The Art of Dramatic Composition: A Prologue, "Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Feel That Thought", "The Great Work Continues: The 25 Best American Plays Since 'Angels in America', "Amber Gray on 'An Octoroon,' at Soho Rep", "The Octoroon Delayed Opens This Week at PS122", "Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Tries to Revive The Octoroon", "Disgruntled Cast Member Issues Invite to P.S.122's Troubled Octoroon", "Soho Rep Reading of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon to Feature Saycon Sengbloh and William Jackson Harper | Playbill", "Review: 'An Octoroon,' a Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Comedy About Race", "BERKELEY REPERTORY THEATRE | An Octoroon", "Cast announced for An Octoroon at Orange Tree", "Review: An Octoroon (Orange Tree Theatre)", "An Octoroon is taboo ridden, but thoughtful (Shaw Festival)", "Georgia Southern Theatre & Performance to Present "An Octoroon", "2017 Results | Critics' Circle Theatre Awards", For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=An_Octoroon&oldid=1138923673, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using infobox play with unknown parameters, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 12 February 2023, at 11:33. 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. 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. It all culminates in a thrillingly ridiculous duel with himself (ingeniously choreographed by J. David Brimmer). More literally educational are Richards lectures on Greek tragedy, which can be seen as his form of performance, or his interludes. . Walking on a stage covered with cotton balls is a tricky business. Zoe Peyton, , "The Octoroon", is the supposedly "freed" biological daughter of Judge Peyton, former owner of the plantation. In Buried Child, Halies and Tildens murdered baby (apparently drowned by Dodge, as Franz tries to drown the photos of lynchings) has been literally buried in the soil behind the house. 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. 2023 . [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. 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. 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. date the date you are citing the material. In Appropriate Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the genre of American family drama. [44] Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, Theatre Journal 69, no. 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.
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. [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. Transcript. Though she is considered to be illegitimate and is not the product of a marriage, and though she is of mixed racial ancestry, she has been raised like the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Peyton, beloved by them both. Topsy, Sambo, and Mammy (Zip is busy fighting Richard) recite a litany of what white people readily enjoy about black performance, staged or otherwise. Pete, George, and Dora acquaint themselves when Zoe enters to meet George. More significant than these echoes is the familiar symbolic equation of the family home with America. Alistair Toovey and Vivian Oparah in An Octoroon. I will discuss the three plays separately in order to bring out their distinctive qualities as intrageneric dramatic adaptations. The womens fantasy, however, will prove ephemeral. For the details of this argument see Verna A. [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. About their apparently imminent sale, for example, Dido says, This is about the worst damn day of my life! The audience is catapulted into a space that plays to their stereotypes and questions our society's relationship to humanity and our history. [39] Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire. eNotes.com, Inc. [12] Charles Isherwood, Caricatured Commentary: Minstrel Meets Modern, The New York Times 9 March 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/theater/reviews/10neighbors.html (accessed 1 May 2017). A Black playwright is struggling to find his voice among a chorus of people telling him what he should and should not be writing. MClosky announces that Terrebonne is for sale and plots to steal Zoe; because she is an octoroon, she is a piece of property and therefore a part of the estate. [2], Jacobs-Jenkins researched Boucicault heavily while working on An Octoroon and found an unfinished essay at the New York Public Library saying that theatre is a place for dramatic illusionthe most believable illusion of sufferingand catharsis. Then Playwright and Assistant put on redface and blackface paint. [49] Merrill and Saxon, Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon, 152. Austin Smith and Amber Gray in a scene from Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss play. Sound No. Brooks' idea is that melodrama is about binaries and opposites, where there is always good and bad with no gray area. View our Privacy Policy. 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. Stacy Wolf, Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Last Updated on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. 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]. [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?") 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. Reviewer Chase Quinn observed that the audience at Soho Rep was in an unceasing state of anxiety, as each audience member was left to negotiate for him or herself when and how much to laugh. As a punishment Diana denies him wind to sail to Troy and requires the sacrifice of his daughter to appease her. Jacobs-Jenkins introduces Jims real feelings. Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon are all intrageneric adaptations; that is, they are plays that adapt other plays, or in the case of Neighbors other performances, in the same dramatic genre. 365 Fifth Avenue 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. 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). Perhaps An Octoroon was best suited to a rough-edged performance in a tiny theater. 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. 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. 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. As well as giving vigorous contemporary voices to Dido, Minnie, and Grace, Jacobs-Jenkins replaces their unquestioning loyalty to their owners in Boucicaults play with aspirations and dreams of their own. 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. [35] Horton Foote, Dividing the Estate. 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. in Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation.. Boucicault portrayed Wahnotee, and in his play Jacobs-Jenkins explores the connection between a person and their identity as artist. [34] Tracy Letts, August: Osage County (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 12324. While posing, MClosky comes from behind and kills Paul to take the letter. 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. 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. 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. Bo hated the plantation with its bugs and its endless stories about Civil War ancestors. As an object, the album is constantly presented to the audiences view and its unseen contents to their imagination. [4] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Archeology of Seeing. The Octoroon Themes Racial Identification and Discrimination Set in the pre-Civil War South, The Octoroondeals heavily with racial themes. 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