Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicault’S the Octoroon

Meta-Melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon

Verna A. Foster

Modern Drama, Volume 59, Number 3, Fall 2016, pp. 285-305 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/629588

Access provided by Sam Houston State University (7 Jun 2017 19:26 GMT) Meta-Melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon

VERNA A. FOSTER

ABSTRACT: In adapting the nineteenth-century melodrama The Octo- roon, Jacobs-Jenkins both satirizes Boucicault’s racial assumptions and emulates his aesthetic principles to produce a meta-melodrama, a play that at once celebrates and critiques its own form while providing a stinging indictment of racial attitudes in the twenty-first century. This essay draws on both the published script and audience responses to Soho Repertory Theatre’s two stagings of the play in 2014 and 2015 gleaned from reviews, blogs, and interviews. The contemporary context and cross-racial casting of An Octoroon ironize and adapt the meaning of Boucicault’s play, making it appropriate for the twenty- first century. Through his use of italicization, Brechtian quotation, the new contemporary dialogue he writes for the slave characters, and his shocking updated sensation scene, Jacobs-Jenkins induces his audience to question their own and each other’s racial reactions even as they are caught up in the play.

KEYWORDS: adaptation, melodrama, metatheatricality, appropriation

An Octoroon (2014) is the third of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays to deal with ideas of blackness in America and, in a startlingly novel theatrical way, with what makes a black play. Neighbors (2010) presents what happens when a family of minstrels, the Crows, played by black actors in blackface, move in next door to a middle-class black college professor and his white wife. Appro- priate (2014) is about a white Southern family who return to the old family home after their father’s/grandfather’s death and discover that he kept an album filled with photographs of lynchings. When asked in an interview (with Eliza Bent) about the pronunciation of the title of this play, Jacobs- Jenkins said he pronounced it like the adjective, but since he likes “punny” ti- tles, “appropriate” works as a verb as well (qtd. in Bent, “Branden”). Themat- ically, the play deals with what is “appropriate” behaviour and with the act of appropriation on several levels. The playwright himself also “appropriates”

© University of Toronto doi: 10.3138/md.0792R VERNA A. FOSTER elements from “every play that [he] liked” in the genre of American family drama in order to “cook the pot to see what happens” (qtd. in Brantley, “Squabbling”), in the process writing a “black” play – a play dealing with blackness in America – that has no black characters in it. In An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins both appropriates Dion Boucicault’s 1859 melodrama The Octoroon and makes it appropriate, or fitting, for contemporary audiences. The indefinite article in his title evokes Aimé Césaire’s classic postcolonial confrontation with Shakespeare, Une Tempête, and marks his difference from Boucicault. But while Jacobs-Jenkins satirizes Boucicault’s racial assumptions, he pays homage to his predecessor’s aesthetic principles, emulating them by writing what he calls a “meta-melodrama” (qtd. in Bent, “Branden”), a play that both celebrates and critiques its own form. Key to Jacobs-Jenkins’s success in appropriating The Octoroon for the twenty-first century is the fact that he takes both the play and Boucicault’s dramaturgy seriously. His affection for Boucicault and his respect for melodrama as a genre mean that he does not simply send the play up but rather retains what is moving and exciting in the story Boucicault tells while reframing it, contesting its racial attitudes, and making his audience question their own. In an interview with Raphael Martin and his director, Sarah Ben- son, Jacobs-Jenkins spoke knowledgeably about melodrama, specifically cit- ing Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination (“Feed”). And his admiration for Boucicault’s skill in manipulating audience response leads him to emulate, update, and extend his predecessor’s techniques, while explicating for his own audience what he is doing. The result is a revisionist meta- melodrama that is exciting, relevant, moving, funny, invigorating, and theatrically innovative, a piece of theatre that engages its audience in analysing their own and others’ reactions even as they are still caught up in the play. To explore how An Octoroon works as homage, political critique, and meta-melodrama, in this article I draw upon both the published script and, where possible and appropriate, Soho Repertory Theatre’s productions of the play. I am concerned both to provide detailed textual analysis of Jacobs- Jenkins’s adaptation of Boucicault’s characters, dialogue, and spectacle and to demonstrate the effects of his revisions in performance. The Soho Rep production generated a wealth of commentary in reviews, blogs, and interviews about how audience members responded to Jacobs-Jenkins’s controversial work, making it possible to ground discussion of audience response (a matter of critical concern to Jacobs-Jenkins as well as to Boucicault) in the reported or recorded experiences of actual spectators. Well before Jacobs-Jenkins came upon Boucicault’s play, the history of The Octoroon was a history of adaptations made to suit different audiences. Boucicault adapted The Octoroon from a contemporary novel and later revised

286 Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016) Meta-Melodrama his American version for an English audience. Written in the wake of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’sCabin(1852) and drawing on plot elements and characters from Mayne Reid’snovelThe Quadroon (1856), Boucicault’splay opened at the Winter Garden in New York in December 1859.LikeGeorgeL. Aiken’s 1853 dramatization of Stowe’s novel, it was immensely popular. The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana purports to present a “faithful” depiction of the Louisiana life highlighted in its subtitle, based on Boucicault’s own observa- tions made when he lived in New Orleans in 1855–56. In particular, the kindly plantation owners and loyal folksy slaves seem designed to contest Stowe’s por- trayal of slavery, which Boucicault – according to his letter to the London Times on 20 November 1861 – thought was too harsh (see Degen 174). The Octoroon depicts the love between George Peyton, the heir to Terre- bonne Plantation, and Zoe, the “octoroon” daughter of his deceased uncle. Zoe pathetically tells George that her one drop of black blood makes her a tainted thing and prevents their marrying. Since The Octoroon is a melodrama, there are multiple complications. The Peytons are in dire financial straits because Terrebonne’s two overseers, the villainous M’Closky and the feckless Salem Scudder, have between them ruined the plantation. As the Peyton family awaits the repayment of a longstanding debt to save Terre- bonne and its slaves from auction, M’Closky discovers that Zoe is not legally free, and he determines to purchase her. To prevent the repayment of the debt, M’Closky murders Paul, a young slave boy entrusted with the promis- sory letter’s delivery, using the tomahawk belonging to Paul’s Native Ameri- can friend, Wahnotee. To save the slaves, George determines to “sell” himself by marrying Dora Sunnyside, the southern belle daughter of a neighbouring wealthy plantation owner (Boucicault, Octoroon 160). The auction takes place, however, and the slaves, loyally trying to look cheerful to help Mrs. Peyton, are sold. Despite everyone ’s best efforts, M’Closky buys Zoe. Act Three’s climactic auction probably owes something to Boucicault’s observation of slave auctions during his time in New Orleans (Roach 217). The depiction of Zoe standing on a table waiting to be sold as George and M’Closky fight over her was one of the “most widely reproduced illustra- tions” of a scene from Victorian melodrama (Roach 218). In the play’s secondary plot, Wahnotee is accused of murdering Paul. He is saved from “lynch law,” first by Scudder’s insistence on some form of due process in the name of “a civilised community” (Boucicault, Octoroon 172) and then by a startling discovery made possible by modern technology: Scud- der’s new photographic invention retains an image of M’Closky standing over Paul’s dead body, proving his guilt. M’Closky is taken aboard Captain Ratts’s steamboat; he sets it on fire and swims to the shore, pursued by Wah- notee, while the “steamer floats on at back, burning” (175) in a spectacular and

Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016) 287 VERNA A. FOSTER sensational conclusion to the fourth act. Wahnotee eventually takes his revenge upon M’Closky, but the news of the letter repaying the debt arrives at Terrebonne too late to save Zoe. To avoid becoming M’Closky’s sexual slave, Zoe has taken poison; she dies in George’s arms, telling him that he may now “without a blush, confess [his] love for the Octoroon” (183). In writing The Octoroon, Boucicault seems to have wished to treat a controversial subject uncontroversially. The play may be seen as anti-slavery in the sympathy Boucicault creates for Zoe, but he also presents the Southern slave- holders as benevolent – especially Mrs. Peyton, who thinks of her slaves as her children (160) – and the slaves themselves as endearingly childish. The villain, M’Closky, is not a member of the old Southern gentry, as he resentfully points out (145), but a Northerner, a Yankee. The contemporary reviewer for the New York Times found The Octoroon “harmless and non-commital” (8 Dec. 1859; qtd. in Degen 173), and Joseph Jefferson, who played Scudder, remarked in his Autobiography, “The dialogue and characters of the play made one feel for the South, but the action proclaimed against slavery, and called loudly for its aboli- tion” (qtd. in Thomson 8). But despite its great popularity with the public and its apparently balanced sympathies, The Octoroon was highly controversial and, in some quarters, considered “inflammatory,”“libellous,” and “offensive” (“‘The Octoroon’: A Disgrace” 529; emphasis in original).1 When Boucicault revived The Octoroon at the Adelphi in London in 1861, the English audience, sympathizing with abolitionists in the American Civil War, objected strongly to Zoe’s death and demanded a happy ending. Despite his well-known willingness to make whatever changes to his plays might be necessary to ensure good box-office receipts (rendering The Poor of New York [1857]asThe Poor of Liverpool and of several other cities, for example), Boucicault balked at changing the ending of The Octoroon. In a letter to the Times dated 20 November 1861, he wrote: “In the death of the Octoroon lies the moral and teaching of the whole work. Had this girl been saved, and the drama brought to a happy end, the horrors of her position, irremediable from the very nature of the institution of slavery, would subside into the condition of a temporary annoyance” (qtd. in Degen 172). After three weeks, however, Boucicault gave in to the demands of his audience and wrote a new fifth act, “composed,” according to the Adelphi’s ironic advertisement in the Times, “by the public and edited by the author ...avery grateful tribute to their judgment and taste” (qtd. in Degen 172). This English version of The Octoroon is not extant, but the Illustrated London News provides a detailed description of the new fifth act (qtd. in Degen 176). In it, M’Closky flees with Zoe; George, with Scudder’s help, rescues her; the lovers go off to marry in a land where they may lawfully do so; and Scudder marries Dora. There does exist a truncated, four-act version (printed in Boucicault’s Selected Plays)

288 Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016) Meta-Melodrama that ends abruptly but “happily” with Wahnotee stabbing M’Closky, George entering with Zoe (alive) in his arms, and the steamboat blowing up. John A. Degen suggests that Boucicault, embittered by having to give his play a happy ending, turned what he had intended as a “serious social play” or even a “modern tragedy” into a “contrived formula melodrama,” far removed from the ethos of the original American version of The Octoroon (175, 178). Sarah Meer, however, questions Boucicault’s commitment to anti-slavery and argues that it is more likely he changed the ending for commercial reasons. Meer argues that the playwright was at least as much interested in Zoe’s anomalous social position as in her racial position and compares the play to his next play, The Colleen Bawn (1860), which involves a class misalliance. There is enough ambiguity in the text and in the history and reception of The Octoroon to leave the play open to multiple and even opposite interpreta- tions. The play thus poses both a peculiar challenge and a rich opportunity for an adapter working in the twenty-first century. It is at once anti-slavery and racist in its depiction of the African-American characters, arguably even by the lights of the mid-nineteenth century, let alone today. The Octoroon is obviously very much a play of its own time in its attitude to race, class, and gender as well as in its genre, but its author’s skilful manipulation of that genre has a lot to teach younger dramatists, as Jacobs-Jenkins discovered. Boucicault was the most popular and the most able practitioner of melodrama in the nineteenth-century theatre of England, America, and his native Ireland. His Irish melodramas, The Colleen Bawn and especially The Shaugh- raun (1874), have been successfully staged in recent decades. The Octoroon is more problematic because of its content, though the Phoenix Theatre in New York gave the play a successful “faithful, deadpan,” and at times moving revival in 1961 (Taubman). The Phoenix’s Program Note commented on the play’s contemporary relevance: “Slavery is gone but its remains are a part of our heritage”; “the vestigial bitterness remains with us to be read in the daily paper” (Octoroon [theatre program] 20). The view expressed in the Program Note that The Octoroon is worth reviving because it “is a living picture of a part of our country’s past” (20), however, would not survive the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In England, The Octoroon was in the repertory until the 1930s and considered “progressive” (Ravenhill). It was successfully revived in a recorded staged reading before a live audience at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, aired by the BBC on Radio 3 in 2013. Curated and adapted by British dramatist Mark Ravenhill, The Octoroon generated a lively and also appreciative post-performance discussion. One of the actors, Trevor White (who played George), commented that the play was “ahead of its time” (White). During the discussion, Ravenhill noted that, when he directed a rehearsed reading of the play in New York, African-American dramatists

Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016) 289 VERNA A. FOSTER responded quite variously, engaging in a heated debate: could Boucicault’s play be put into dialogue with the work of African-American dramatists, or should they ignore it, or write against it? (Ravenhill). In fact, the reading that Ravenhill directed in New York in 2012 was not of Boucicault’s The Octoroon but of Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, then a work-in-development with Soho Rep (Hetrick). An Octoroon, like the play it appropriates, has had a complicated history and has thrived on controversy. Titled The Octoroon: An Adaptation of The Octoroon Based on The Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins’s play was first presented in 2010 at Performance Space 122, Off-Off Broadway, amidst considerable controversy. First, the director, Gavin Quinn, left the show, and Jacobs-Jenkins directed it himself. Two white actors then departed, one of them complaining that the production was a “trainwreck” in an email that found its way to publication in the Village Voice blog and elicited numerous comments (Ludlow Lad). Jacobs-Jenkins used the controversy as “fodder” for the first twenty minutes of his play when it was finally presented as a “workshop” (Bent, “Turn”). The storm over the PS 122 staging thus made its way into the theatrical history (his own as well as Boucicault’s) that Jacobs-Jenkins sets forth in the “Prologue” to his play. (For example, the dramatist, BJJ, explains that he was obliged to play some of the white characters himself because the white actors did not want to play slave owners and left the show.) An Octoroon, directed by Sarah Benson, was eventually performed to enthusiastic acclaim by Soho Rep in 2014 and re- mounted, with a largely different cast but to equal praise, at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in 2015. Through his original tautologous subtitle – An Adaptation of The Octo- roon Based on The Octoroon – Jacobs-Jenkins highlights and gently mocks his relationship to Boucicault, with whom he “became really obsessed” (qtd. in Bent, “Branden”). His palpable affection for Boucicault contributes in an important way to the complex theatrical appeal of An Octoroon, for while Jacobs-Jenkins critically revises the racial attitudes expressed in his predecessor’s play, he does so without attacking Boucicault himself (see Figure 1). Instead, he shows how such attitudes have continued to permeate later think- ing and directs his most severe reproach against white America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. An Octoroon effectively reproduces the sensations typical of Victorian melodrama – the suspense, the pity, the laughter, and the thrills – for contemporary audiences while at the same time dis- playing a consciousness of and critiquing its own form. As in Neighbors and Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins’s sense of genre is a crucial component of what he is saying. In fashioning An Octoroon as a meta-melodrama, Jacobs-Jenkins finds ways, in the words of director Sarah Benson, “to make the idea promote the form and the form promote the idea” (qtd. in Bent, “Branden”).

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Figure 1: BJJ and Playwright (Chris Meyers and Danny Wolohan); photo by Pavel Antonov

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An Octoroon opens with a prologue titled “The Art of Dramatic Compo- sition” (borrowed from Boucicault’s 1878 essay on playwriting), in which Ja- cobs-Jenkins provides the audience with the information they need about Boucicault and, more importantly, with a critical perspective from which to engage with his own provocative depictions of race and racism in the play proper. Jacobs-Jenkins uses the prologue to depict symbolically his relationship to Boucicault. The author of An Octoroon, BJJ, and then the Playwright, Dion Boucicault, enter and complain to the audience, the former about the expectations placed on him as a “black playwright” (7), the latter about being forgotten. BJJ objects to the assumption that he does or should write about blackness: even when he wrote about farm animals, he was told that he was “deconstructing African folktales” (10) – a line that foreshadows the appear- ance later in the play of a giant Br’er Rabbit (Noveck). Jacobs-Jenkins depicts his relationship with Boucicault as both confrontational and congruent. The two dramatists glare at each other and exchange insults –“Fuck you! Fuck me? Fuck you!”–spoken multiple times but “in complete unison” (13), antici- pating Jacobs-Jenkins’s retention of much of Boucicault’s dialogue as his own. Intertextual influence is not unidirectional, however. If The Octoroon makes possible An Octoroon, equally the later play changes the way we read the earlier one. Jacobs-Jenkins comically depicts this backwards influence: BJJ drinks an entire bottle of alcohol without suffering any ill effect and for no apparent reason gives himself a “powerful wedgie”; the Playwright experiences “a mysterious wedgie” and becomes “progressively drunker” without drinking anything (9, 13). This symbolic identification of the two dramatists, both “mostly – if not completely – naked” (7, 10) – or, in other words, devoid of distinguishing marks except for the colour of their skin – underscores the palimpsestic identification of their plays resulting from Jacobs-Jenkins’s appropriation of Boucicault’s plot, characters, and words. Ravenhill’s confla- tion of the two Octoroons in his remarks in the BBC discussion mentioned above is thus quite understandable. The contemporary context and updated cross-racial casting, however, ironize and adapt the meaning of the dialogue and plot elements that Jacobs- Jenkins retains from Boucicault, rendering the nineteenth-century melodrama appropriate, or “fit,” for audiences in the twenty-first century.2 BJJ himself puts on whiteface to play both George, the hero, and M’Closky, the villain (the opposite of white actors playing black characters in blackface in nineteenth-century productions of Boucicault’s play). The Playwright puts on redface to play Wahnotee (Boucicault’s own role for the first week of The Octoroon’s premiere run). In the dramatis personae of An Octoroon, Jacobs- Jenkins lists the “actor ethnicities” for his characters “in order of preference” (4). BJJ (and consequently George and M’Closky) should be “played by an

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African-American actor or a black actor”; the Playwright’s Assistant (and consequently Pete and Paul, in blackface) should be “played by a Native Ameri- can actor, a mixed-race actor, a South Asian actor, or one who can pass as Native American”; Zoe should be “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” (4). This fussy multiplication of racial categories, like the use of whiteface by a black actor, blackface by “an Indian actor – whatever that means to you” (13), and redface by a white actor, ridicules racist divisions of people according to the shade of their skin as well as the theatrical conventions by which historically they have been depicted. In The Octoroon, cross-racial casting lends itself both to the broad acting style typical of melodrama and to the creation of racial stereotypes; in An Octo- roon, it enables the mockery of such caricatures. Jacobs-Jenkins satirizes Bouci- cault’s stereotypes of African and Native Americans by exaggerating their inherent racism. The Playwright, once in costume as Wahnotee, dances crazily and “headbangs” to loud contemporary music and then “stalks his prey before thrashing about wildly with his tomahawk” (16) (see Figure 2). In the play proper, Pete, addressing his white masters, becomes a ludicrous, over-the-top version of an Uncle Tom. Most importantly, Jacobs-Jenkins’s use of cross- racial casting produces a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, ensuring a critical reading of the characters, plot, and dialogue that he shares with Boucicault. In constructing his revisionist meta-melodrama, Jacobs-Jenkins nonetheless adopts some of Boucicault’s precepts on playwriting and even sees an affinity between Boucicault and Brecht. The epigraph to his play is a passage from “The Art of Dramatic Composition,” in which Boucicault describes how “the spectator is led to feel a particular sympathy with the artificial joys or sorrows of which he is the witness. This condition of his mind is called the theatrical illusion” (Jacob-Jenkins, An Octoroon 5; compare Boucicault, “Art” 43–44). Jacobs-Jenkins finds “the idea that you could feel something and then be aware that you’re feeling it” stimulating and “like Brecht.” Although he acknowledges the importance of both the “intellectual” faculty that “gets us through the world” and the “subconscious feeling place,” he believes it is the latter that “the theatre is obligated to” (qtd. in Bent, “Branden”). In An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins attends to both faculties. He manipulates audience engagement and critical detachment by emulating Boucicault, in pulling out all the emotional stops, and Brecht, in ironically framing and theatricalizing what we are responding to. Whenever the audience is in danger of becoming so involved in the play’s pathos or humour as to lose sight of the realities of racial politics and slavery, Jacobs-Jenkins offers an abrupt reminder, causing us to question where our sympathy lies or to cut short our laughter. As Chris Myers (who played BJJ in Soho Rep’s 2014 production) put it in an interview

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Figure 2: Wahnotee (Danny Wolohan); photo by Pavel Antonov

294 Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016) Meta-Melodrama with Teddy Nicholas, “you’re constantly oscillating between ‘oh this fun’ and ‘oh shit just got real’” (Myers). For the first three acts of An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins follows Boucicault rather closely, though he offers up his predecessor’s lines for the audience’s critical inspection; in Act Four, however, he wrests control of the play away from Boucicault, lecturing his audience on the nature of melodrama and ex- plicitly updating the “Sensation Scene” (47) in a shocking coup de théâtre. The changes that Jacobs-Jenkins makes to Boucicault’s text are both politically revisionist and theatrically efficient. Up to the climactic auction scene, Boucicault’s lines carry the plot, though Jacobs-Jenkins streamlines and also adds to his predecessor’s dialogue, writing new lines – and personalities – for the slaves (Pete, Dido, Minnie, and Grace) and drastically reducing the number of characters and especially the number of actors required. He eliminates Scudder and gives his photographic invention and his lines about justice in Act Four to George, confines Mrs. Peyton to her offstage bed and the slave Solon to the added discourse of the other slaves, and omits all of the white plantation owners. At the auction, the only men bidding are George/ M’Closky (the actor has to fight himself) and Captain Ratts. Jacobs-Jenkins leaves this difficulty to the ingenuity of the director to solve, possibly, he suggests, by incorporating the audience as bidders (43). Benson cautiously used this metatheatrical device, effectively implicating the audience, “as potential bidders,” in the racial attitudes of the slave owners (Levy). The doubling of George and M’Closky incidentally suggests, too, that, as far as the slaves are concerned, there is less difference between hero and villain than the white characters – and white audience members – would like to suppose. Jacobs-Jenkins makes fewest changes in the character and behaviour of the idealized Zoe, though he does give her a couple of sharp lines that are not in Boucicault and that remind us of the historical realities of the racial and social distinctions that both Octoroons depict. Zoe kicks Pete and demands, “Wake up you, silly nigger! Where’s breakfast?” (22). And in Act Five, while trying to cajole Dido into giving her poison, Zoe actually insults her by call- ing her “Mammy” (56), a term that Dido feels desexualizes her: “I just don’t like when people be treating me like I’m some old woman. I am not a mammy! I’m not!” (57). But mostly Jacobs-Jenkins enables the audience, if not to weep, at least to experience the pathos of Zoe’s plight and to sympathize with her, especially when she learns that she is a slave: “A slave! A slave! Is this a dream – for my brain reels with the blow? Sold! And M’Closky, my master – oh! (Falls on her knees, face in her hands)” (38–39). Jacobs-Jenkins grants this moment, an only slightly edited version of Boucicault’s lines, its full emotional force. Typically in melodrama, much of the emotional weight is carried by the actor’s tone and gestures (as well as by background music –

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Figure 3: Auction: George, Lafouche, Zoe (George Myers, Danny Wolohan, Amber Gray); photo by Pavel Antonov an onstage cello in Soho Rep’s staging) rather than by the words themselves. In Soho Rep’s production of An Octoroon, Amber Grey played Zoe straight – that is, realistically, without critical distance – receiving much praise from reviewers for her “grace and passion,” for her “heart wrenching” and “harrow- ing” performance (Chase; Grimm; Batuman) (see Figure 3). The other actors in the production, however, adopted the various presenta- tional acting styles called for by Jacobs-Jenkins’s ironic treatment of their respective characters.3 Jacobs-Jenkins invites the audience to adopt a critical stance toward both Boucicault’s dialogue and his own added lines. He creates this Brechtian distance, layering his own twenty-first-century take on the play’s action over Boucicault’s nineteenth-century assumptions, through a variety of dramaturgical techniques, including “italicization” and “quotation.” Sometimes he calls for a “Beat” at the end of a line to give the audience time to think about the line’s implications. This kind of italicization occurs, for example, when George asks Zoe if they must “immolate” theirlivesonhisaunt’sprejudice,and Zoe responds, “Yes, for I’d rather be black than ungrateful!” (31). The “Beat” afterthislinefromBoucicaultpermitstheaudiencetoregistertheracistillogical- ity of Zoe’s comparison. Or when Minnie and Dido, in a passage of Jacobs- Jenkins’s added dialogue, discuss whether or not they would “fuck” George, the “Beat” after Minnie says, “ButIkindofgetthefeelingyoudon’treallygetasay in the matter” (18), highlights the dramatist’sabruptreminderofthedarkreality of slavery beneath the women’s contemporary-sounding comic banter.

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Most obviously, Jacobs-Jenkins’s use of cross-racial casting, especially his use of a black actor in whiteface to play George/M’Closky, produces the effect of Brechtian “quotation.” The black actor is obviously presenting, or “quoting,” rather than identifying with his lines. Austin Smith (who played BJJ, George, and M’Closky in Soho Rep’s 2015 staging) made this point in an interview with Emily Gawlak: “In this play I feel like my job is more so to distance myself enough from my feelings so that I can adequately tell this story so that the audience has the experience that they’re supposed to have. And in that way the play is very Brechtian” (Smith). For example, when George, in lines written by Jacobs-Jenkins rather than Boucicault in this instance, comments appreciatively at the beginning of the play on the slaves he has met at Terrebonne –“How I enjoy the folksy ways of the niggers down here. All the ones I’ve ever known were either filthy ape-like Africans of Paris or the flashy uppity darkies of New York” (20) – his remark is both uncomfortably shocking and clearly satirically pointed when spoken by a black actor. A somewhat different effect is produced when M’Closky, himself an outsider, urges Zoe to become his mistress and mistress of Terrebonne by attempting to arouse in her a racial hatred like his own class hatred of the Southern aristocracy. He says, in Boucicault’s (slightly edited) words, “I’ll set you up grand, and we’ll see these families and their white skins shrivel up with hate” (25). When spoken by a black actor, these lines resonate as much with racial as with class antagonism, especially as Jacobs-Jenkins changes Boucicault’s “you’ll see” (Boucicault, Octoroon 146)to“we’ll see.” In his fourth act, Jacobs-Jenkins, as BJJ, takes control of his play away from Boucicault in order to introduce his own updated photographic “Sensa- tion”: an enlarged “lynching photograph” (51). Apologizing for the “limited re- sources” (47) of his theatre, BJJ elects to narrate rather than to show the near lynching of Wahnotee and the discovery of the truth via the new art of photography. BJJ, the Playwright, and the Assistant use contemporary expressions, such as “George’slike,”“the crowd’s all,”“Pete’slike” (49–50), as they introduce and then literally quote their respective characters’ lines. At the same time, BJJ and the Playwright lecture the audience on the nature of melodrama, in particular the purpose of the “Sensation Scene,” telling them how they are supposed to react, an introduction that in no way lessens the shocking effect of the projected image of a real-life lynching that they are about to witness. The Playwright, echoing Boucicault’s essay on playwriting, says that “theideaisto overwhelm your audience’s senses, to the end of building the truest illusion of reality.” BJJ adds, “Act four is where the like moral of the play lives.” And the moral, BJJ emphasizes, concerns “universal themes” (“Like justice,” the Play- wright adds) and “not ‘social issues’” (47–48). Boucicault used photography, which was “really exciting” and “novel” (50) in the mid-nineteenth century, to

Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016) 297 VERNA A. FOSTER produce the requisite sensational triumph of justice by proving that M’Closky, and not Wahnotee, murdered Paul. Jacobs-Jenkins has to go to greater lengths than Boucicault in order to “overwhelm [his] audience’s senses” (47). To shock his contemporary audience into experiencing, and not just intellectually recognizing, a monstrous act of injustice, Jacobs-Jenkins reproduces reality itself, projecting the photograph of the lynching onto the back wall of the theatre. Against this image, BJJ as George repeats his lines, “I appeal against your usurped authority; this lynch-law is a wild and lawless proceeding. You call yourselves judges – you aren’t – you’re a jury of executioners” (51). This laughter-stifling scene brings An Octoroon firmly into the twentieth century. One reviewer of Soho Rep’s production commented, “the silenced, silent audience was compelled to con- template fact, not fiction: the murder of two men, left swinging from the end of barbarism’s ropes” (Stuttaford 47); another observed that the audience became in that moment the “enthralled white gawkers” in the photograph (Quinn). The act ends with Wahnotee violently attacking M’Closky while visual, aural, and in Soho Rep’s production, even olfactory effects represent the exploding steamboat (Green). In this onstage outburst of frenzy, Jacobs- Jenkins allows for some release of the audience’s tension before the stage goes dark and quiet, and the Assistant explains, “The point of this whole thing was to make you feel something” (54), an understatement that points to Jacobs-Jenkins’s command of his chosen genre. Even more contemporary than the updated sensation scene, and more subtly shocking in a comedic vein, are the new lines – and new personalities and attitudes – that Jacobs-Jenkins writes for the slaves, especially the women. Jacobs-Jenkins creates a shift in “focalization,” giving a voice to “the silenced and marginalized” (Hutcheon 11; Sanders 19), whose twenty-first- century sitcom dialogue comments ironically on Boucicault’s sentimentalized treatment of the relationship between owners and slaves. Wishing she could stay at Terrebonne instead of being sold, Minnie says of the Peytons, “They were some cool-ass white people. I mean, they didn’t never really beat us, you know?” (42; emphasis in original), damning with faint praise. And early in the play, we learn that Zoe’s beloved father, “old-ass” Mr. Peyton, who was “hung like a horse,” raped several of the “lightskinned-ed girls” (18) on the plantation, not just Zoe’s mother. The most striking line, quoted by several reviewers of Soho Rep’s production, occurs at the end of the play, when Min- nie tells Dido she need not concern herself further with Zoe’s problem: “I know we slaves and evurthang, but you are not your job. You gotta take time out of your day to live life for you” (58). The line is funny and horrifying at the same time, comically anachronistic in its wording and sentiment, horrifying in its literal truth that Dido is her job.

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The slaves in Jacobs-Jenkins’s play do not feel the devoted loyalty to their owners that Boucicault depicts in The Octoroon. Clearly they perform their roles, switching registers from Jacobs-Jenkins’s contemporary dialogue to Boucicault’s lines when they address their masters. Pete asks Minnie, newly promoted from field slave to house slave, if she is “settling in all right” and has no objection to her eating a banana. But as soon as George and Dora appear, he “transforms into some sort of folk figure” and says, in the manner of Boucicault’s Pete speaking to the slave children, “Hay! Hay! Drop dat banana fo’ I murdah you!” (19). Rather than waiting to be sold for the benefit of Mrs. Peyton, almost all of the field slaves run away. Grace, joint head of the “Runaway Plannin’ Committee” but left behind because she overslept, explains, “Solon thought it was time to take off while all these white people wuz distracted with they personal financial drama” (40). While Pete enacts an Uncle Tom role, rushing off to “tell a white man what’s going on” (40), the women have aspirations of their own. Minnie per- suades Dido that the best option for them is to be bought by Captain Ratts and work on his steamboat. She imagines “coasting up and down the river, lookin’ fly, wind whipping at our hair and our slave tunics and shit, and we surrounded by all these fine, muscle-y boat niggas who ain’t been wit a woman in years.”“Girl,” she adds, “don’t you know on a boat they be eating fresh fish and skrimps and stuff? None of these fattening pig guts” (42) (see Figure 4). Though the women’s dreams are both fantastical and limited by their sense of the inevitability of servitude, Jacobs-Jenkins presents the slaves as sentient, desiring beings and not merely props in the white people’s “financial drama.” The play ends with Dido and Minnie hopefully packing. But there will be no escape for them, not even to another form of slavery. As Dido and Minnie fear, and the audience knows, something has happened to render “these last twelve hours totally moot” (58): a letter has arrived to save Terrebonne, and the steamboat has exploded. The two women are trapped inside Boucicault’s plot just as Tom Stoppard’s reimagined Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are trapped inside Hamlet and Dido and Minnie’s real-life counterparts were trapped in the institution of slavery. In his depiction of Boucicault’s slaves as our contemporaries, Jacobs- Jenkins leads his audience to sympathize with characters who are little more than objectified comic relief in The Octoroon. More subversively, he still induces audiences to laugh, in effect, at racist stereotypes and at slavery but then, unlike Boucicault’s audiences, to question their own laughter.4 Several reviewers of Soho Rep’s An Octoroon remarked on the sometimes problematic laughter and the audience’s discomfort with the play that resulted from the playwright’s dramaturgical choices. David Levy comments that the contemporary scenes “seduce the audience into letting their guard down,” and the

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Figure 4: Dido and Minnie (Marsha Stephanie Blake and Jocelyn Bioh); photo by Pavel Antonov broad playing for laughs produces discomfort. Writing of the 2015 production, Chase Quinn observes that what makes An Octoroon “so remarkable is the unceasing state of anxiety in which you’re held from start to finish” as each audience member is left “to negotiate for him or herself” when and how loudly and for how long to laugh. Nonetheless, “as a black writer in a predo- minantly white crowd,” Quinn found Jacobs-Jenkins’s “comedic approach to race and identity . . . energizing at a time when we’ve been soberly appraising the value of black lives on social media, and when the reality of racism in America has been anything but funny.” Playwright Teddy Nicholas, by con- trast, actually walked out of the 2014 production. Prefacing his interview with Chris Myers, Nicholas writes, “I began to feel incredibly tense and uneasy. I became hyper-aware of the audience around me, especially white people laughing at the blackface/redface performances, and I felt threatened, and I left during intermission.” Myers explains to him that Jacobs-Jenkins is interested in “targeted laughter” and in the way in which “the audience listens to themselves react to the joke.” The playwright himself has endorsed this view: “You laugh and then you have to think about your laughter for a second” (qtd. in Sellar). He also does not mind if audience members walk out. He believes that a “democratic audience” does not need to respond in exactly the same way all the time: “I love it when an audience can howl together, but I’m excited by people who titter or cackle at the wrong time. I love people who walk out!” (qtd. in Bent,

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“Branden”). Jacobs-Jenkins proves as adept at manipulating his audience’s responses as was Boucicault, or even more so. For while he wants to retain max- imum flexibility for how his “democratic” audience responds to his play, he actually orchestrates a variety of individual responses to create a stimulating and productive discomfort as spectators watch not only the play but also their own and each other’s reactions to it. Jacobs-Jenkins “turns self-consciousness into theater” (Brantley, “Old Times”). Adding yet another layer to Jacobs-Jenkins’s manipulation of the audience’s self-consciousness – as well as to the play’s quirky humour – is Br’er Rabbit, played in Soho Rep’s productions by an uncredited Branden Jacobs- Jenkins himself. Whether played by Jacobs-Jenkins or not, Br’er Rabbit is clearly an authorial figure, allowed to wander across the stage at will, inspect- ing the audience. Br’er Rabbit is Jacobs-Jenkins’s reappropriation of the trick- ster character from African folklore, best known to white Americans from the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris, who heard the tales from Afri- can Americans in Georgia. Similar tales of Compair Lapin were written down by Alcée Fortier from stories he heard on Laura Plantation in Louisiana. Jacobs-Jenkins cites the Louisiana connection as an inspiration for his incor- poration of Br’er Rabbit into An Octoroon (Sellar). This Br’er Rabbit is a whimsical creature who also evokes the White Rabbit from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, taking the audience into what Jacobs-Jenkins calls “the rabbit-hole experience of the show” (qtd. in Sellar) – the illogical, unpredict- ably predictable, comic/horrifying world of Jacobs-Jenkins’s version of Bouci- cault’s Terrebonne. At first delightfully inexplicable as he wanders across the stage, Br’er Rab- bit observes and finally confronts the audience. Jacobs-Jenkins permits his director some leeway as to how many times Br’er Rabbit actually appears. In Soho Rep’s productions, he appeared multiple times, engaging in various bits of practical (setting up the tripod camera) and comic business as well as turn- ing the audience’s gaze back upon itself.5 When he “wanders in” just after Zoe tells George she cannot marry him because she is an octoroon, he “seems to inspect” the audience (31), as if asking how we are reacting to what we have just witnessed. At the end of the play, he “wanders in” with a gavel and a tomahawk, props associated with injustice – the slave auction and the false accusation of Wahnotee – and this time “he looks right at us” (58), not only gauging our reaction but also challenging us to think about how we have re- acted. He is the one checking out how effectively BJJ’s manipulation of the audience has worked. As Jenna Clark Embrey cogently remarks, “An Octo- roon hinges not just on the performance of race, but on the performance of the audience’s reaction to those images, and the playwright’s subsequent observation of that reaction.”

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If Boucicault’s engaged audiences hissed the villain, Jacobs-Jenkins’sturn their critical gaze upon themselves. Jacobs-Jenkins complicates the emotional response – pity, suspense, outrage, laughter – typically evoked by melodrama and by The Octoroon in particular to produce a meta-response. He creates an audience conscious of itself responding while its individual members wonder if they are responding appropriately. By ironizing, layering, updating, and mixing his own work with Boucicault’s, Jacobs-Jenkins takes adaptation to a new level. He adapts not only a source text and the genre in which it is written but the audience as well. If Dion Boucicault inspired An Octoroon, Branden Jacobs- Jenkins returns the favour by making The Octoroon provocative again and appropriate for racially sensitive audiences in the twenty-first century.

NOTES 1 For more on the American and British reception of The Octoroon, see Meer. 2 Linda Hutcheon notes that “when an adapted text migrates from its context of creation to the adaptation’s context of reception . . . change is inev- itable” (xviii). She comments also on the relevance of the Darwinian implications of the term “adaptation”: artistic adaptation makes a work “fit” for a new “cultural environment” (31). 3 Reviewer Thom Geier describes the variety of performance styles “from slapstick and mustache-twisting melodrama to politically charged min- strelsy to a more sincere naturalism, as well as music choices, from hip- hop to an on-stage cellist.” Several reviewers – for example, Sellar and Grimm – note that Dido and Minnie were hilariously played as our contemporaries (by Marsha Stephanie Blake and Jocelyn Bioh in 2014 and by Pascale Armand and Maechi Aharanwa in 2015). Zoë Winters (2014) and Mary Wiseman (2015) presented a grotesquely over-the-top Dora. 4 Reviewer Jesse Green wonders, “Is laughing at the clichés of contemporary urban blackness, albeit as offered by a black playwright, any different from laughing at the clichés of antebellum rural blackness, as offered by a white one?” He concludes that Jacobs-Jenkins has “located in political incorrect- ness a way to remodel and reenergize” melodrama. 5 See reviews by Chase, Komisar, and Embrey.

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Bent, Eliza. “Turn That Frown Upside-Down: Making Lemonade Marketing Out of the Occasional Sour Review.” American Theatre Feb. 2011. 12 Aug. 2015 http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/feb11/strategies.cfm. Boucicault, Dion. “The Art of Dramatic Composition. Part 1.” North American Review 126 (1 Jan. 1878): 40–52. Boucicault, Dion. The Octoroon. Selected Plays. Ed. Andrew Parkin. Washington: Catholic U of America P, 1987. 135–90. Brantley, Ben. “Old Times There Are Not Forgotten.” New York Times 4 May 2014. 12 Aug. 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/theater/an- octoroon-a-slave-era-tale-at-soho-rep.html. Brantley, Ben. “A Squabbling Family Kept in the Dark.” New York Times 16 Mar. 2014. 12 Aug. 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/theater/in- appropriate-branden-jacobs-jenkins-subverts-tradition.html?-r=0. Chase, Al. “‘An Octoroon’ by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins – An Astonishing World Premiere at Soho Rep.” White Rhino Report 11 May 2014. 20 May 2015 http://whiterhinoreport.blogspot.ca/2014/05/an-octoroon-by- branden-jacobs-jenkins.html. Degen, John A. “How to End The Octoroon.” Educational Theatre Journal 27.2 (1975): 170–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3206111. Embrey, Jenna Clark. “Where The Light Falls: The Performance of Reaction in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon.” Culturebot 17 Mar. 2015. 20 May 2015 http://www.culturebot.org/2015/03/23484/where-the-light- falls. “Feed: Writer & Director of An Octoroon.” Online video clip. YouTube. 30 Apr. 2014. 29 Oct. 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=psqmqqvlCS8. Geier, Thom. “Off Broadway Review: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Truly Sensational ‘An Octoroon.’” Culture Sauce 26 Feb. 2015. 20 May 2015 https://culturesauce.net/2015/02/26/off-broadway-review-branden- jacobs-jenkins-octoroon/. Green, Jesse. “Theater Review: The Wild and Wily An Octoroon.” Vulture 13 Mar. 2015. 20 May 2015 http://www.vulture.com/2015/03/theater- review-an-octoroon.html. Grimm, Eric J. “An Octoroon at Theatre for a New Audience.” Theater Pizzazz! 27 Feb. 2015. 20 May 2015 http://www.theaterpizzazz.com/an- octoroon-at-theatre-for-a-new-audience. Hetrick, Adam. “Soho Rep Reading of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon to Feature Saycon Sengbloh and William Jackson Harper.” Playbill 18 Apr. 2012. 22 June 2015 http://www.playbill.com/article/soho-rep- reading-of-branden-jacobs-jenkins-an-octoroon-to-feature-saycon- sengbloh-and-william-jackson-harper-com-192712.

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Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2013. Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden. An Octoroon. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015. Komisar, Lucy. “‘An Octoroon’ Is Clever Hokey-Serious Comedy about Slavery.” New York Theatre Wire 24 Feb. 2015. 20 May 2015 http://www. nytheatre-wire.com/lk15027t.htm. Levy, David. “Soho Rep’s ‘An Octoroon’ Challenges Audience to Laugh at Slavery.” Flavorpill 27 Feb. 2015. 26 May 2015 http://flavorpill.com/nyc/ article/performance/soho-rep-s-an-octoroon-challenges-audience-to- laugh-at-slavery. Ludlow Lad. “The Octoroon: 7/3/2010.” Off-Off Blogway 4 July 2010. 26 May 2015 http://ooblogway.blogspot.ca/2010/07/octoroon-732010.html. Meer, Sarah. “Boucicault’s Misdirections: Race, Transatlantic Theatre and Social Position in The Octoroon.” Atlantic Studies: Global Currents 6.1 (2009): 81–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810802696287. Myers, Chris. “Teddy Nicholas Talks with Chris Myers about His Obie- Winning Performance in An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at Soho Rep.” New York Theatre Review 6 June 2014. 26 May 2015 http:// newyorktheatrereview.blogspot.ca/2014/06/teddy-nicholas-talks-with- chris-myers.html. Noveck, Loren. “An Octoroon.” NYTheater Now 1 Mar. 2015. 20 May 2015 http://nytheaternow.com/Content/Article/2015-3-1-an-octoroon. The Octoroon. Theatre program. Phoenix Theatre, New York, Jan. 1961. Playbill. 27 Oct. 2015 http://www.playbill.com/Show/Detail/13106/The- Octoroon. “‘The Octoroon’: A Disgrace to the North, a Libel on the South.” Spirit of the Times; A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage 29.45 (17 Dec. 1859): 529. Quinn, Chase. “Laughing (and Crying, and Laughing Again) about Slavery.” Hyperallergic 24 Feb. 2015. 20 May 2015 http://hyperallergic.com/185346/ laughing-and-crying-and-laughing-again-about-slavery/. Ravenhill, Mark. The Octoroon. Post-performance discussion presented by Martin Sweet on Night Waves. BBC Radio 3. 5 May 2013. 15 June 2015 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s351n. Reid, Mayne. The Quadroon. Ridgewood: Gregg, 1967. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006. Sellar, Tom. “Pay No Attention to the Man in the Bunny Suit.” Village Voice 21 May 2014. 20 May 2015 http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-05-21/ theater/pay-no-attention-to-the-man-in-the-bunny-suit/full.

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Smith, Austin. “An Octoroon’s New Leading Man Austin Smith on Melodrama, Performing in Whiteface, and Why Humor is Our Best Weapon Against Injustice.” Interview with Emily Gawlak. StageBuddy 20 Feb. 2015. 26 May 2015 http://stagebuddy.com/theater/theater- articles/interview-austin-smith. Stuttaford, Andrew. “History Lessons.” New Criterion 33.8 (2015): 44–47. Taubman, Howard. “Fun and Hisses: Boucicault’s ‘Octoroon’ Revived at Phoenix.” New York Times 28 Jan. 1961: 13. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Thomson, Peter. Introduction. Plays by Dion Boucicault. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. White, Trevor. “Boucicault’s Play ‘Is Ahead of Its Time.’” Drama on 3. Curated by Mark Ravenhill. BBC Radio 3. 3 May 2013. 3 June 2016 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p018kh80.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR verna a. foster is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches modern drama and dramatic theory. Her publications include The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy (Ashgate, 2004) and numerous essays. Currently she works on dramatic adaptations and has edited Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays (McFarland, 2012).

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