Shawfest dives deep into representation debate
An Octoroon
(out of 4) By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Peter Hinton. Until Oct. 14 at the Royal George Theatre, 85 Queen St., Niagara-on-the-Lake. Shawfest.com or 1-800-511-7429. “Hi everyone. I’m a ‘Black playwright.’ ”
So begins Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s audacious play, which has been winning plaudits and sparking debate since it premiered at New York’s Soho Rep. in 2014. The character speaking is named BJJ: a mouthpiece for the playwright himself.
Adarkly funny opening monologue reveals his fascination for the 19thcentury Irish impresario Dion Boucicault — famous and influential in his day and nearly unknown now, partly because the melodramatic conventions of his plays are believed hopelessly dated.
With An Octoroon Jacobs-Jenkins tests that belief: It’s about his attempts to rewrite Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon, which treated slavery and property ownership in the pre-Civil War American South. The excitement of An Octoroon is in the dialogue and clash between Boucicault’s world and our own.
It’s a layered, imperfect play, its excesses likely a product of Jacobs-Jenkins’s youth and inexperience (he was just shy of 30 when it premiered). It’s also outrageous and brilliant, and has the potential to provoke hilarity, discomfort, and raised consciousness amongst its audiences.
By choosing to produce it in his first season as artistic director of the Shaw Festival, Tim Carroll throws the organization and its audiences into the deep end of debates about representation, appropriation and privilege that it has previously circled uneasily. It needed a great staging that could dig deep into the play and work through its complexities, but Peter Hinton’s production has not achieved these aims.
Hinton’s directorial signature is embellishment: he emphasizes visual strokes and elaborate scenic design, researches deeply, and at his best provides compelling perspectives on canonical works we thought we knew.
An Octoroon doesn’t need embellishment: it has that already. Hinton’s interpretation adds layers of scenic complication and contemporary business that slow things down rather than clarify and elucidate.
This starts with that opening monologue, which André Sills, who can be wonderful, orates with a studied formality that does not seem natural to him. Neither Jacobs-Jenkins’s particular voice — supersmart, deeply self-ironizing, profanity-laden — nor Sills’s relationship to what he’s saying come through clearly.
He is joined on stage by a character called Playwright, who represents Boucicault (Patrick McManus): Irish-accented, also profane, and totally disgusted with how today’s theatre is no longer popular and has forgotten him. Then arrives the Assistant (Ryan Cunningham), whose slogan-emblazoned T-shirt declares him to be Indigenous.
A key point of this prologue is that BJJ couldn’t get his Octoroon produced because white actors were afraid to appear in it, so he’s going to play the lead white roles himself, while Playwright takes on the stageIndian role of Wahnotee, and Assistant the main Black male roles.
Watching BJJ and Playwright put on white- and red-face makeup is deliberately shocking, as is the appearance of Assistant in full blackface and adopting highly stereotyped speech and gestures to play the Black boy Paul and the adult slave Pete.
These gestures are Jacobs-Jenkins’s contemporary channelling of the melodramatic impulse to pro- voke strong feeling (shock and awe, we’d perhaps call it today) in order to query the binary thinking (goodies/ baddies, right/wrong) of the melodramatic mode.
At the same time Jacobs-Jenkins acknowledges that old Boucicault himself was a subtler thinker than we give him credit for: by making his play spin around the capacity of an octoroon (someone who’s oneeighth Black) to pass as white, he called the notion of racial purity into question.
The middle section of the play delivers Jacobs-Jenkins’s version of the Octoroon story: BJJ/Sills plays both George, the new master of the Terrebone Plantation, and M’Closky, the dastardly overseer who hatches a plot to take over the property and everything on it including its slaves. Zoe (Vanessa Sears) is the titular figure, who falls in love with George, though he may have to marry wealthy, lusty Dora (Diana Donnelly) to keep house and home together.
These passages drag: the performers generally hit a performative note and stay there. More reminders of the contemporary frame (as provided by a few comments BJJ makes directly to the audience) or more exaggerated bursts of melodramatic style might have added interest.
Ryan deSouza’s musical underscoring lulls where it might have thrilled, and Hinton’s scenic flourishes — a black aperture opening and closing to reveal a white back screen, fake side walls, and in particular added tableaux competing with JacobsJenkins’s scripted ones — add unnecessary visual complexity (design is by Gillian Gallow).
Things get more on track in the fun and meta-theatrical fourth act, which BJJ and the Playwright halfnarrate, half-enact because it’s just too damn complicated; and in the controversially anti-climactic finale.
One of Jacobs-Jenkins’s most imaginative gestures is to flesh out the inner lives and relationships of the slave characters, and the exchanges between Lisa Berry’s Dido and Kiera Sangster’s Minnie are the production’s consistent pleasure. They talk as if they were contemporary African-Americans, adopting a performative Blackness that is likely to provoke in audiences the sequence of laughter then self-questioning guilt that the author makes clear he’s striving for.
This is a piece that gets right up in the face of the Shaw’s traditional audience base: “I am literally surrounded by white people all the time,” BJJ says early on, gesturing with exasperation at the orchestra and balcony seating in the Royal George Theatre. A clearer follow-through was needed to justify this provocation.