An Octoroon

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2015

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Act II

Acts III-V

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Performing Constructions of Race

As soon as he steps on stage in the Prologue, BJJ introduces himself as a “Black playwright,” though he also asserts that he does not know what this term means. Though Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s work often explores constructions of race and racism as an ongoing theme, and this is particularly true with An Octoroon, the implication is that he is never sure how to define the expectations that come with the label “Black playwright.” Faced with the conundrum of finding no white male actors willing to perform in such an unfashionably melodramatic play, BJJ takes on the roles of both the white protagonist and the white villain, for which he puts on whiteface makeup. Whiteface, which certainly doesn’t produce the same cultural gut-punch as the blackface that was used in the original Boucicault melodrama, serves as a reminder of race as a constructed set of social hierarchies.

Jacobs-Jenkins plays with the visibility and invisibility of race, commenting on how race can often be difficult to quantify or definitively identify while also having immense material consequences. Whereas whiteness is often treated as invisible, or as the racial norm or default, white makeup on a Black actor makes it forcefully visible. Most of the male characters are played by BJJ, the Playwright, or the Assistant, and nearly all these characters require the actors to perform a race other than their own. With this, race becomes a matter of performance, constructed onstage on top of bodies without the corresponding lived experience of their characters’ races. In a sense, these racial identities are treated as equally artificial and performative—a gesture that is the precise opposite of minstrelsy, which singles out Blackness to be performed and lampooned by actors who are always presumptively white.

An Octoroon picks apart the stereotypical minstrel show tropes that make up the Black characters in The Octoroon and were typical of performances of Blackness on the antebellum stage. Even Black characters in melodrama, which required more depth than minstrelsy, were simplified into these character types and spoke in an exaggerated dialect that had to be written phonetically to facilitate the awkward pronunciations. Even when Black actors began to perform in minstrel shows, they had to wear blackface and speak in over-the-top dialect, often clowning for comical characters. The Black characters in An Octoroon are either played by the Assistant, who is Indian—which might mean either Indigenous or from India—or by Black women. When interacting with white characters, they all put on similar performances of Blackness that align with tropes of minstrelsy. When the Black characters are in private, they demonstrate code-switching, in which they stop performing white expectations of Blackness and instead speak to each other in contemporary Black vernacular.

At the center of the play’s enormous racial chaos is Zoe, who is played by a white or otherwise light-skinned actress. Zoe is a site of racial contention in the play, as she is white enough for George to fall for her, but too Black to marry him. In An Octoroon, Zoe doesn’t code-switch and maintains the mannerisms and speech patterns of a woman who has been raised and educated as if she were white. Zoe’s character raises the question of racial visibility and how race has historically been constructed as a physically identifiable quality, particularly when unseen bloodline determined one’s freedom or enslavement.

Theatrical Convention and Racial Representation

The Prologue, in which BJJ talks to the audience about his decision to adapt The Octoroon, sets up the play’s metatheatrical framework: The play is self-consciously theatrical and reminds the audience that they are watching a play rather than encouraging them to become absorbed and suspend disbelief. In thus engaging explicitly with the conventions of theater, Jacobs-Jenkins creates a space to consider how those conventions have been deployed to reproduce racist mythologies and how they can be repurposed to dismantle those same mythologies.

The title of the Prologue, “The Art of Dramatic Composition,” is taken from Boucicault’s 1878 essay by the same title, in which he instructs readers on his approach to playwriting and melodramatic dramaturgy. Boucicault explains that drama is composed of two parts: “The action which causes suffering, and the persons who suffer” (Boucicault, Dion. “The Art of Dramatic Composition.” The North American Review, 1878, vol. 126, no. 260, pp. 40-52), and the purpose of dramatic composition is to make the audience feel pleasure. Furthermore, Boucicault dictates that action must be performed for the audience rather than described, and narrators are anti-dramatic. In other words, metatheatricality and melodrama are on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of audience immersion and willing suspension of disbelief.

However, to further complicate the matter, the metatheatrical framework of An Octoroon is also theatrical, as the BJJ onstage, even as performed in the original production, isn’t the actual playwright. He’s a character created by the playwright and performed by an actor. Moreover, his story about his therapist suggesting that he adapt the play is immediately undermined when BJJ admits that he doesn’t have a therapist, although he continues to describe their fabricated conversation. Therefore, there are many layers of metatheatricality, of the suffering and the sufferers, that can’t necessarily be separated from theatricality and performance.

When BJJ addresses the audience in the Prologue, he expresses an honest intention to adapt The Octoroon as a play that he admires. By speaking directly to the audience about his personal struggles and mental health, BJJ creates a sense of vulnerability and therefore truthfulness, especially when juxtaposed with the highly sensationalized aesthetics of melodrama. He even gives Boucicault a voice in the play—though the relationship between the two playwrights is initially antagonistic, it soon becomes collaborative as they work together to overcome the material limitations of the production. And rather than deconstructing and exposing the glaring issues of racial representation in the original melodrama with a wink and a nod, Jacobs-Jenkins presents them through problems and impossibilities in an earnest production. He puts on whiteface to ostensibly solve the problem of having no white male actors—a problem that no professional production has ever had—with the result of satirizing the blackface in the original as if by accident. He has Black actors speaking in modern AAVE as a supposed concession due to a gap in the historical record.

His stage directions add a metatheatrical layer, as they create a space where the playwright intellectualizes these problems and raises questions out of a feigned uncertainty, worrying at one point that the play might be “too Brechtian” (43). In the fourth act, which is the climactic moment in melodrama, BJJ and the Playwright do exactly what Boucicault’s essay directs them not to do: They describe the action. By reducing the centerpiece spectacle to words, Jacobs-Jenkins encourages audiences to think about the issues presented rather than becoming immersed in special effects.

De-Idealizing Life on the Plantation

One of the ways that minstrel shows were insidious in their representation of slavery was by perpetuating the myth that enslaved people were happy and loved their lives on the plantation. While some enslavers may have been more humane than others, there was no version of slavery that was pleasant or happy. For an enslaved person, performing happiness was a survival tactic. Translated into minstrelsy and melodrama, that cheerfulness was performed by white actors in blackface who were constructing a fantasy of enslaved life in the national imaginary.

Boucicault’s The Octoroon is frequently described as an abolitionist play, debuting only a few years after the Civil War and piggybacking on the style and success of the enormous number of adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a deliberately abolitionist novel that became a massive cultural phenomenon. But Boucicault maintained that the play was not meant to take a stance for or against slavery. Those who read an abolitionist message into the play usually cite the way Zoe is written to elicit sympathy for her plight, which is caused entirely by slavery and anti-Black laws. Moreover, beating or killing enslaved people is shown as wrong. They’re the actions of a villain, as is buying a nearly-but-not-quite-white enslaved woman for sexual purposes. But through all of that, slavery isn’t shown as wrong. McClosky is presented as villainous not because he is an enslaver but because he is an especially cruel enslaver, just as the play’s hero, George, is a “benevolent” enslaver. The happy part of the happy-tragic ending is that Terrebonne will keep its enslaved people, as the plantation is depicted as a place where they are happy. Notably, there were no Black people involved in the creation of this depiction.

In An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins challenges the original play’s portrayal of happy enslaved people by showing the cracks in the performance. Boucicault’s Act I begins with Pete chasing away a bunch of enslaved children before launching into the exposition about the white people’s money problems. Jacobs-Jenkins’s Act I opens with Minnie and Dido, two enslaved women who are played by Black actors rather than white actors in blackface. Their conversation is private, and they speak frankly about the Peytons and the late Judge Peyton’s tendency to rape lighter-skinned enslaved women. In the original melodrama, Zoe is so perfect and loveable that even Mrs. Peyton embraced her as her own, and no one acknowledges that Zoe’s mother was raped by Judge Peyton.

But Minnie and Dido know that rape is a common part of enslaved life. Throughout the play, they gossip about whose babies have been sold and why trying to escape is a bad idea—not because they don’t want to escape, but because they are so deep in the South that they are certain they would end up killed. Pete performs a caricatured dialect and obsequious attitude for George and Dora, yelling at and insulting the other enslaved people while praising Terrebonne and the Peytons. But by Act III, when Pete is on the auction block, his exterior cracks. After attempting a humiliating song and dance to appeal to bidders, he suddenly drops the accent and declares that he’s sick of playing this role.