes ingenious design also create a needless hiatus. As act 1 begins . 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. The CrowsMammy, Zip Coon, Sambo, Topsy, and Jim Crowplay updated versions of the infamous parts suggested by their names. online is the same, and will be the first date in the citation. Pete, George, and Dora acquaint themselves when Zoe enters to meet George. An Octoroon is weird in all the right ways, but it's also just so clever! [40] The photo album in Appropriate, by contrast, belies the apparent absence of blackness in the play by embodying and giving it an explosive motivating power that forces the white characters to confront a legacy of racism that they prefer not to acknowledge. Brer Rabbits gaze is designed to ensure that spectators take note of their own and each others responses to racist stereotypes presented as comic. 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. Jims performance, so admired by Melody that she gives the dazed Jim a blowjob, seems, according to Jacobs-Jenkinss stage directions, designed to be genuinely remarkable and worthy of the theatre audiences admiration as well as Melodys. American Next Wave: Four Contemporary Plays from HighTide Festival Theatre. 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. BJJ stops the action of the play. Intrageneric adaptation has received less theoretical attention than intergeneric or intermedial adaptation. But the show must go on, and the writers, it seems, are short on actors, for reasons political as well as practical. Rachael makes a point of excusing both her father-in-laws anti-Semitism and what she sees as his racial prejudice because he cannot be held responsible for how he may have been brought up to feel or think about other people (40, 42). This leads to a hilarious scene . publication online or last modification online. In "An Octoroon," the projection of a lynching photograph grounds this playfully postmodern riff on Dion Boucicault's "The Octoroon" in historical horror. All of these historically situated stereotypes, Jacobs-Jenkins implies, are based in white views of black performative behavior deriving ultimately from the minstrel shows. The photo albums in Buried Child and Appropriate reveal what has been kept hidden. "[2] This examination of race as a social construct is also in Appropriate and Neighbors. [5] Suzan-Lori Parks anticipates Jacobs-Jenkinss use of an archeological metaphor for a slightly different purpose. 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. Foster is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago. 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. Complimentary and Deeply Discounted Shows. After setting a pile of leaves on fire with a cigarette, Mammy puts out the fire with milk spurting from her enormous breasts, with which she also feeds two white babies, twirling them around in the air from her appendages. Assistant announces that the boat explodes. The two scream expletives at each other Marina- and Ulay-style before BJJ gives up and they begin the play in earnest. Try it today! ", It will be one of the hottest tickets in town. [40] Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 13. This play is set in Creole Louisiana, before the Civil War, on a plantation called Terrebonne. In his own defense, Jacobs-Jenkins writes in the stage direction, "I don't know what a real slave sounded like. 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. eNotes.com Jim Crows song and dance, while not one of the formal Interludes, is a case in point. He comes across a therapist who recommends adapting his favorite play, The Octoroon by Dion Boucicault, as a jumping off point out of his writers block. 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. Themes Questions & Answers Critical Essays . Ariel Nereson The audience is catapulted into a space that plays to their stereotypes and questions our society's relationship to humanity and our history. Amy E. Hughes 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. 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. More literally educational are Richards lectures on Greek tragedy, which can be seen as his form of performance, or his interludes. Advisory Editor: David Savran . Besides, it was being almost entirely recast for the new production, and there was concern that the original chemistry might evaporate. [45] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 20. [49] Merrill and Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, 152. [6], The sensation scene of the original play is deconstructed in act four. 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. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. At the beginning of his performance, dressed in straw hat, striped suit, and enormous bowtie, Jim looks ridiculous, but also amazing (285). 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. The emphasis on huge body parts, especially eyes, lips, and feet, was characteristic of representations of black people in minstrel shows. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 7. (No.) Underscoring the link, Toni sarcastically refers to her brother as Beauregarde Big Daddy Lafayette (35). Nataki Garrett directed the first production of An Octoroon outside of New York with Mixed Blood Theatre Company in the fall of 2015. B J J isnt the only undressed playwright onstage for long. He alludes both to tropes common across American family dramaa genre characterized by its content and its realism rather than by any particular structural featuresand to specific details from well-known plays. Richard explains that the origin of Agamemnons tragedy lies in events that occurred before the action of the play begins. From left, Haynes Thigpen, Austin Smith (on the ground), Amber Gray and Mary Wiseman. [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). This strategy is most apparent in his depiction of the enslaved female characters, who are little more than comic props in The Octoroon. date the date you are citing the material. The audience is catapulted into a space that plays to their stereotypes and questions our societys relationship to humanity and our history. [33] Stephen J. [37] Thomas P. Adler, Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, in Matthew Roudan, ed. The play, based on a 1859 melodrama by the Irish-Anglo playwright Dion Boucicault, tells the story of a young man who's about to inherit a plantation and falls in love with a woman who is an. He's quickly echoed in a snide tone by a white onlooker, who just so happens to be Dion Boucicault (Danny Wolohan). Most of the black works we have read that touch on race have been incredibly serious dramas, but Jacobs-Jenkins is able to depict racial issues while still giving the reader a good laugh. 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). Stay abreast of discount offers for great theater, on Broadway or in select cities. [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. 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. Into the familiar dramatic context of this white familys absorption in its own dysfunction Jacobs-Jenkins inserts the photo album as a reminder of the familys and Americas deadly legacy of racism. 3 (Fall 2016): 286. 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. Verna A. [42] On nineteenth-century American melodrama, including its depiction of slavery, see Rosa Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 31, no. Though she is legally a slave and the property of Mr. Peyton, she has not been treated as one; he tried to free her, not realizing that a legal loophole prevented it. Download the entire the Octoroon study guide as a printable PDF York Theatre Communications Group 2008! 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