Nineteenth Century American theatre on a Twenty-First Century Stage

The cast of An Octoroon is fabulous — funny, sharp, imaginative, courageous.  This company is tight, it transforms its delightful costumes into normal apparel, and much of the play is very funny except when it’s suddenly appalling.   Mind you, the horror has been there all the while. An Octoroon is effective.  Then what about it irks me so?

Comedy is hard, and particularly terrifying when it’s about serious subjects.  Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play, while a hit last year at SoHo Rep and receiving accolades this year in a new production with Theatre for a New Audience at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, is to me a brilliantly executed (cheers to director Sarah Benson and the aforementioned cast) schoolroom exercise in theory, with a cast that makes it appear complete when it’s not done baking yet.  It works much of the time until the author interrupts to tell us how clever he is, and how he’s manipulating us. Melodrama is supposed to make us feel, not think, but playwright Jacobs-Jenkins wants both.  I don’t mind a good manipulator, and this play has plenty of points to make, in its beginning in the present leading to the play within the play.  The playwright tells us this play is about race and race relations and morality. And yes, doing any version of An or The Octoroon will generate passions surrounding those subjects.  The problem is that the playwright’s attempts at cleverness interrupt the play, stopping the action and extending what should have been a longish one act to an overlong two act.

Jacobs-Jenkins’ fascination with mid-nineteenth century melodrama, particularly a play by Dian Foucicault, is the basis on which he stages the issues he wishes to discuss in this play.  The 19^th century playwright Foucicault appears to be a character in the play within the play, along with the narrator/playwright of this play. Yes, it’s that confusing.  The opening of the evening immediately distanced me from it when the playwright’s stand-in opens the play with a conversation between said playwright and his therapist.  Luckily it’s not actually Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins, but rather the delightful newcomer Austin Smith, who plays the playwright in the present, a romantic hero visiting a plantation in the melodrama (George), as well as the mustachioed white villain of the piece (M’Closky). Oh yes, he’s in whiteface for most of the evening.  Brilliant.

Foucicault’s play was called “The Octoroon,” which is a person who is 1/8 black. The new play is called “An Octoroon,” but it is not about a woman who is 1/8 black.  It is about us, white people, black people, what happened then, what’s not all that different now.  The title character, Zoe, is beautifully portrayed by Amber Gray, who sings, and laughs, and loves, and cries and leaves us hanging – and caring.  During a melodrama, the audience may care about its characters, but not three weeks later.  Ms. Gray’s “Zoe” still follows me around.  I want to know what happened.  Jacobs-Jenkins doesn’t wring the last tear out of us – he is unusually and wisely silent about her fate.  Her last several scenes, when her life as a free woman is torn apart as she’s sold as a slave, are just devastating to her and to us.

Mary Wiseman as Dora and Austin Smith as George in An Octoroon.  Photo Credit: Gerry Goodstein

Except in the narrative breaks where Jacobs-Jenkins makes his characters instruct us as to the form of melodrama and his intent with his version of the play, the story ranges from funny to heartbreaking, as do the performances by the brittle yet glittering Mary Wiseman as Dora, a southern heiress who loves George; Ian Lassiter in multiple roles of various races; Maechi Aharanwa and Pascale Armand as battling and loving Minnie and Dido, the funniest out-of-time house slaves you can’t even imagine; Haynes Thigpen as Foucicault and a devoted but sometimes drunken Indian brave; and Danielle Davenport as the desperate field slave Grace.  Yes, these are all dreadful stereotypes brought to glowing life by this fine cast.

In addition to the actors, who all sing with warmth and/or gusto, the evening is hauntingly accompanied by Lester St. Louis on cello. 

The play had memorable staging and shocks, but some of them were of the sort that hit the audience over the head with a bat, which takes us out of the play and therefore we stop trusting our responses to the story before us.  If Jacobs-Jenkins must bracket his play with lectures, he would be best advised to cut them down and let the actors play on our heartstrings and manipulate us more subtly.

Some stage pictures were horrifying, some silly, and some unspeakably lovely, courtesy Mimi Lien’s scenic design and Matt Frey’s lighting design.

Although I have issues with some of Jacobs-Jenkins more obvious techniques, still I came away from An Octoroon moved and glad to have seen it.  I look forward to Jacobs-Jenkins’ maturation as a playwright.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to prepare for an ever busier theatre season.

9 to 5 + Trickster = Disappointing

This month the Women’s Project is putting on an experimental play — experimental in that it has multiple playwrights and directors creating it, rather like the large writing staffs of television sitcoms.  Not surprisingly, that’s what We Play for the Gods seemed like, except that it lacked a laugh track.  The laughs, chuckles, even giggles, were provided by a living audience.  However, in terms of the evening’s entertainment meeting the barest structural elements needed for a “play,” well: a beginning (none), middle (muddle), and end (still waiting). 

(C) 2012 Women's Project

The actors in We Play for the Gods are valiant creatures, so talented they make this play appear to work. Alas, it does not.  Is it a case of too many cooks?

As the audience enters the Cherry Lane Theatre, a woman sounding vaguely like a BBC Newscaster makes real and unreal announcements, asking (so discreetly) for donations for the Women’s Project in a soothing voice.  It’s rather difficult, therefore, to know when the play starts, since the same voice apparently proceeds as a radio broadcaster, awakening Simi, aptly described as a dysfunctional scientist.  Simi is well played with quiet pain and passion by Amber Gray.  A clip-clopping is heard — happily not a latecomer coming down the aisle but rather Annie Golden as Marla, office manager/administrative assistant/what have you for decades at the May Institute, “a world-renowned research institute dedicated entirely to the study of human behavior….” and so on.  Marla is experienced and practical, broken, used up.  Next in is Susan, a temp whom you just know will be arty. She’s terrified, oddly dressed for corporate America, and as we come to learn, a poet.  With an MFA, no less.  Irene Sofia Lucio plays this lost young woman beautifully, as Susan tries desperately to fit in, using her powerful “confident” voice that fools no one.  Lisa is the boss, perhaps once a scientist but now a brusque, tightly wound fund-raising executive with a repressive and probably vulgarian (male of course) boss above her.  She is bound to break into sharp shards before the evening is out, based upon this pitch perfect performance by Erika Rolfsrud.  And finally, the uninvited guest, a trickster “god” in blue, messing with everybody as if their real lives weren’t bad enough.  This mad woman, called the Provocatrix in the program, is played irreverently by Alexandra Henrikson.

Left to Right:  Erika Rolfsrud, Amber Gray, Alexandra Henrikson, Irene Sofia Lucio, and Annie Golden

These five dauntless women work very well together onstage and make us almost care. 

Was the point to show us that disparate desperate people are forced in our society (as if it’s different in any other) to work together in a place where nobody wins, nobody thrives, no one survives?  Or is it about “Trix,” the blue bitch who comes by to throw wrenches, high winds, and seagulls into the works to destroy what little these people have.

Only Susan, the frustrated poet — who seems to believe the Trickster may be her mischievous, miserably mean muse — seems to accomplish anything by the end of the play.  Simi appears to have gone quite over the edge, and Lisa and Marla will live on through Scotch. 

Yes, the Trickster god is not beneficent.  Nevertheless, just what was the point?  What we have here are four interesting characters in search of a story.  If those staff writers — seven playwrights, four directors, three producers — can find one, they may be able to write a play instead of a sitcom episode about working women, a derogatory phrase if ever this working woman has heard one. 

The Women's Project's latest project was disappointing.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to search the Internet for episodes of Murphy Brown.