{"id":47466,"date":"2016-06-09T15:31:46","date_gmt":"2016-06-09T15:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=47466"},"modified":"2016-12-11T23:19:29","modified_gmt":"2016-12-11T23:19:29","slug":"nothing-is-black-and-white-in-branden-jacobs-jenkinss-an-octoroon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=47466","title":{"rendered":"Nothing is black and white in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins\u2019s \u2018An Octoroon\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nothing is black and white in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins\u2019s \u2018An Octoroon\u2019<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a>
\n2016-06-06<\/p>\n

Peter Marks<\/strong><\/a>, Theater critic<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nJon Hudson Odom, left, as George, Maggie Wilder, center, as Dora and Kathyrn Tkel as Zoe in \u201cAn Octoroon<\/a>.\u201d (Scott Suchman<\/a>)<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

\u201cHi, everyone, I\u2019m a black playwright!\u201d the actor Jon Hudson Odom exclaims at the outset of \u201cAn Octoroon<\/a>,\u201d Branden Jacobs-\u00adJenkins\u2019s<\/a> acerbically virtuosic skewering of America\u2019s perpetually festering racial anxieties.<\/p>\n

Before long, Odom, shedding the guise of the dramatist \u2014 who goes by the initials \u201cBJJ\u201d \u2014 is applying white-face makeup to portray the roles of both the altrustic heir to a broke Southern plantation and his racist archnemesis, in the \u201cblack playwright\u2019s\u201d new version of a 19th-century slavery melodrama. \u201cI couldn\u2019t find any more white guys to play the white guys\u2019 parts,\u201d BJJ confesses, explaining that white guys have qualms these days about embodying people who own other people. He\u2019s unapologetic, though, about having his assistant (Joseph Castillo-Midyett) put on blackface to play house slave<\/a> Pete, while the white Irish author of the original melodrama (James Konicek) materializes to smear on garish red makeup to become the Native American character, Wahnotee.<\/p>\n

Jacobs-Jenkins, a Washington-born playwright and Pulitzer Prize finalist this year for his tragicomic workplace drama \u201cGloria,\u201d is looking with a jaundiced eye in \u201cAn Octoroon\u201d at the mechanics of \u201cThe Octoroon<\/a>,\u201d the 1859 \u201csensation drama\u201d by Dion Boucicault<\/a> that inspired Jacobs-Jenkins\u2019s play. Simultaneously he\u2019s highlighting the collective skittishness of our time over labels and racial identity and who has permission to say what about whom. By pla\u00adcing black actors in whiteface and Latino actors in blackface and white actors in redface, he\u2019s for\u00adcing the rest of us to consider in the starkest terms the impact of society\u2019s relentless color-sorting \u2014 conscious or otherwise…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nothing is black and white in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins\u2019s \u2018An Octoroon\u2019 The Washington Post 2016-06-06 Peter Marks, Theater critic Jon Hudson Odom, left, as George, Maggie Wilder, center, as Dora and Kathyrn Tkel as Zoe in \u201cAn Octoroon.\u201d (Scott Suchman) \u201cHi, everyone, I\u2019m a black playwright!\u201d the actor Jon Hudson Odom exclaims at the outset of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,6462,6940,20],"tags":[24028,24026,24027,2875,2581],"class_list":["post-47466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-branden-jacobs-jenkins","tag-jon-hudson-odom","tag-peter-marks","tag-the-washington-post","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47466"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50550,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47466\/revisions\/50550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}