An Octoroon

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon is one of those plays that is so excellent, challenging, insightful and funny that it leaves me with the desire to see it again immediately, several times even, and also to read it a couple of times for good measure. It's one of the strongest and most satisfying shows I've seen in a while. It serves as a reminder of the fact that as a nation, we tend not to talk meaningfully, effectively, or straightforwardly about race, and that our inability to do so makes our ugly racial past bleed into our present. It does all this without crushing the possibility of frank talk or real, productive change. And it's really fucking funny.

While not a straightforward history lesson, An Octoroon does a seamless job of demonstrating to its audiences some of the ways our distant past and immediate present remain entwined. The show simultaneously reconstructs, comments upon, and updates aspects of Dion Boucicault's 1859 melodrama The Octoroon, which was, in the states, second only in popularity to the big commercial blockbuster of the time, the melodramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Clearly, as it remains now, race was on a lot of American peoples' minds during the leadup to the Civil War. Go figure.

Jacobs-Jenkins' Talmudic reworking of the Boucicault piece is at once respectful to and critical of the original, and through it, An Octoroon compares past performance styles, social mores, views on race (and class and gender), and collective national consciousness with their contemporary equivalents. Lots has changed; lots hasn't. The production is unsettling, and even disorienting at times--especially since Jacobs-Jenkins doesn't let his audience get too caught up in the comedic aspects of the show before abruptly reminding us about what we're laughing at in the first place. He also refuses to tie up all the loose ends he and Boucicault have introduced in the process. There are just so many, after all--and as a collective, contemporary Americans are still trying to figure out, a century and a half after slavery ended, who is allowed to approach them, and in what ways, let alone how we are supposed to work them out once we do.

I am humbled by and grateful for An Octoroon. I hope you run right out and see it if you can. I hope it continues to be staged, seen, and discussed. And for the love of this stained, strained country, I hope like hell it's not the only contemporary American theatrical entertainment to do so.

Theater with Children: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Photo: Gerry Goodstein

When I was a kid, my parents took my sister and me to a lot of theater in our hometown of Pittsburgh, which has a much stronger arts scene than I think most people assume. My folks subscribed (and still do) to Pittsburgh Public Theater, and sometimes took us to summer stock productions under a huge tent at Hartwood Acres. They frequently took us to shows at Carnegie-Mellon University, which had consistently excellent offerings (and has sent about a gazillion starry-eyed graduates to New York over the years). They also took us, for a couple of years, to a great Shakespeare festival. Now sadly defunct, the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival operated, at least through the late 1980s, out of the lovely little Stephen Foster Memorial Theatre on the University of Pittsburgh campus.

A few days before we'd attend a particular Shakespeare play, my mother would haul the dark gray, heavily inked copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare that she had purchased as a college student out from the study and read through it. Then, over dinner or in the car en route to the show, she'd tell us a chatty, child-friendly synopsis of what we were about to see: "Lear was a king, and he had three daughters. Can you guess, just by hearing their names, which one we are supposed to like best?" or, "Wait until you see what an awful man Iago is. Just a terrible guy. Here's what he does to Othello." Her synopses were typically bookended with impassioned reminders that we were not going to be able to understand everything the characters said because they spoke in an older form of English, but that we shouldn't worry about that. Her approach didn't always work (I clearly remember my dad shushing me with growing irritation while I squirmed my way through Richard III, a play I have grown to appreciate but still really don't love), but it helped more often than it didn't. At the very least, whether we connected with the play or not, my sister and I always had some inkling of what the hell was going on at any given time.