Branden Jacobs-Jenkins - Appropriate/An Octoroon: Plays

Praise for Appropriate

A very fine, subversively original new play I ended up deciding I would steal something from every play that I liked, Jacobs-Jenkins says, and put those things in a play and cook the pot to see what happens. What a difference a chef makes. Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins, who is in his late twenties, honors the time-tested recipes of those who have gone before him, combining them into a crafty narrative guaranteed to hook susceptible theatergoers. But he also brings a culinary self-consciousness to the mix that makes you savor the ingredients anew, while pondering why they have dominated American theater for so long The style of Appropriate is piercingly clear, with carefully drawn characters who speak in crisp and fluid dialogue It also turns out that Appropriate is, at heart, a ghost story, in the most profound sense. The play begins in sustained darkness, as we listen to a harried, scraping musical noise that seems both eerie and utterly natural. Its the sound of cicadas, we later learn, making the calls they do every so many years just before dying. They cant help themselves. Without forcing us, this remarkable and devious play allows us to draw our own parallels with the human sound and fury that fills most of the evening.

BEN BRANTLEY, NEW YORK TIMES

Appropriate feels entirely original and upsetting in new ways It asks audiences to understand the hatred, the anger and the pathologies that evolved as a result of our racist past. Eventually the [familys] house buckles under the weight of those emotions, underscoring the metaphor. The effect is visceral, reverberating for days afterward.

JOANNE OSTROW, DENVER POST

Appropriate is a highly charged and ambitiously sprawling drama The author finds opportunities to startle us just as were settling back to enjoy the familiar spectacle of flamboyant family dysfunction Theres no denying that Jacobs-Jenkins is one of the rising stars in the American theater.

CHARLES MCNULTY, LA TIMES

Praise for An Octoroon

From Dion Boucicaults 1859 play The Octoroon, about a white Southerner who falls in love with a mixed-race woman, Jacobs-Jenkins fashioned a kind of theater-essay, whose parentheses are filled with dialogue about performing blackness, the theater as a live art, and the basic concerns that haunt the thinking mind trapped in a body thats defined by skin color, gender, or speech: life makes each of us a target for someone else. An Octoroon isnt just an alternative to the irony-free black American theater of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson; its part of itand part of many other things, too, because Jacobs-Jenkinss surrealism grows out of naturalism, the strange circumstances that make us open our mouths, hoping to be heard, even as we forget to listen. By experimenting with numerous theatrical genres in a single work, like An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins is displaying how serious he is about the form. Again and again, he poses these questions: What can the theater do, besides talk? What makes a play? Is it love?

HILTON ALS, NEW YORKER

A coruscating comedy of resolved history Strange as it seems, a work based on a terminally dated play from more than 150 years ago may turn out to be this decades most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today.

BEN BRANTLEY, NEW YORK TIMES

An Octoroon is a meta-dramatic meditation and deconstructive masterpiece Jacobs-Jenkins writes brilliantly about race in America, and the cultural legacy employed in the service of tyranny since the earliest days of this nation. He knows how to curse through stereotypes and rip apart the fault lines of representation Jacobs-Jenkins stands out because his writing lets you into the pain of his own process. His explorations feel like they flow in real time and only have been wrought at considerable personal cost to a writer. A writer who cannot help but wonder aloud if anyone profiting from such a history, however critical he or she might be, could be said to be anything other than complicit There is no smugness or surety to what we watch: An Octoroon constantly worries about sensationalism and exploitation and, especially, what it is asking actors to do. Jacobs-Jenkins knows he is asking his collaborators to trust him through their own discomfort and go to places few care to visit.

CHRIS JONES, CHICAGO TRIBUNE

If I say that this bizarrely brilliant play is the work of a thirty-two-year-old black American dramatist called Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, I am already subscribing to an idea the piece seeks to subvert: that our identities can be defined by convenient labels. Even the notion of what makes a play is up for grabs, as this tumultuous piece is both an adaptation of The Octoroon, a popular nineteenth-century melodrama by Dion Boucicault, and a postmodernist critique of it A work that is infinitely playful and deeply serious and which dazzlingly questions the nature of theatrical illusion An extraordinary play that defies categorization and that proclaims Jacobs-Jenkins as an exciting new dramatist who questions what it means to be dubbed a black playwright.

MICHAEL BILLINGTON, GUARDIAN

Plays

BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS

THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP
NEW YORK
2019

Appropriate/An Octoroon: Plays is copyright 2019
by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Appropriate, I Promise Never Again to Write Plays about Asians and An Octoroon are copyright 2019 by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Appropriate/An Octoroon: Plays is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156

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The publication of Appropriate/An Octoroon: Plays by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, through TCGs Book Program, is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Special thanks to the Vilcek Foundation for its generous support of this publication.

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