Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. But the questions it never stops posing light up a very murky night. The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 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). [27] Kee-Yoon Nahm, Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. [10] Jane Barnette, Adapturgy: The Dramaturgs Art and Theatrical Adaptation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 55, 62. 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. His use of humor during the play most clearly shows Jacobs-Jenkinss belief that there is now enough time passed between the days of The Octoroon and his own time that not only can he adapt and deconstruct the themes of the original play and its context, he can laugh at it. Tonis diatribes may be more unrelenting than Violets in August: Osage County, but the two matriarchal figures engage in similarly vitriolic attacks against members of their family. 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. I think the comedic elements in the play especially show how Jacobs-Jenkins breaks the racial protocol so condemned by Gilroy. This strategy is most apparent in his depiction of the enslaved female characters, who are little more than comic props in The Octoroon. One theme of this text has to do with the fact that everyone, no matter their race, has the capacity to feel and love deeply, and all should have the right to do so. Thats race as a subject that no one can get a comfortable hold on. Box office: 020-8940 3633. Anyone can read what you share. 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. 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. 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). The auction begins and MClosky aggressively bids on Zoe, winning her. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. While atmospheric cicadas make symbolic noise in the background, the family members quarrel over long-standing grievances and over their inheritance, which, to their horror, includes an album filled with photographs of lynchings. The Octoroon is a drama of plantation life and miscegenation in antebellum America, written by an Irishman who visited the South. Though I cant remember any of them now. 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. 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. The kind of dramatic excavation practiced in Neighbors is thus a form of both pedagogy and political protest. In the auction scene he has to fight himself over Zoe. By presenting characters in whiteface, blackface, and redface, Jacobs-Jenkins can look at "blackness and how to represent social constructs onstage that are so tied to a specific culture of nation. This is the type of play I would love to dissect for a thesis project! online is the same, and will be the first date in the citation. At the Plantation Terrebonne in Louisiana, Dido and Minnie chat about the arrival of George, and the passing of his uncle, their previous master. In August: Osage County, for example, Barbara conflates the decay of home and family with the decay of America: This country, this experiment, America, this hubris: what a lament, if no one saw it go.[34] In Dividing the Estate when family members, no longer able to depend on money from their land, contemplate getting jobs at Whataburger, schoolteacher Pauline comments, Thats what they say America is becoming, you know, a service economy.[35] And in Buried Child when Shelly tells Vince that his home is like a Norman Rockwell cover, Vince replies, Its American.[36] This American house with its fraught relationships and dark secrets is explicitly Vinces inheritance (128), willed to him by his grandfather, Dodge. Foster, Suzan-Lori Parkss Staging of the Lincoln Myth in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 17, no. MINNIE played by an African-American actress, a black actress, or an actress of color. They represent for him his worst nightmare about how his white neighbors might perceive him despite his education and professional, middle-class standing: People will see them and . New York NY 10016. In An Octoroon, the projection of a "lynching photograph" is an attempt towards an actual experience of finality. 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. [4] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Archeology of Seeing. 3 (Fall 2016): 286. England, England, Accessibility Statement Terms Privacy |StageAgent 2020. 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. date the date you are citing the material. Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. BJJ clarifies that in the time of the play, a photograph was a novel/innovative/contemporary way for the plot to be resolved. In her 1994 essay Possession, she argues that it is necessary to dig for bones in order to locate and recreate unrecorded African-American history. Ironically, The Octoroon premiered in New York four days after famed. publication online or last modification online. A plate from George's camera is presented, showing both Paul sitting, and MClosky murdering him is presented and proves M'Closky's guilt. Last Updated on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. 1 - The Rocky Horror Show Jacobs-Jenkins further makes The Octoroon fit for its twenty-first century theatrical environment through the adaptive processes of transmotivation, transfocalization, and transvalorization described by Genette. Research Playwrights, Librettists, Composers and Lyricists. Ed. This strategy produces a general sense of familiarity that, as reviewer Erin Keene, observes, creates a comfort zone for audience members who are then periodically shocked out of their complacencywe know these people, we know this genreby the reemergence of the album.[32] The broadly familiar content of Appropriate is punctuated, too, by more precise allusions that Jacobs-Jenkins chooses to italicize and engage with in order to render visible within the parameters of the white American family play a discourse about blackness. For the details of this argument see Verna A. Can we ever fully trust anything said by these people who dress up in costumes and pretend to be other people? This is the first of many such moments that straddle the line of sincerity and satire. [44] The Native American Wahnotee is played by a white actor in redface. [39] Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire. Jordan Schildcrout Eventually, Zoe takes the poison and runs off. [1] Jeff Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation To Confront Race And Identity In The US, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 16 February 2015. [7] Grard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 1 (Fall 2018). 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. Paulwith the mailbagsstops to take a photo of himself with Georges camera. 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. 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. The tension between the old forms and the new meanings layered onto them generates uneasy and uncertain laughter that engages audiences in a much-needed, if in the theatre implicit, dialogue of their own about racial attitudes in contemporary America. At the beginning of his performance, dressed in straw hat, striped suit, and enormous bowtie, Jim looks ridiculous, but also amazing (285). In doing so, Brer Rabbitor the dramatist himselfassesses the political impact of Jacobs-Jenkinss adaptation. 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. 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