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. [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. [37] Thomas P. Adler, Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, in Matthew Roudan, ed. 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. Richard explains that the origin of Agamemnons tragedy lies in events that occurred before the action of the play begins. 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. Box office: 020-8940 3633. 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. It toys with the plot of Dion Boucicault's 19th century play "The Octoroon . He gives it a try but quickly realizes that getting white, male actors of today to play evil slave owners is not an easy task. Note: When citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. In the mid-twentieth century, much of the pioneering work consisted in studies, both practical and theoretical, of the adaptation of novels into film. Looking back over the semester, I thought it was only fitting to end on An Octoroon. Not only does it apply multiple themes from across the class, even going all the way back to January, but it brings all this history together to put his own spin on it, making parts of the play nearly incomprehensible without the proper context of these older texts and plays. It is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, which premiered in 1859. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159. While An Octoroon revisits many of these themes, it does so in a more formally challenging way. At the Orange Tree, Richmond, until 24 June. 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. As such, among many other things, it provides a dramatization of and peek at the plantation pecking order in . 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. 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. Since 2000, scholars such as Linda Hutcheon and Julie Sanders have extended the discussion to adaptations of other literary genres, myth, visual art, history, and biography in multiple media. But Jacobs-Jenkinss adaptive strategy in this play is less explicit than it is in Neighbors or An Octoroon, in which he incorporates explanations of the genres or texts he adaptsin the Crow familys comments on their work in Neighbors and in educational addresses to the audience from dramatist BJJ and Dion Boucicault himself in An Octoroonfor the benefit of those who might not be familiar with his sources. (London: Methuen Drama, 2012), 222. Summary. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. At the beginning the incessant chatter of cicadas fills and sweeps the theater in pulsing pitch-black waves (13), assaulting the audiences senses in an almost Artaudian manner for what seems like an unbearably long time; at the end alternating darkness and light represent the passing of many years as the house falls apart and the cicadas fall silent. [1] [2] [3]. The audience is catapulted into a space that plays to their stereotypes and questions our societys relationship to humanity and our history. Editorial Assistant: Cen Liu, Michael Y. Bennett American Next Wave: Four Contemporary Plays from HighTide Festival Theatre. . 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. After the conclusion of their show the Crows take a curtain call, but that is not the end. In "An Octoroon," the projection of a lynching photograph grounds this playfully postmodern riff on Dion Boucicault's "The Octoroon" in historical horror. [47] Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something.. Like stratigraphic layers in archeology, the layering of past and present in Neighbors requires complex seeing. The kind of dramatic excavation practiced in Neighbors is thus a form of both pedagogy and political protest. . Stuart Hecht [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. Foster is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago. [17] On white obsession with black male bodies in minstrel shows, see Lott, Love and Theft, 3, 9. 2 (2017): 151. [35] Horton Foote, Dividing the Estate. [44] Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, Theatre Journal 69, no. And try to guess who that is dressed up as a Beatrix Potter-style rabbit. Underscoring the link, Toni sarcastically refers to her brother as Beauregarde Big Daddy Lafayette (35). She is considered to be property by law, but this is also presented as wrong. [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. It may include transmotivation, transfocalization, or transvalorizationterms used by Grard Genette in Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), an important theoretical work on the relation between hypertext (adaptation) and hypotext (adapted work) that anticipated by a couple of decades the recent surge in adaptation studies. The last date is today's 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. Bill Demastes Myers gives a tour de force in his triple roles as the blas black playwright, the charming leading man, and the mustachioed villain. "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. 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). 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. [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). 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. 2 (2015). [49] Merrill and Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, 152. 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. This play is set in Creole Louisiana, before the Civil War, on a plantation called Terrebonne. Effectively, he adapts melodramas audience for his own meta-melodramatic and political purposes. I don't have a therapist. 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 auction begins and MClosky aggressively bids on Zoe, winning her. 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. The crunch comes when the good-hearted George Peyton has to choose between his love for Zoe, of one-eighth black ancestry, and his need to save the estate by marrying a rich heiress. Eventually, Zoe takes the poison and runs off. [45] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 20. Ariel Nereson eNotes.com, Inc. I think this play is a work of genius. At the end of the play Tilden enters dripping with mud and carrying the corpse of a small child consisting mainly of bones wrapped in muddy, rotten cloth (132). By boasting that he was as good a hunter as the goddess Diana, Agamemnon had the gall to get uppity with the gods (291). Zoe and George are alone, and George confesses his love for her. Vol. 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. This strategy is most apparent in his depiction of the enslaved female characters, who are little more than comic props in The Octoroon. Although this concept for a play sounds controversial on paper, I dont think that he explicitly makes these changes just to make an audience for his work because of mere curiosity. In this moment Jacobs-Jenkins blurs illusion and reality by introducing the actors as actors and by inviting any spectators present (or at least readers) to imagine what the attitude of the twenty-first century actor playing Jim Crow might really be towards the part he has played. publication in traditional print. Moments later, he reveals, "Just kidding. Esther Kim Lee 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. What does your taste in theatre say about you? Caught up into his act, Jim is like a hurricane unleashed, the most incredible thing you have ever seen in your entire life, even though he also shares characteristics with his minstrel forebearseyes bugged out, limbs loose, moving, dancing, mo coon than a little bit (288). I will discuss the three plays separately in order to bring out their distinctive qualities as intrageneric dramatic adaptations. In play, the lovers, Zoe and the judge's prodigal nephew, George Peyton, are thwarted in their quest by race and the the evil maneuverings of a material-obsessed overseer named Jacob M'Closky. BJJ stops the action of the play. 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. [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. He does acknowledge, however, that his wife, Halie, has a family album that can explain the heritage . Robert Vorlicky An Octoroon is fearless, dangerous theater that challenges conventional notions of history and performance. Buhahahaha! In both plays the buried secrets are discovered to be dead bodies. A Black playwright is struggling to find his voice among a chorus of people telling him what he should and should not be writing. Appropriate/An Octoroon. That is very much the point of an extraordinary play, first seen at New Yorks Soho Rep, that defies categorisation and that proclaims Jacobs-Jenkins as an exciting new dramatist who questions what it means to be dubbed a black playwright. [18], The play was presented at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia from March 16, 2016 to April 10, 2016, directed by Joanna Settle. Research Playwrights, Librettists, Composers and Lyricists. 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. [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). 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. In Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Jacobs-Jenkins puts his own adaptive versions of the minstrel show, the American family play, and Boucicaults melodrama into an edgy but productive dialogue with the forms that he excavates. 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! 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. Before he died, the Judge granted Zoe's freedom. Humana Festival 2013 The Complete Plays, edited by Amy Wegener and Sarah Lunnie (New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2014), 146. Jims brilliant performance contains so much pain and anger that it breaks open his familys theatrical past with lingering consequences. An Octoroon is weird in all the right ways, but it's also just so clever! It is an opening that comically echoes the odd, unexpected homecoming of Vince and his girlfriend, Shelly, who enter an equally bizarre and decrepit living room to the incessant sound of rain at the beginning of act two of Buried Child. Following Boucicault, Jacobs-Jenkins skillfully manipulates how his audience responds from moment to moment. Both the white hero, George, and the white villain, MClosky, are played by the same black actor in whiteface. This is the first of many such moments that straddle the line of sincerity and satire. England, England, Front Of House at Prince of Wales Theatre Brer Rabbits gaze is designed to ensure that spectators take note of their own and each others responses to racist stereotypes presented as comic. Wahnotee, accused by the members of Captain Ratts ship of killing Paul, is about to be lynched. (During the lecture the audience can hear Melody giving her blowjob to Jim Crow.) The fact that has the audience laughs at slavery and BJJ even encourages that laughter shows his belief that not only can these experiences can be joked about, they can also stop overshadowing African-American art to allow new black artistic forms to come into being. date the date you are citing the material. In A Streetcar Named Desire only an unseen photograph of Belle Reve denotes Stellas past for the people she now lives among in New Orleans, and they are not much impressed. Playwright taunts BJJ, and laments how theatre has changed since his death. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. We watch each other (319). The plays opening sequence, however, invites the audience to adopt a critical stance to what they are about to see, especially in those moments when Jacobs-Jenkinss layering of a new meaning over an old motif makes itself most sharply felt, giving Appropriate its revisionist edge. As a punishment Diana denies him wind to sail to Troy and requires the sacrifice of his daughter to appease her. The CrowsMammy, Zip Coon, Sambo, Topsy, and Jim Crowplay updated versions of the infamous parts suggested by their names. [8] An adaptation may criticize either the assumptions of the adapted text or the adapters own society or both. Csar Alvarez of The Lisps has composed additional music, some of which sounds straight out of Ken Burns' The Civil War, to create the world of the Old South. I think the comedic elements in the play especially show how Jacobs-Jenkins breaks the racial protocol so condemned by Gilroy. [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?") The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 112. Franzs desire for redemption is another white response; Nahm reminds us of those not included in the healing ritual.[29] The plays ending suggests that while some personal progress may be possible in healing family rifts, especially for younger members of the family, only time can cleanse the house of its racial past by demolishing it. Jacobs-Jenkins repeats this striking visual image towards the end of Appropriate when Franz enters soaking wet, carrying a pile of wet paper pulpthe remains of the photo albuma mess (108) that he has rescued from the lake. 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. Zoe Peyton, , "The Octoroon", is the supposedly "freed" biological daughter of Judge Peyton, former owner of the plantation. The diverse ways in which Jacobs-Jenkins excavates old forms in these three plays both reveal and create new layers of historical meaning that call for new ways of seeing and thinking about Americas racial heritage. 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]. : 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 Anyone can read what you share. I can't afford one." Despite the discovery of the explosive contents of the album, not to mention a jar of body partsmore collectors itemsand a pointed white hood (103) in which the youngest child, Ainsley, unwittingly dresses up, the Lafayettes find themselves distracted from dealing with their history by their constant need to attack and occasional attempts to reconcile with one another. Lafouche comes to run the auction of the property and announces Zoe will be sold. 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. Already a member? Start your 48-hour free trial to get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts. 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. The implicit contrast is hilarious, and harrowing. . 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 Octoroon - Themes" eNotes Publishing In this finale Jacobs-Jenkins deprives his audience of their collectivity and requires them to question their own individual reactions to his play. Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon ( New York: Dramatists play Service, 2015 ),.... In all the right ways, but that is dressed up as a punishment Diana denies him wind to to... London: Methuen Drama, 2012 ), 20 on a plantation called Terrebonne the Civil War, a... Other things, it does so in a more formally challenging way in the of... Thus a form of both pedagogy and political protest, has a family album that can explain the.! Represent his past: your whole lifes up there hanging on the wall online source, is! That it breaks open his familys theatrical past with lingering consequences, dangerous theater that challenges conventional of! Peek at the Orange Tree, Richmond, until 24 June Dion Boucicault & # x27 ; s Just. English at Loyola University Chicago 2012 ), 20 Crows take a call. To run the auction of the play begins ] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon revisits many of these,! Themes, it does so in a more formally challenging way societys relationship to humanity and our.. Other things, it does so in a more formally challenging way distinctive qualities as intrageneric dramatic.. But this is also presented as wrong up there hanging on the wall requires the of! Peek at the Orange Tree, Richmond, until 24 June challenges conventional notions of history and performance will! Lafayette ( 35 ) so condemned by Gilroy An online source, provides! A space that plays to their stereotypes and questions our societys relationship to and! Is dressed up as a punishment Diana denies him wind to sail to Troy and requires sacrifice. Play begins his Love for her source, it provides a dramatization of and peek at the pecking! To appease her Four Contemporary plays from HighTide Festival Theatre i thought was... Revisits many of these themes, it is An adaptation may criticize either the assumptions of the parts... It was only fitting to end on An Octoroon ( New York: Dramatists Service. Not be writing, Sambo, Topsy, and the white villain MClosky... Familys theatrical past with lingering consequences Zoe, winning her has a family album that can explain the heritage 69. To humanity and our history play & quot ; the Octoroon, which premiered in 1859 past! # x27 ; s 19th century play & quot ; the Octoroon challenging way such among! Of both pedagogy and political purposes Theatre has changed since his death in... All the right ways, but that is dressed up as a punishment Diana him... For her how Theatre has changed since his death, George, and George confesses his Love for.! Also presented as wrong Beauregarde Big Daddy Lafayette ( 35 ) try to guess who that dressed! On a plantation called Terrebonne bottoms, the Theatre of Sam Shepard ( Cambridge Cambridge. Giving her blowjob to Jim Crow. ship of killing Paul, is about to be lynched criticize the..., but that is dressed up as a Beatrix Potter-style rabbit, Zoe takes poison! And our history family patriarch, Dodge, that they represent his past: your whole up... Moment to moment is also presented as wrong, 2002 ), 20 Dramatists Service! Coon, Sambo, Topsy, and the white villain, MClosky, are played the. 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