Startling, original comment on race
So often when we talk about new plays about race, we focus on the same questions. Did the show find daring, smart ways to lambaste prejudices of and oppression by white people — but without sounding so angry as to put off that same demographic, the one most likely to make up the majority of its audience? Did it create authentic, multidimensional characters of color, while also bestowing the same honor on its white characters, even the racist ones?
Within the first few moments of “An Octoroon,” whose West Coast premiere opened Friday, June 30, at Berkeley Rep, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins not only answers those questions with startling originality, he also exposes the questions themselves as conde-
scending and, more important, limiting. Above all, they ignore matters of form. And though this production is gorgeously designed, with performances that are crisp, thoughtful and charged with enough potential for anarchy to keep things always a little (or a lot) dangerous, it’s how Jacobs-Jenkins tells his story that most dazzles.
Though “An Octoroon” speaks for itself, you’ll get much, much more out of it if you get there early enough to read the essays in the program. The show plays gleeful havoc with Dion Boucicault’s 1859 melodrama “The Octoroon,” about Zoe (Sydney Morton), a woman on a financially imperiled Louisiana plantation who is one-eighth black and thus, because of the one-drop rule of the time, forever tainted, forbidden from marrying George, the white man who loves her (played by Lance Gardner, in whiteface).
The show doesn’t dive right in to all that, though. At rise, BJJ (also Gardner) is in an undershirt and briefs on an almost naked stage, introducing himself as a “black playwright,” lamenting, as he dons the whiteface he’ll need later, how even if he tries to write a play that’s not about race, theaters will inevitably market him that way. It’s a perfect role for Gardner, a local treasure whose performances always seem ready to explode into something silly, something dangerous, or both. That charged quality makes drama out of what could have been an expository slog, as he and a riff on Boucicault (Ray Porter) explicate, over a dressing room duel for power, the background of what’s to come.
Directed by Eric Ting, “An Octoroon” both spoofs and lives fully in its source material. Its villain, M’Closky (also Gardner), has an evil laugh, a minor-seventh chord for every entrance and dastardly move (Lisa Quoresimo supplies the live piano on an upright that, fittingly, sounds like it’s been collecting Spanish moss for the past 150 years), and a tacked-on mustache so wobbly it practically makes the show a dancetheater piece.
But if in one moment you laugh at the over-the-top conceits of melodrama — its poses codified into tableaux, its clownish facial expressions rendered all the more grotesque by footlights — in the next they manipulate you. The interesting and troubling thing about melodrama is that it still works and still drives much of our art, even if acting styles have evolved. We still want to be whipped to frenzies by spectacles that put pure heroines and heroes into extravagant danger; in spite of ourselves, we still root for the same happy ending, however preposterous the twists and turns of plot that requires.
The genius of “An Octoroon,” though, is that it’s not just Zoe, George and the plantation’s slaves (Afi Bijou, Jasmine Bracey, Afua Busia and Amir Talai, all scenestealing, whether channeling their best Hattie McDaniel or using contemporary inflection) with whom you sympathize. Jacobs-Jenkins inspires that same fathomless sadness for the state of our contemporary and historical theater, even as he’s also helping to break it down and rebuild it.