Octoroon pushes Shaw into racy new corners
About 10 minutes into the Shaw Festival’s opening of An Octoroon Friday night, I thought about the elderly lady ahead of me as we were taking our seats.
She has likely been coming to Shaw for decades. She has probably seen Pygmalion multiple times. All the musicals. All the old Shaw standbys. What was she to make of a show in which two men in their underwear repeatedly yell ‘F--- you!’ to each other? In the first scene?
How did she handle subsequent scenes in which the ‘N’ word is thrown around so casually, it’s like
Blazing Saddles rode into town? Playwright Branden JacobsJenkins’ uncomfortable comedy is daring for any theatre company to do, but at Shaw — for its Canadian premiere — it feels especially important. It embodies the winds of change this company must embrace, even if it alienates some longtime supporters.
And it will, count on it. There will be people leaving at intermission. There will be people demanding a refund. Shaw regulars who simply blind-buy their tickets are in for a shock.
Which is a good thing. It’s likely why new artistic director Tim Carroll chose it for his first season. It’s a blunt show about racism in the United States, then and now, and how it resonates in modern theatre. It induces nervous laughter one moment, cringes the next. It takes the modern trend of colour-blind casting to the absurd extreme, as we watch a black actor apply whiteface makeup.
That would be Andre Sills, in one of the Shaw season’s most highwire performances. He plays three roles, including Jacobs-Jenkins’ himself at the outset. He’s attempting to stage Dion Boucicault’s well-intentioned but wildly racist 1859 play The Octoroon, about the heir to a plantation named George (Sills again) who falls in love with the titular octoroon named Zoe. An octoroon, by the way, is someone that is one-eighth black.
She also happens to be the daughter of his uncle. Let the squirming begin.
While he’s courting her, sneering villain M’Closky (Sills yet again) schemes to buy his land and nab Zoe for himself. If there were train tracks nearby, he’d be tying someone to them.
The original play was a huge hit in its day, but feels like an offensive relic now. Rather than downplay it, Jacobs-Jenkins goes over-the-top on every ridiculous thing about it, from the grating melodrama to the mangled message it tried to convey. He has the house slaves Minnie and Dido (Kiera Sangster and Lisa Berry) talk in modern slang like they’re hanging out at a salon. He has Patrick McManus in redface as an Indian, and then as a slave auctioneer in another scene, still in redface. The explanation? Sunburn.
He has Ryan Cunningham in blackface — itself a shock to see in any capacity, theatrical or otherwise — for two different characters, both such painful caricatures you fear the show is going to bludgeon you with its absurdity.
And lest the comedy lull you into false comfort, the play delivers a crafty gut punch near the end when Sills — as Jacobs-Jenkins again — halts the action to explain how what was ‘shocking ’ back then is mundane now. So he projects an image that sucks all humour from the room.
“Anyway, the point of this whole thing was to make you feel something,” says Cunningham.
You’ll feel plenty during this challenging night of theatre. Just know, not all of it will sit well.