It was September 1998. At age 14, playwright-to-be Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was taken by his parents to see Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. The production, conceived and directed by Studio founder and artistic director Joy Zinoman, featured two African-American actors––Thomas W. Jones and Donald Griffin––as Vladimir and Estragon. The two men performed with their faces blackened and with vestigial traces of white makeup around their lips, linking Beckett’s clowns with their vaudevillean, and minstrel, forbearers. “I had no idea what I was looking at,” Jacobs-Jenkins said, “but it was doing something to me.” He remembers that the Studio’s staging “managed to ‘racialize’ Beckett in this bizarre way,” leaving him “completely riveted” as a young black audience member (Evangelisto 20).
Later pursuing an undergraduate degree in anthropology, Jacobs-Jenkins always managed to write about historical productions of the American stage. So, he returned to theatre by way of performance studies, a field that tends to blend the notions of artistic creation with a healthy dose of research. From there, Jacobs-Jenkins was encouraged to start writing plays; a task that he admits he undertook with the intention of dissecting the “historicity of racial representation” (Shaw). It should then come as no surprise that the same type of collusion of theatre, history, and race he saw in Godot has come into play in Jacobs-Jenkins’s own work as a playwright. Sarah Benson, a frequent collaborator, dispels the notion that this propensity toward historical discourse overpowers the dramatic action in Jacobs-Jenkins’s work. In her view, the former fuels the latter: “People aren’t sitting around talking about history in his plays—he’s embedding these ideas in the actual form, and finding ways to make the idea promote the form and the form promote the idea” (Bent 44).
If August Wilson is the playwright dealing with race in a modern sense, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has established himself as the postmodern equivalent. Jacobs-Jenkins’s first three plays—Neighbors (2010), Appropriate (2013), and An Octoroon (2010/2014)––don’t exactly make a trilogy, but they are linked in how they “embed” themselves in historically American theatrical forms.1 In Neighbors, a family of stereotypical black characters played by black actors in blackface—The Crows––move in next to a contemporary interracial family.2 The playwright utilizes exaggerated tropes of American minstrelsy to probe the uncomfortable legacy of one of our country’s most notorious practices. In Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins sends up the American ‘house play,’ like those by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Horton Foote, Sam Shepard, and Tracy Letts. He admits to “steal[ing] something from every play that I liked” by those playwrights and then reassembling the pieces (Brantley 2014). His play follows a white family who discover a trove of incendiary racist artifacts in the belongings of their recently deceased father. For An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins set his sights on the nineteenth-century melodrama The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana, written by Irish playwright Dionysus “Dion” Boucicault.
The difference between Jacobs-Jenkins’s postmodern genre-bending and Boucicault’s melodramatic spectacle prove not to be as black and white as they appear. Each playwright’s theatrical aesthetic places an emphasis on manipulating and underscoring fantastical, visual stage events. Most forms of theatre, but especially spectacular theatre, hinge upon creating a hierarchy of visibility. That is, the audience occupies a privileged position in relation to the characters involved in the dramatic action. Jacobs-Jenkins uses his play to navigate the dual voyeurism that exists between audience and performer. I argue that An Octoroon is at its most salient when it is pointedly using the moments of highest spectacle (that is, when the audience’s gaze is most intense) found in The Octoroon to disrupt the privilege of its contemporary audience. In this article, I aim to discuss how Jacobs-Jenkins postmodern tactics––specifically his employment of ‘face’ makeup––exist in conversation with Boucicault’s brand of spectacular theatre.
In order be a part of this conversation however, we as the audience are required to do our homework and not just accept the show at face value. To better understand Jacobs-Jenkins’s strategy of race-bending, one must understand not just the traditional history of The Octoroon, but the immediate history of An Octoroon as well.
Dion Boucicault wrote The Octoroon in 1859 as a direct response to the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin seven years earlier. In particular, he took issue with the ‘faithfulness’ of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s representation of Southern life. Despite his popularity on the English stage, the Irish Boucicault considered himself “a member of a subjugated nation [who] felt keenly the indignity of slavery of one race being beholden to another” (Fawkes 109). In a letter to the editor of the London Times, Boucicault wrote:
A long residence in the Southern States of America has convinced me that the delineations in Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the condition of the slaves, their lives, and feelings were not faithful. I found the slaves, as a race, a happy, gentle, kindly-treated population, and the restraints upon their liberty so slight as to be rarely perceptible. A visitor to Louisiana, who might expect to find his vulgar sympathies around by the exhibition of corporal punishment and physical torture, would be much disappointed. For my part, with every facility for observation, I never witness any ill-treatment whatever of the servile class; on the contrary, the slaves are in general warmly attached to their masters and their homes, and this condition of things I have faithfully depicted.
The dramatic action of Boucicault’s play concerns itself with the inhabitants the Terrebonne Plantation in Louisiana, owned by the late Judge Peyton. Following the judge’s death, the plantation has been plunged into dire financial straits resulting from the negligent mismanagement of the two Yankee overseers, the good-hearted Salem Scudder and the villainous Jacob M’Closky. Peyton’s nephew, George, has returned from Europe to salvage his inheritance before the home and its slaves are sold off. Upon his arrival, he falls in love with Zoë, a fair-skinned octoroon who is the object of the affections of every man on the plantation. The main action of the melodrama focuses on the hero mightily undertaking two tasks—restoring the plantation’s reputation and winning Zoë’s heart.
While the hero George is preoccupied with Zoë, the villain M’Closky engages in a series of misadventures, which (briefly) include: the murder of a young slave boy named Paul that is captured by a daguerreotype camera (in what is thought to be the first use of a camera onstage); his sensational acquisition of both Terrebonne and Zoe thanks to a forced auction; his destruction of a riverboat that was to ferry him to justice; and his demise in the swamp at the hands of the ‘noble savage’ Wahnotee, who is avenging the death of Paul. The heroic George and the ‘benevolent Yankee’ Scudder are able to right the wrongs by the play’s conclusion. However, in the final scene, Zoë (not realizing M’Closky is dead and discredited) poisons herself out of fear of living as the man’s concubine. She dies in George’s arms, thus dashing any hope of a happy ending for the octoroon and her white lover.
Much of this material is necessary in order to begin decoding the layers at play in of An Octoroon’s coup de théâtre of a prologue. The play starts with the entrance of the character ‘BJJ,’ a blatant metatheatrical stand-in for Jacobs-Jenkins himself. Dressed only in his underwear and armed with a Duane-Reade bag and microphone, BJJ speaks directly to the audience, jumping right into a re-enactment of a seemingly-recent conversation with his therapist:
BJJ: Hi everyone. I’m a “black playwright.” Now I don’t know what that means.
“Do you have any career goals?”
“No…”
“Anyone’s career you admire? Do you have any role models?”
“In the theater?”
“Yeah––are there any playwrights who you admire?” “…”
“Anyone?”
“I don’t know––”
“Just––just say the first name that comes to mind.”
“Uh, Dion Boucicault?”
“Who is that?”
“He’s a dead playwright who wrote in the nineteenth century. He’s dead.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“Yeah––no one cares about him anymore. He’s dead.”
“So your role model is someone no one cares about.”
“I mean, people cared about him when he was alive.”
“Oh, okay…And what did he write?”
“Um, well, he’s probably best known here for writing a play called
The Octoroon?”
“The Octoroon? What’s an octoroon?”
“It’s a person who is one-eighth black.”
“Ah. And you like this play?”
“Yes.”
“Okay…Well here’s an idea: Why don’t you try adapting this
Octoroon––for fun.”
So I did. Or I tried to.
This essentially sums up the major dramatic situation: how does a black playwright in 2014 reconcile his theatrical interest in a racist work from 1859, especially when the work in question derives its name from a form of scientific racism?
The Octoroon draws its name from the notion that race was a mathematical concept and through ‘algebraic notations’ could be used to determine the amount of black blood a person possessed.3 Like its source of inspiration, Thomas Mayne Reid’s novel The Quadroon, Boucicault’s Octoroon dramatizes a ‘passing narrative,’ in which a very light-skinned black female has been raised as white and occupies a liminal space on the plantation owned by her white father. In The Quadroon, the heroine is one-quarter black––hence a ‘quadroon.’ In The Octoroon, the heroine Zoë is one-eighth black––hence an ‘octoroon.’
In form, manner, and appearance, Zoë ‘passes’ as white (especially by parties unaware of her parentage) and loved by all in the plantocracy, but the small amount of black blood is often reference and she is denied the status of white members. The passing narrative then possesses a tricky ambiguity, which operates on two levels. It demonstrates the ultimate triumph of the hegemonic structure, wherein an Othered figure has successfully assimilated into the dominant culture). It also suggests the ultimate nightmare of the historically white American community, in which a black figure could conceivably evade the constraints of segregation.
The efficacy of passing in the 19th-century relied first and foremost on ocular elements—the pigmentation of the skin, the texture of the hair, the thinness of the lips, the highness of the nose’s bridge, the blueness of the eyes—all being gauged as ‘white enough.’ Unlike the earliest minstrel shows, in which “the ‘blackened-up’ white body became the narrative focal point,” Boucicault’s melodrama shows a black body that is “passing” for white (Brooks 27). Playing to the melodramatic nature of his play, Boucicault has increased Zoë’s tragic suffering by increasing the amount of ‘whiteness’ in her blood.
Melodrama, as a form, is wholly reliant on this type of suffering. In these plays, suffering almost always is inscribed on the literal body of a the tragic character, where the “moral truth in gesture and picture that could not be fully spoken in word’ is instead manifested in “visible body signs” (Williams 52). One of The Octoroon’s most recognizable passages is the girl’s rebuke of George’s love by citing the “bluish tinge under her nails and around her eyes” as evidence of her black heritage, and this “dark fatal mark…is the ineffaceable curse of Cain” (Boucicault 16). That so much of the play’s dialogue focuses on telling us of Zoë’s blackness is notable considering the proscenium spaces in which The Octoroon was played, like New York’s Winter Garden Theatre where it premiered. There, the audience is unable to visually racialize Zoë, so it must be literally written upon her.
Just as Zoë’s blackness is written upon her by Boucicault, Jacobs-Jenkins uses the original text of The Octoroon as a theatrical palimpsest. An Octoroon literally manifests the notion of reinscription as the prologue continues. Following his monologue, BJJ pulls out compacts of makeup from his plastic bag and “violently” applies whiteface makeup to the sounds of “loud music––bass-heavy, hypermasculine, crude, and probably ‘ethnic.’” He then chugs an entire flask of alcohol followed by the act of “very, very slowly and very, very stoically giv[ing] himself an incredibly powerful wedgie”––neither of which are meant to affect him (Jacobs-Jenkins 5). At this point, he summons the spirit of Boucicault, who childishly repeats BJJ’s dialogue in a stereotypical Irish accent. The two engage in a Marina Abramović-and-Ulay-style shouting match which consists of a back-and-forth of 47 “Fuck yous.” They may be speaking the same words, but not communicating.
Left alone after BJJ storms off, Boucicault applies redface while becoming progressively drunker and picking at a wedgie, further linking the two temporally-dissonant playwrights. The triangulation of cross-racial performance is completed when Boucicault’s Native American assistant begins to put on his own blackface makeup. As the play proper begins, the false back wall of the falls forward and the “plantation of Terrebonne” is revealed. In Mimi Lien’s original design, the men in face makeup wander around in an all-white space with hundreds of cotton balls covering the floor. Through this doubling, the audience is able to view the piece in two dimensions simultaneously: the dimension of 1859 and the dimension of 2014. The resulting “meta-melodrama” deftly interweaves these two concentric rings of narrative to raise important questions about America’s inability to reconcile its racial differences.
The New York Times review of the piece’s most recent re-mount in 2015 noted, “Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins’s central point here––as it was in his Neighbors and Appropriate––is that we don’t even have the vocabulary to discuss what continues to divide Americans according to skin color. The debate is not, for starters, simply a matter of black and white.” (Brantley 2015). Rather than telling, Jacobs-Jenkins is interested in showing. And it is telling that in order to show us, he employs the very same conventions he saw at play as a teenager. Just like Godot, An Octoroon is wrestling with an historically-significant play by a famous Irish playwright through the strategic use of face makeup. Jacobs-Jenkins bends the dated tropes of melodrama to his will in order to expose the notion of ‘race’ as an “optical, illusionistic, phantasmagoric stunt” (Brooks, 42). However, not everyone has responded to this concept with the enthusiasm of the New York Times.
In fact, the words of another Times critic were twisted and used by a demagogic actor against Jacobs-Jenkins during his first attempt to stage An Octoroon at P.S. 122 back in 2010. Two days before the premiere the show (then titled The Octoroon: An Adaptation of The Octoroon Based on The Octoroon), an unnamed white actor involved in the production sent out a late-night vitriolic email to a few friends. The next morning, the email had been leaked as a blind item to The Village Voice and was plastered indelibly online. The text in full reads:
Ladies and Gentlemen! I would like to invite you to a trainwreck––The Octoroon: An Adaptation of The Octoroon Based on The Octoroon––an adaptation of a 19th Century melodrama by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault about the romance between a white man and a woman who is 1/8th black (an octoroon), which includes several newly penned slave scenes by playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and some stunt racial casting (white actors playing black guys, Native American actors in black face, etc). The details of how this train wrecked form a long and complicated story which we can gossip over in private, suffice it to say that our original director Gavin Quinn (of Pan Pan, an Irish theatre company who have been making amazing work since 1991) had to quit, citing artistic differences with our playwright Branden Jacob- Jenkins (who has been making theatre since a year ago or so). So now the play has transformed from an engaging piece of contemporary theatre directed by Gavin Quinn to a piece of crap that wouldn’t hold a candle to some of the community theater I did in high school, directed by Branden Jacob-Jenkins. The only thing I can say about all of this is that I am ashamed to be in this play. I had written a whole bunch of other stuff about why this show is now so shallow both in conceit and execution and why working with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is awful to the point of being insulting––but then I read Isherwood’s review in the New York Times of BJJ’s last play Neighbors and he summed it up pretty nicely: ‘But sorting out Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins’s intentions is probably a fruitless exercise. The play’s undisciplined writing undermines its pretensions to cultural satire, to say nothing of its pretensions to sociological tragedy. Neighbors––or N(e)ig(h)g (bo)ers––is a lot more punishing than it is provocative.’ Well put, Isherwood. Well put. The only good thing I can say is that enough of the play was cut yesterday to reduce its running time from over 2 and half hours to 90 minutes. So there will be less suffering for all of us.
In the fallout from that debacle, all of the white actors in the show choose to act in solidarity and walk away from the production. With a lack of white guys to properly produce his play, Jacobs-Jenkins opted to open the show anyway with a visible absence of white males. One audience member who runs the site Off-Off-Blogway saw this version, and remembers:
Many of the scenes that obviously we written for two actors were played with one, the playwright himself opened the show, playing the part of the Native American putting on “red face” while explaining the opening of the show, sealed envelopes with questions from the the playwright/director were delivered to the actors on stage, who would break character and answer the questions as themselves.
By eschewing any attempts at faithfully staging the play he set out to create, Jacobs-Jenkins opted to directly address the audience about the difficulties of mounting a show when every white guy has jumped ship. One of the show’s assistant directors, Lacy Warner, wrote about this experience over for Brooklyn Magazine. According to her, Jacobs-Jenkins’s last-ditch effort to salvage his play by exposing every racial and theatrical anxiety “morphed it into a an intimate and vulnerable production about failure and the nature of collaboration in the theatre” (Warner). In fact, considering the power of the prologue of the current version of the show, the mutiny of white men four years earlier may have been the best thing that could have happened.
Whereas in the 2010 version, the choice to use face makeup may have felt gimmicky, the 2014 version uses it as a means of engaging with the production history of The Octoroon with a chiasmic theatrical twistiness. During the presentation of The Octoroon couched within An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins has BJJ (in whiteface) embody the three major white roles of George, Scudder, and M’Closky. In the original production these roles would all have been played race-appropriate, but the playwright seems to have taking to heart the suggestion that he “play all the white guys” following the departure of his original cast.
Having a black man in play the important white characters gains further depth when we consider that in The Octoroon, all the major white male characters come from outside of Louisiana. Thus, in the plantocratic world of Terrebone, which locates power in hegemonic figure of the white Southern male, all three of Boucicault’s main characters possess varying degress of Otherness. George has spent his life in Europe, while both overseers, Scudder and M’Closky, are recognizably Northern. M’Closky perhaps occupies the furthest degree of difference––in addition to being a Yankee, he is also being a variation on the stock character of the Stage Irish.
On the Victorian British stage, the Stage Irishman was often portrayed as drunken, stupid, and violent––much like the Black Buck, his counterpart on the American stage. The exaggerations of these qualities often resulted in increasingly visual connections being made between the Irish and ape; sometimes productions would go so far as to play the Stage Irish as a ‘simianised’ figure. In his plays, Boucicault often aligned himself with the oppressed––especially the oppressed Irish––and fought against these stereotypical presentations. Strangely though, in The Octoroon, Boucicault locates his villain in the man with which he shares the most obvious characteristics. Jacobs-Jenkins capitalizes on this legacy by manifesting the ‘blackened’ status of the Boucicault’s Stage Irish by having his own avatar play the part.
It is worth noting that in 1916, the LaFayette Players, a Negro acting ensemble, produced a condensed version of The Octoroon featuring a cast entirely made up of black actors in whiteface. Charles Gilpin, who played the role of the white slave master M’Closky, was singled out in the New York Age’s review for his “fine makeup” that was said to have been so convincing that his friends “at first [were] unable to determine who he was” (Walton 6).
For most of The Octoroon’s production history, another significant part was found in the character of Wahnotee, a Native American member of the “Lepan” tribe. In order to capture the right amount of audience sympathy for the Rousseauian “noble savage”, Boucicault wrote the part to be played by a white actor. Junius Booth was among the many actors said to have earned laurels in his portrayal. However, at the premiere at Winter Garden in 1859, it was none other than Dion Boucicault himself who played the role––in redface. In An Octoroon, The Playwright follows BJJ’s lead and reddens up to play both the “redskin” Wahnotee and the “redneck” LaFouche. The implications of the shouting match of a collected 47 “Fuck yous” between BJJ and the The Playwright draw even more strength from the fact that given that the Gavin Quinn, the director of 2010 staging of The Octoroon: An Adaptation of The Octoroon Based on The Octoroon, was himself Irish.
The last of the cross-race performances in An Octoroon is implied by the suggestion that Boucicault’s assistant (played by “one who can pass as Native American”) puts on blackface. In the melodramatic presentation, the assistant plays the stereotypical slave types of the “Uncle Tom-esque” Pete and Paul, a young slave boy––all of which would have been played by white actors in burnt cork. Throughout the 19th-century production history of The Octoroon, it has been noted that Paul, described as a the “yellow” boy, was traditionally played by a white actress in a light application of black face. Jacobs-Jenkins is then further playing with the idea of the boy as “yellow” by also suggesting that a South Asian actor or actress could be considered for the part in the dramatis personae.
In contrast to the men, who portray multiple characters of another ethnicity, the females in An Octoroon are taken almost intact from Boucicault’s script and played straight, at least in terms of race. The white Dora Sunnyside is portrayed by a white actress, though presented in high grotesquery; the female slaves are all black actresses, though they speak in colloquial 21st-century style; and one reviewer over at Broadway&Me noted that the über-earnest performance of Zoë by Amber Gray, a biracial actress, “wouldn’t have been out of place in Boucicault’s original production back in 1859”––save for the fact that Zoë was typically played by a white actress ( ).4
Some have located this entrapment of women within the melodramatic form as a weakness in Jacobs-Jenkins script. However, the playwright admits to avoiding the impulse to jam “everything that I was feeling, or that I wanted to see, or was annoyed by, into one play”––as he feels he did to his own disappointment in Neighbors (Bent 47). He instead hones his focus in An Octoroon by relating each of the other coups de théâtre he deploys back to the act of three men whiting, blacking, and reddening up in the prologue.
The act three auction in which Zoë is reduced to chattel and put on the block to be sold causes George and M’Closky start a bidding war. The sensationalism in Boucicault’s play came from seeing a white woman being auctioned as a black property, but in Jacobs-Jenkins, it occurs when two men bidding are suddenly fused together as a flurry of whiteness in one body.
After this, BJJ and the Playwright pause the show to give a brief melodramatic dramaturgy lesson. Together, the men explain that following the traditional third act “climax” (represented by the auction), melodrama would use its fourth act to stage a “Sensation Scene.” According to BJJ, it is in Act Four when “a playwright’s real mettle is tested” as the high points of the show’s narrative, spectacle, and moral converge (An Octoroon ) In Boucicault’s original “Sensation Scene,” Wahnotee is caught and accused of the murder of Paul (which in fact was the result of M’Closky). Wahnotee is spared from lynching at the hands of his kangaroo court when George pulls a photographic plate from a daguerreotype which conveniently caught M’Closky in the act. In an attempt to escape, M’Closky manages to set a steamship filled with cotton on fire, leading to a bombastic fiery explosion.
BJJ and the Playwright admit the difficulty in re-creating the Boucicault’s “Sensation Scene,” within constraints of fire codes and a limited budget. Yet, the men also get to a deeper point about the shift in audiences’ horizon of expectations in the years since The Octoroon. They agree that “it actually would have been really exciting to audience 150 years ago––having someone caught by a photograph,” today in the age of Photoshop, it’s just boring (Jacobs-Jenkins 44). BJJ suggests setting the place on fire or sacrificing an animal onstage, but instead settles on “the next best thing––something actually related to the plot” (45). At that moment, an enormous photograph of a lynching of a black man is projected onto the white back wall. This photographic reality stands in complete opposition to the artifice of theatrical illusion at which Jacobs-Jenkins has been playing. In this, perhaps he does manage to capture the Boucicaultian goal of “overwhelm[ing] the audience’s senses to the end of building the truest illusion of reality” (47).
At the end of Boucicault’s play Zoe’s poisons herself, and in death, her body literally “turns white.” Abolitionist newspapers widely publicized this fact which, along with the play’s sympathetic portrayal of black slaves, caused Southern audiences to protest the New York premiere. Boucicault didn’t find any sympathy across the Atlantic either. During the play’s run in London, where miscegenation was legalized, the playwright was pressured to alter the play’s tragic ending. This resulted in a “Happy English Ending” where Zoë is rescued at the last second and able to live happily ever after with George.5
After Zoë retrieves the poison from the female slaves Minnie and Dido, Jacobs-Jenkins jettisons the ending all together. Instead, at the end of An Octoroon, the stage lights are extinguished and the cast sings an original ballad composed by César Alvarez together in darkness. Only then is the privileged gaze of the melodramatic audience completely subverted. Unable to keep each other apart through their gaze, spectator and performer are united by a communal quality––the sound of human voices.
Unfortunately, those voices don’t always manage to carry. Case in point: the production of Waiting for Godot that inspired Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The choices of putting Didi and Gogo in blackface and the men’s “resort to black slang” were cited as “the kinds of improvisations that would have driven Beckett up the wall” (Marks). Seeing only red, Samuel Beckett’s estate used a different type of black and white to make their point—the show closed prematurely upon the enforcement of a cease-and-desist order.