Meta-Melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicault ﾀﾙs .

VERNA A. FOSTER sensational conclusion to the fourth act. Wahnotee eventually takes his revenge upon M’Closky, but the news of the letter repaying the debt arrives at Terrebonne too late to save Zoe. To avoid becoming M’Closky’s sexual slave, Zoe has taken poison; she dies in George’s arms, telling him that he may now “without a blush, confess [his] love for the Octoroon” (183). In writing The Octoroon, Boucicault seems to have wished to treat a controversial subject uncontroversially. The play may be seen as anti-slavery in the sympathy Boucicault creates for Zoe, but he also presents the Southern slaveholders as benevolent – especially Mrs. Peyton, who thinks of her slaves as her children (160) – and the slaves themselves as endearingly childish. The villain, M’Closky, is not a member of the old Southern gentry, as he resentfully points out (145), but a Northerner, a Yankee. The contemporary reviewer for the New York Times found The Octoroon “harmless and non-commital” (8 Dec. 1859; qtd. in Degen 173), and Joseph Jefferson, who played Scudder, remarked in his Autobiography, “The dialogue and characters of the play made one feel for the South, but the action proclaimed against slavery, and called loudly for its abolition” (qtd. in Thomson 8). But despite its great popularity with the public and its apparently balanced sympathies, The Octoroon was highly controversial and, in some quarters, considered “inflammatory,” “libellous,” and “offensive” (“‘The Octoroon’: A Disgrace” 529; emphasis in original).1 When Boucicault revived The Octoroon at the Adelphi in London in 1861, the English audience, sympathizing with abolitionists in the American Civil War, objected strongly to Zoe’s death and demanded a happy ending. Despite his well-known willingness to make whatever changes to his plays might be necessary to ensure good box-office receipts (rendering The Poor of New York [1857] as The Poor of Liverpool and of several other cities, for example), Boucicault balked at changing the ending of The Octoroon. In a letter to the Times dated 20 November 1861, he wrote: “In the death of the Octoroon lies the moral and teaching of the whole work. Had this girl been saved, and the drama brought to a happy end, the horrors of her position, irremediable from the very nature of the institution of slavery, would subside into the condition of a temporary annoyance” (qtd. in Degen 172). After three weeks, however, Boucicault gave in to the demands of his audience and wrote a new fifth act, “composed,” according to the Adelphi’s ironic advertisement in the Times, “by the public and edited by the author . . . a very grateful tribute to their judgment and taste” (qtd. in Degen 172). This English version of The Octoroon is not extant, but the Illustrated London News provides a detailed description of the new fifth act (qtd. in Degen 176). In it, M’Closky flees with Zoe; George, with Scudder’s help, rescues her; the lovers go off to marry in a land where they may lawfully do so; and Scudder marries Dora. There does exist a truncated, four-act version (printed in Boucicault’s Selected Plays) 288 Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016)

Meta-Melodrama that ends abruptly but “happily” with Wahnotee stabbing M’Closky, George entering with Zoe (alive) in his arms, and the steamboat blowing up. John A. Degen suggests that Boucicault, embittered by having to give his play a happy ending, turned what he had intended as a “serious social play” or even a “modern tragedy” into a “contrived formula melodrama,” far removed from the ethos of the original American version of The Octoroon (175, 178). Sarah Meer, however, questions Boucicault’s commitment to anti-slavery and argues that it is more likely he changed the ending for commercial reasons. Meer argues that the playwright was at least as much interested in Zoe’s anomalous social position as in her racial position and compares the play to his next play, The Colleen Bawn (1860), which involves a class misalliance. There is enough ambiguity in the text and in the history and reception of The Octoroon to leave the play open to multiple and even opposite interpretations. The play thus poses both a peculiar challenge and a rich opportunity for an adapter working in the twenty-first century. It is at once anti-slavery and racist in its depiction of the African-American characters, arguably even by the lights of the mid-nineteenth century, let alone today. The Octoroon is obviously very much a play of its own time in its attitude to race, class, and gender as well as in its genre, but its author’s skilful manipulation of that genre has a lot to teach younger dramatists, as Jacobs-Jenkins discovered. Boucicault was the most popular and the most able practitioner of melodrama in the nineteenth-century theatre of England, America, and his native Ireland. His Irish melodramas, The Colleen Bawn and especially The Shaughraun (1874), have been successfully staged in recent decades. The Octoroon is more problematic because of its content, though the Phoenix Theatre in New York gave the play a successful “faithful, deadpan,” and at times moving revival in 1961 (Taubman). The Phoenix’s Program Note commented on the play’s contemporary relevance: “Slavery is gone but its remains are a part of our heritage”; “the vestigial bitterness remains with us to be read in the daily paper” (Octoroon [theatre program] 20). The view expressed in the Program Note that The Octoroon is worth reviving because it “is a living picture of a part of our country’s past” (20), however, would not survive the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In England, The Octoroon was in the repertory until the 1930s and considered “progressive” (Ravenhill). It was successfully revived in a recorded staged reading before a live audience at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, aired by the BBC on Radio 3 in 2013. Curated and adapted by British dramatist Mark Ravenhill, The Octoroon generated a lively and also appreciative post-performance discussion. One of the actors, Trevor White (who played George), commented that the play was “ahead of its time” (White). During the discussion, Ravenhill noted that, when he directed a rehearsed reading of the play in New York, African-American dramatists Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016) 289

VERNA A. FOSTER responded quite variously, engaging in a heated debate: could Boucicault’s play be put into dialogue with the work of African-American dramatists, or should they ignore it, or write against it? (Ravenhill). In fact, the reading that Ravenhill directed in New York in 2012 was not of Boucicault’s The Octoroon but of Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, then a work-in-development with Soho Rep (Hetrick). An Octoroon, like the play it appropriates, has had a complicated history and has thrived on controversy. Titled The Octoroon: An Adaptation of The Octoroon Based on The Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins’s play was first presented in 2010 at Performance Space 122, Off-Off Broadway, amidst considerable controversy. First, the director, Gavin Quinn, left the show, and Jacobs-Jenkins directed it himself. Two white actors then departed, one of them complaining that the production was a “trainwreck” in an email that found its way to publication in the Village Voice blog and elicited numerous comments (Ludlow Lad). Jacobs-Jenkins used the controversy as “fodder” for the first twenty minutes of his play when it was finally presented as a “workshop” (Bent, “Turn”). The storm over the PS 122 staging thus made its way into the theatrical history (his own as well as Boucicault’s) that Jacobs-Jenkins sets forth in the “Prologue” to his play. (For example, the dramatist, BJJ, explains that he was obliged to play some of the white characters himself because the white actors did not want to play slave owners and left the show.) An Octoroon, directed by Sarah Benson, was eventually performed to enthusiastic acclaim by Soho Rep in 2014 and remounted, with a largely different cast but to equal praise, at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in 2015. Through his original tautologous subtitle – An Adaptation of The Octoroon Based on The Octoroon – Jacobs-Jenkins highlights and gently mocks his relationship to Boucicault, with whom he “became really obsessed” (qtd. in Bent, “Branden”). His palpable affection for Boucicault contributes in an important way to the complex theatrical appeal of An Octoroon, for while Jacobs-Jenkins critically revises the racial attitudes expressed in his predecessor’s play, he does so without attacking Boucicault himself (see Figure 1). Instead, he shows how such attitudes have continued to permeate later thinking and directs his most severe reproach against white America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. An Octoroon effectively reproduces the sensations typical of Victorian melodrama – the suspense, the pity, the laughter, and the thrills – for contemporary audiences while at the same time displaying a consciousness of and critiquing its own form. As in Neighbors and Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins’s sense of genre is a crucial component of what he is saying. In fashioning An Octoroon as a meta-melodrama, Jacobs-Jenkins finds ways, in the words of director Sarah Benson, “to make the idea promote the form and the form promote the idea” (qtd. in Bent, “Branden”). 290 Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016)

Meta-Melodrama Figure 1: BJJ and Playwright (Chris Meyers and Danny Wolohan); photo by Pavel Antonov Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016) 291

VERNA A. FOSTER An Octoroon opens with a prologue titled “The Art of Dramatic Composition” (borrowed from Boucicault’s 1878 essay on playwriting), in which Jacobs-Jenkins provides the audience with the information they need about Boucicault and, more importantly, with a critical perspective from which to engage with his own provocative depictions of race and racism in the play proper. Jacobs-Jenkins uses the prologue to depict symbolically his relationship to Boucicault. The author of An Octoroon, BJJ, and then the Playwright, Dion Boucicault, enter and complain to the audience, the former about the expectations placed on him as a “black playwright” (7), the latter about being forgotten. BJJ objects to the assumption that he does or should write about blackness: even when he wrote about farm animals, he was told that he was “deconstructing African folktales” (10) – a line that foreshadows the appearance later in the play of a giant Br’er Rabbit (Noveck). Jacobs-Jenkins depicts his relationship with Boucicault as both confrontational and congruent. The two dramatists glare at each other and exchange insults – “Fuck you! Fuck me? Fuck you!” – spoken multiple times but “in complete unison” (13), anticipating Jacobs-Jenkins’s retention of much of Boucicault’s dialogue as his own. Intertextual influence is not unidirectional, however. If The Octoroon makes possible An Octoroon, equally the later play changes the way we read the earlier one. Jacobs-Jenkins comically depicts this backwards influence: BJJ drinks an entire bottle of alcohol without suffering any ill effect and for no apparent reason gives himself a “powerful wedgie”; the Playwright experiences “a mysterious wedgie” and becomes “progressively drunker” without drinking anything (9, 13). This symbolic identification of the two dramatists, both “mostly – if not completely – naked ” (7, 10) – or, in other words, devoid of distinguishing marks except for the colour of their skin – underscores the palimpsestic identification of their plays resulting from Jacobs-Jenkins’s appropriation of Boucicault’s plot, characters, and words. Ravenhill’s conflation of the two Octoroons in his remarks in the BBC discussion mentioned above is thus quite understandable. The contemporary context and updated cross-racial casting, however, ironize and adapt the meaning of the dialogue and plot elements that JacobsJenkins retains from Boucicault, rendering the nineteenth-century melodrama appropriate, or “fit,” for audiences in the twenty-first century.2 BJJ himself puts on whiteface to play both George, the hero, and M’Closky, the villain (the opposite of white actors playing black characters in blackface in nineteenth-century productions of Boucicault’s play). The Playwright puts on redface to play Wahnotee (Boucicault’s own role for the first week of The Octoroon’s premiere run). In the dramatis personae of An Octoroon, JacobsJenkins lists the “actor ethnicities” for his characters “in order of preference” (4). BJJ (and consequently George and M’Closky) should be “played by an 292 Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016)

Meta-Melodrama African-American actor or a black actor”; the Playwright’s Assistant (and consequently Pete and Paul, in blackface) should be “played by a Native American actor, a mixed-race actor, a South Asian actor, or one who can pass as Native American”; Zoe should be “played by an octoroon actress, a white actress, a quadroon actress, a biracial actress, a multi-racial actress, or an actress of color who can pass as an octoroon” (4). This fussy multiplication of racial categories, like the use of whiteface by a black actor, blackface by “an Indian actor – whatever that means to you” (13), and redface by a white actor, ridicules racist divisions of people according to the shade of their skin as well as the theatrical conventions by which historically they have been depicted. In The Octoroon, cross-racial casting lends itself both to the broad acting style typical of melodrama and to the creation of racial stereotypes; in An Octoroon, it enables the mockery of such caricatures. Jacobs-Jenkins satirizes Boucicault’s stereotypes of African and Native Americans by exaggerating their inherent racism. The Playwright, once in costume as Wahnotee, dances crazily and “headbangs” to loud contemporary music and then “stalks his prey before thrashing about wildly with his tomahawk” (16) (see Figure 2). In the play proper, Pete, addressing his white masters, becomes a ludicrous, over-the-top version of an Uncle Tom. Most importantly, Jacobs-Jenkins’s use of crossracial casting produces a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, ensuring a critical reading of the characters, plot, and dialogue that he shares with Boucicault. In constructing his revisionist meta-melodrama, Jacobs-Jenkins nonetheless adopts some of Boucicault’s precepts on playwriting and even sees an affinity between Boucicault and Brecht. The epigraph to his play is a passage from “The Art of Dramatic Composition,” in which Boucicault describes how “the spectator is led to feel a particular sympathy with the artificial joys or sorrows of which he is the witness. This condition of his mind is called the theatrical illusion” (Jacob-Jenkins, An Octoroon 5; compare Boucicault, “Art” 43–44). Jacobs-Jenkins finds “the idea that you could feel something and then be aware that you’re feeling it” stimulating and “like Brecht.” Although he acknowledges the importance of both the “intellectual” faculty that “gets us through the world” and the “subconscious feeling place,” he believes it is the latter that “the theatre is obligated to” (qtd. in Bent, “Branden”). In An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins attends to both faculties. He manipulates audience engagement and critical detachment by emulating Boucicault, in pulling out all the emotional stops, and Brecht, in ironically framing and theatricalizing what we are responding to. Whenever the audience is in danger of becoming so involved in the play’s pathos or humour as to lose sight of the realities of racial politics and slavery, Jacobs-Jenkins offers an abrupt reminder, causing us to question where our sympathy lies or to cut short our laughter. As Chris Myers (who played BJJ in Soho Rep’s 2014 production) put it in an interview Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016) 293

VERNA A. FOSTER Figure 2: Wahnotee (Danny Wolohan); photo by Pavel Antonov 294 Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016)

Meta-Melodrama with Teddy Nicholas, “you’re constantly oscillating between ‘oh this fun’ and ‘oh shit just got real’” (Myers). For the first three acts of An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins follows Boucicault rather closely, though he offers up his predecessor’s lines for the audience’s critical inspection; in Act Four, however, he wrests control of the play away from Boucicault, lecturing his audience on the nature of melodrama and explicitly updating the “Sensation Scene” (47) in a shocking coup de théâtre. The changes that Jacobs-Jenkins makes to Boucicault’s text are both politically revisionist and theatrically efficient. Up to the climactic auction scene, Boucicault’s lines carry the plot, though Jacobs-Jenkins streamlines and also adds to his predecessor’s dialogue, writing new lines – and personalities – for the slaves (Pete, Dido, Minnie, and Grace) and drastically reducing the number of characters and especially the number of actors required. He eliminates Scudder and gives his photographic invention and his lines about justice in Act Four to George, confines Mrs. Peyton to her offstage bed and the slave Solon to the added discourse of the other slaves, and omits all of the white plantation owners. At the auction, the only men bidding are George/ M’Closky (the actor has to fight himself) and Captain Ratts. Jacobs-Jenkins leaves this difficulty to the ingenuity of the director to solve, possibly, he suggests, by incorporating the audience as bidders (43). Benson cautiously used this metatheatrical device, effectively implicating the audience, “as potential bidders,” in the racial attitudes of the slave owners (Levy). The doubling of George and M’Closky incidentally suggests, too, that, as far as the slaves are concerned, there is less difference between hero and villain than the white characters – and white audience members – would like to suppose. Jacobs-Jenkins makes fewest changes in the character and behaviour of the idealized Zoe, though he does give her a couple of sharp lines that are not in Boucicault and that remind us of the historical realities of the racial and social distinctions that both Octoroons depict. Zoe kicks Pete and demands, “Wake up you, silly nigger! Where’s breakfast?” (22). And in Act Five, while trying to cajole Dido into giving her poison, Zoe actually insults her by calling her “Mammy” (56), a term that Dido feels desexualizes her: “I just don’t like when people be treating me like I’m some old woman. I am not a mammy! I’m not!” (57). But mostly Jacobs-Jenkins enables the audience, if not to weep, at least to experience the pathos of Zoe’s plight and to sympathize with her, especially when she learns that she is a slave: “A slave! A slave! Is this a dream – for my brain reels with the blow? Sold! And M’Closky, my master – oh! (Falls on her knees, face in her hands)” (38–39). Jacobs-Jenkins grants this moment, an only slightly edited version of Boucicault’s lines, its full emotional force. Typically in melodrama, much of the emotional weight is carried by the actor’s tone and gestures (as well as by background music – Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016) 295

VERNA A. FOSTER Figure 3: Auction: George, Lafouche, Zoe (George Myers, Danny Wolohan, Amber Gray); photo by Pavel Antonov an onstage cello in Soho Rep’s staging) rather than by the words themselves. In Soho Rep’s production of An Octoroon, Amber Grey played Zoe straight – that is, realistically, without critical distance – receiving much praise from reviewers for her “grace and passion,” for her “heart wrenching” and “harrowing” performance (Chase; Grimm; Batuman) (see Figure 3). The other actors in the production, however, adopted the various presentational acting styles called for by Jacobs-Jenkins’s ironic treatment of their respective characters.3 Jacobs-Jenkins invites the audience to adopt a critical stance toward both Boucicault’s dialogue and his own added lines. He creates this Brechtian distance, layering his own twenty-first-century take on the play’s action over Boucicault’s nineteenth-century assumptions, through a variety of dramaturgical techniques, including “italicization” and “quotation.” Sometimes he calls for a “Beat” at the end of a line to give the audience time to think about the line’s implications. This kind of italicization occurs, for example, when George asks Zoe if they must “immolate” their lives on his aunt’s prejudice, and Zoe responds, “Yes, for I’d rather be black than ungrateful!” (31). The “Beat” after this line from Boucicault permits the audience to register the racist illogicality of Zoe’s comparison. Or when Minnie and Dido, in a passage of JacobsJenkins’s added dialogue, discuss whether or not they would “fuck” George, the “Beat” after Minnie says, “But I kind of get the feeling you don’t really get a say in the matter” (18), highlights the dramatist’s abrupt reminder of the dark reality of slavery beneath the women’s contemporary-sounding comic banter. 296 Modern Drama 59:3 (Fall 2016)

Meta-Melodrama Most obviously, Jacobs-Jenkins’s use of cross-racial casting, especially his use of a black actor in whiteface to play George/M’Closky, produces the effect of Brechtian “quotation.” The black actor is obviously presenting, or “quoting,” rather than identifying with his lines. Austin Smith (who played BJJ, G

(with Eliza Bent) about the pronunciation of the title of this play, Jacobs-Jenkins said he pronounced it like the adjective, but since he likes "punny" ti-tles, "appropriate" works as a verb as well (qtd. in Bent, "Branden"). Themat-ically, the play deals with what is "appropriate" behaviour and with the act of