![]() ![]() The style is amusing for a few minutes, annoying after half-an-hour, and outright unbearable at the play’s current running length. ![]() Yes, the presentation style of old plays was overwrought, that’s why having to sit through it for 2 ½ interminable hours is an unbearable experience. For Jacobs-Jenkins, it means expecting the audience to laugh at jokes only he thinks are funny. For Luna Malbroux, that meant putting on a show that would have done better in sketch form, but falls apart when strung together with a flimsy narrative. Both productions – both scripts – are so eager to shout to the rooftops that they don’t care if they’re understood they just throw things at the wall to see if they stick. And down the rabbit hole we go…Īs I mentioned in my recent review of FaultLine’s How to be A White Man, there are some genuinely good ideas to be found, but the whole thing lacks focus. A White man’s play about Black people restaged by a Black playwright. He’s assisted in his endeavor by Boucicault himself, suddenly appearing in our time and acting in full redface.Īs a stage suddenly descends and a backdrop appears, the older play is staged with all of its classic accoutrements, including scenery-chewing performances and live accompaniment by a pianist dressed as Br’er Rabbit. In an attempt to explore the idea of where someone like him fits into his chosen art form, he decides to put on Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon, with BJJ performing both of the male leads in full whiteface. Even his White shrink is startled by the idea that he’d have such thoughts. He tells us why he’s frustrated with what being “a Black playwright” means to White people. On walks BJJ, adorned in nothing but his undergarments. Like Lee with Bamboozled, Jacobs-Jenkins is all too eager to pat himself on the back for An Octoroon “daring” to show blackface in a contemporary setting, but doesn’t have enough awareness to fully explore its modern equivalents.Īnd that’s too bad, because the few-and-far-between moments when the play does just that, it shows sparks of pure brilliance. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s still relevant: the reason I love Boondocks creator Aaron MacGruder’s infamous scathing review (and subsequent follow-up comments) of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is because MacGruder knows that it isn’t enough to simply show that you’ve heard of a topic if you’re going to say something about it you have to say something important. That’s what Jacobs-Jenkins promises to do with An Octoroon, his “post-modern” take on Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon, but the contemporary playwright (a Black man) is unable to fulfill his part of the bargain. This prologue hints at a production we audience members will never see: one that we were promised but never got one that turns the damaging practices Vaudevillian blackface and cultural appropriate on their heads as it takes them to task one that’s capable of taking a “classic” work – a work supposedly sympathetic toward an oppressed people – viewing it through a contemporary lens, and revealing its inherent hypocrisies. This scene is soon followed by one of Irish playwright Dion Boucicault at the table applying redface as Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” plays. As a Black man myself, I’ve always gotten a wonderfully Schadenfreude-esque glee from watching supposedly-enlightened White people squirm when suddenly confronted by art based on Black rage. Granted, there was at least one moment when the majority of the audience was shocked: it was near the beginning, when BJJ (avatar of playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, played by Lance Gardner) sits at a make-up table to apply “whiteface” (and I mean really white) as Menace Clan’s “Kill Whitey” blasts over the theatre speakers. Not to see if they were shocked, not to see if they were angry, but to see if anyone else was as bored as I was. ![]() What was different this time was that during the performance I found myself scanning the faces of the audience for reactions to the spectacle we were watching. It’s something I’m quite used to, so I didn’t dwell on it, no matter how much it disappoints me. Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to LoveĪs I took my seat in Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Stage, the first thing I noticed was that I was only one-of-a-handful of Black faces in the audience. “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” By CharlesAndHisTypewriter on Sunday, 2 July, 2017 ![]()
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