RACE AND IDENTITY
Headline-grabbing play An Octoroon gets its Canadian premiere at the Shaw Festival,
The last round of openings in Tim Carroll’s first season as artistic director at the Shaw Festival unveils one of the biggest surprises from the 2017 season announcement.
Capping a stream of productions featuring the well-known ( Saint Joan) or relatively unknown ( Me and My Girl) is a play that’s both: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon.
It’s an adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 melodrama The Octoroon, which received rave reviews after its first off-off-Broadway production in 2014 and close media attention for every production since, and the Shaw’s production is its hotly anticipated Canadian premiere.
But it’s hard to pin down exactly what to expect with this radical exploration of race, identity and relationships that has three male characters — one Black, one white and one Indigenous — don blackface, whiteface and redface in a story that takes place on a Southern plantation called Terrebone.
“This play has been one of the biggest surprises of my life, I could never have predicted its success,” Jacobs-Jenkins said from New York City, where he’s working on new adaptations of Euripides’ The Bacchae and Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.
Since playing in New York, An Octoroon has travelled across the States, to England, Australia and now to Canada.
“The fact that we’ve even crossed oceans is unreal to me. . . This play keeps getting done in these places and met with varying degrees of horror and enthusiasm.”
The use of facial makeup — which is put on during the play’s elaborate and highly stylized opening by characters named BJJ, Playwright (a stand-in for Boucicault) and Assistant — brings such a visceral reaction that it has grabbed much of the headline buzz over the last three years for the way it exposes the racist ideologies and stereotypes that existed in Boucicault’s original play and the play that inspired it, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
But in An Octoroon, makeup is not the statement itself but the ignition for bigger ideas Jacobs-Jenkins is exploring.
“What was interesting to me is that we so eagerly demonize the paint itself when actually what makes it offensive is its deployment by another human who is making choices that are offensive. I’m interested in looking beyond the paint and asking who is responsible. The paint itself can’t take the blame for that,” he says.
“It’s a knee-jerk response to a visual stimulus, I think. There’s such a danger to that. And theatre is one of the few media that asks you to come with more than just your eyes to the experience. You have to access your body, your mind; you’re aware of the people around you and onstage. That’s what makes it such a special form to me.”
Whereas The Octoroon was about addressing racial inequality, An Octoroon is about theatre and why people see it, Jacobs-Jenkins says.
If both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Octoroon had the intention of revealing capital T “Truths” about slavery to those with no lived experience of it, and both are considered to be racist and offensive in today’s terms, Jacobs-Jenkins asks what going to the theatre means in 2017.
“It’s about looking at the impulse that theatre is ever going to expose to us anything about anyone other than ourselves,” he says. “I’m never going to learn what it is to be X or Y kind of person unless I actually have those people sitting next to me, watching it with me, talking to me.”
To many theatre lovers, including likely many who are regular subscribers to the Shaw Festival, this idea could be an affront to long-held beliefs that the importance of theatre and the arts in general is grounded in empathy and education.
But for André Sills, in a muchanticipated breakout role as BJJ (named after Jacobs-Jenkins) in Peter Hinton’s production of An Octoroon, maintaining a positive relationship with the audience has been a focus during rehearsal.
“With content like this, tone is very important. We could beat the audience over the head with the ‘message,’ which will just scare people away. I am not saying we censor our show, but try to find that sweet spot where the audience is uncomfortable but are still glued to their seat with a genuine desire to see this experience through,” he said.
Sills says starring in An Octoroon was an intimidating challenge he wasn’t sure he could meet at first — and the play continues to scare him as a performer. But to Jacobs-Jenkins, the play is not about fear but surprise.
“The whole play is trying to rethink what the form can be, what theatre can be, what a play can be and what a script can be. It’s trying to find a new way to express something using a tool that feels old and problematic,” he says.
Or, as the Assistant tells the audience to close Act 4, “The point of this whole thing was to make you feel something.” An Octoroon is at the Royal George Theatre until Oct. 14. See shawfest.com for details. Carly Maga is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with critic Karen Fricker.