Tag: Dion Boucicault

  • Thank you for choosing to bring your students to the Wilma’s production of An Octoroon, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. I applaud your willingness to take a risk on this one. While on some level we all understand that the most extraordinary learning opportunities emerge when we venture outside our comfort zone, most of us still gravitate…

  • Meta-Melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon Modern Drama Volume 59, Number 3, Fall 2016 pages 285-305 Verna A. Foster, Professor of English Loyola University Chicago In adapting the nineteenth-century melodrama The Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins both satirizes Boucicault’s racial assumptions and emulates his aesthetic principles to produce a meta-melodrama, a play that at once celebrates…

  • Making Jokes and History in An Octoroon African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) 2016-06-25 Christopher Bonner, Assistant Professor of History University of Maryland Last weekend I saw a performance of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins‘ play An Octoroon, which is a reimagining of Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, a popular 1859 melodrama set on a Louisiana plantation. There is…

  • The Octoroon, a Tragic Mulatto Tale of the Old South Jubilo! The Emancipation Century 2011-01-23 Alan Skerrett, Jr, Editor Washington, D.C. The Octoroon is a tragic mulatto play by Irish playwright and actor Dion Boucicault. It opened on Broadway in 1859, just a few years before the American Civil War. The play was based on…

  • Reading Racist Literature New Yorker 2015-04-13 Elif Batuman, Staff Writer Of the many passages that gave me pause when I first read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” in high school, the one I remember the most clearly is this conversation between Connie, Clifford, and the Irish writer Michaelis: “I find I can’t marry an Englishwoman, not even…

  • Zoe: That — that is the ineffaceable curse of Cain. Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black — bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the flood; those seven bright drops give me love like yours — hope like yours — ambition like yours…

  • Review: ‘An Octoroon,’ a Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Comedy About Race The New York Times 2015-02-26 Ben Brantley, Chief Theater Critic Walking on a stage covered with cotton balls is a tricky business. It’s all too easy to slip into a pratfall. And forget about running or dancing or hopping like a bunny, as the characters sometimes…

  • One Playwright’s ‘Obligation’ To Confront Race And Identity In The U.S. Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity All Things Considered National Public Radio 2015-02-16 Jeff Lunden Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins may be only 30 years old, but he’s already compiled an impressive resume. His theatrical works, which look at race and identity in America,…

  • AN OCTOROON: THE OCTOROON an essay by James Leverett The Soho Repository New York, New York 2014-04-01 James Leverett, Professor (Adjunct) of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism Yale School of Drama There is melodrama in every tragedy, just as there is a child in every adult.” –Eric Bentley, Life of the Drama A Suggested Walk I…

  • What is Dion Boucicault’s THE OCTOROON? The Soho Repository New York, New York 2014-03-17 James Leverett, Professor (Adjunct) of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism Yale School of Drama Professor of Dramatic Criticism James Leverett from The Yale School of Drama joins us in this video to give context and background to Dion Boucicault’s 1859 melodrama The…