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 con- text 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 thea- trically 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 pro- duction 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 obser- vation 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.

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