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by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Peter Hinton

Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

August 4-October 14, 2017

Zoe: “Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black — bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the flood”

The Shaw Festival is currently presenting the Canadian premiere of An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins which was awarded the Obie Award for Best New American Play in 2014.  This might be an auspicious occasion but judging from the Shaw’s production the play has been over-hyped and Peter Hinton’s direction only makes its flaws more obvious.  Despite this, the production is studded with fine performances that take the Shaw ensemble into new theatrical territory.

An Octoroon fits into the Shaw Festival’s mandate, if it can be said to have one anymore, because it is an adaptation of the 1859 melodrama The Octoroon by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault (1820-90), whose 1841 comedy London Assurance was revived by the Stratford Festival in 2006.  Although melodrama was an important genre before and during Shaw’s lifetime, the Festival has only once before mounted a classic melodrama when it staged The Silver King (1882) by Henry Arthur Jones in 1993.   The Octoroon was famous in Boucicault’s time as one of the first plays ever to treat the question of slavery in America on stage and was both popular and controversial wherever it was performed. 

Jacobs-Jenkins’s interest in the play is not in its abolitionist message.  Instead, he is intrigued by how an extreme genre like melodrama is somehow appropriate for portraying political messages even though today it is deemed outdated.  And he is fascinated by the paradox that because of prejudice at the time, all the actors playing black characters or Indians in the play had to be white and thus had to use blackface or redface. 

Before Jacobs-Jenkins’s radically abridged adaptation of the five act play begins, the playwright adds “The Art of Dramatic Composition: A Prologue” in which a black playwright named “BJJ” in the programme tells the audience how he came to write the play.  Supposedly, when undergoing therapy for continuing low-grade depression, BJJ’s therapist found that the one playwright BJJ admired was Dion Boucicault.  As part of his therapy she suggested he write an adaptation of one of Boucicault’s plays in an attempt to find the source of his depression.  Though BJJ also denies that he ever had a therapist, what we see on stage is meant to be the result.  BJJ puts on whiteface since, due to a supposed lack of willing white actors, he will play both the noble hero George Peyton and the moustache-twirling villain Jacob M’Closky. 

Yet, before the action begins, we meet a stereotypical drunken Irishman, called only the Playwright, who represents Boucicault himself.  Boucicault bemoans the state of theatre today where no one feels anything, decries his fall into obscurity and gets into a shouting match with BJJ that prefigures the push-pull between old and new that will characterize BJJ’s adaptation.  Boucicault puts on redface since, due to a supposed lack of First Nations actors, he will play the Indian Wahnotee, just as he did in the original production.

BJJ’s adaptation follows Boucicault’s plot with Boucicault’s characters and with much of Boucicault’s dialogue intact. The story tells of Terrebonne, a plantation in Louisiana.  The old master has just died and his nephew, the new master George Peyton, has just arrived from enlightened France and finds the idea of slave-owning sickening.  Peyton’s uncle’s gambling has left Terrebonne mortgaged to the hilt and its sale at auction, including all the slaves belonging to the estate, is imminent. 

To save Terrebonne all George would have to do is marry the wealthy Southern belle Dora, whose money could easily pay off the Peyton debts.  George, however, falls instantly in love with the beautiful Zoe, who also loves George but fears he will be repulsed by the fact that she is an octoroon, i.e. one-eighth black.  He is not.  In contrast, George’s nemesis M’Closky steals information that would help save Terrebonne and plans to buy the plantation along with Zoe as one of the slaves. 

The subplot involves a M’Closky’s murder of the slave boy Paul in which M’Closky frames Paul’s best friend the Indian Wahnotee for the crime.  But will anyone find the evidence to prove M’Closky’s guilt in time to prevent his other evil deeds?

Anyone who saw London Assurance at Stratford will know that Boucicault was no hack playwright.  The plot may be a typical melodramatic mortgage plot, but it is involving on its own and the play’s anti-slavery message is clear.  What grates on modern ears is how the characters frame their perception of race.  Of herself Zoe says, “Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black — bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the flood”, which, as sympathetically as it may be intended, can only sound like a white author assuming that a black character has internalized anti-black prejudice.  Boucicault has the enlightened George reject Zoe’s view of herself, but he doesn’t mind portraying black Uncle Pete as a stereotypical lazy servant and Wahnotee as a stereotypical drunken Indian.  

To heighten the comedy of the antiquated views of race and the generally more extreme forms of expression used in melodrama, Jacobs-Jenkins juxtaposes passages quoted straight from Boucicault with his own dialogue written for the characters Dido and Minnie, two house slaves, who speak in a totally contemporary street-smart style. 

The greatest failure of Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation is that it simply stops rather than follows Boucicault’s drama to the end.  The fate of Terrrebonne, of George and Zoe and of Dido and Minnie is left completely hanging.  Instead, all Jacobs-Jenkins gives us is Br’er Rabbit, who has pointlessly been hopping about between scenes, staring out into the audience.  This may be a reference to BJJ’s statement in the Prologue that even his innocent stories of talking farm animals were misinterpreted as “deconstructing African folktales”, but but it is a poor conclusion.  In addition, Jacobs-Jenkins gives us no Epilogue to parallel his Prologue so that we never discover whether BJJ’s exercise of adapting Boucicault’s play did or did not help him discover the source of his depression. 

Failing to follow Boucicault’s play to the end is especially frustrating since Boucicault wrote two endings for The Octoroon – one tragic ending for American audiences who would not wish to see a white man and a black women live happily ever after, and one happy ending for a British audience who did not have such a fear of miscegenation.  Jacobs-Jenkins could have made much about the duty of a writer to his audience and of the biased nature of the American audience, and it’s a shame he did not see fit to do so.

Compounding the unsatisfying conclusion of Jacobs-Jenkins’s play is the unsatisfying direction of Peter Hinton.  The Shaw Festival website refers to An Octoroon as a “comedy” and so does the review of the original production in the New York Times.  Jacobs-Jenkins’s method is to make us laugh at the antiquated views expressed in Boucicault’s play and then realize that our contemporaries’ views have not really changed that much.  The key is that the play is meant as a comedy whose satire also includes us as its subject.

Hinton completely misses this point and directs the play, both the portions by Jacobs-Jenkins and the portions by Boucicault, as leadenly serious when it is clear, especially in the deliberately anachronistic lingo of Dido and Minnie, that Jacobs-Jenkins is aiming at humour.  Hinton is so concerned with being politically correct he doesn’t seem to understand the playwright’s satiric strategy.  Laughter at  Jacobs-Jenkins’s deliberate humour and at Boucicault’s melodrama gives the play its energy.  By directing both so earnestly, Hinton succeeds in making the evening deadly dull.  Since Hinton doesn’t understand how to direct melodramatic acting, those scenes never succeed as satire and since he does not direct the Dido-Minnie scenes to contrast with them the humour of the clash of the two styles never comes out. 

Yet, given the huge obstacles of an seemingly unfinished play and uninsightful direction, much of the cast give surprisingly committed performances.  Chief among these is the terrific performance of André Sills in the triple role of BJJ, George and M’Closky.  As BJJ he shows us a man full of anger both at the world, his therapist and at himself.  Sills is the only member of the cast to understand how to act in melodrama.  He makes the contrast between George and M’Closky as extreme as can be in voice, gesture and movement.  He brings each character to the brink of caricature, especially the whip-snapping M’Closky, but allows us to see them as an exaggerated version of reality rather than letting them fall into fantasy.  The height of the play is when Sills has to appear as both characters simultaneously, literally split in half with costuming and makeup to do so, and has furious debates with himself and even a knock-down, drag-out fight.  After seeing this, you will be convinced that there is no role Sills cannot play well.

Vanessa Sears has pitched her performance halfway between the melodramatic and the realistic but lends so much sincerity to the character of Zoe she immediately wins our sympathy.  Lisa Berry and Kiera Sangster are a great pair as Dido and Minnie, with Berry acting the straight man for the joker Sangster.  Minnie’s lines are hilarious and Sangster delivers them with real “yo, girl” panache. Unfortunately, he has Berry’s Dido express so much realistic concern for what Minnie says that we merely smile, if that, when we should be laughing out loud.

Patrick McManus radically distinguishes his three roles – the garrulous drunken Irishman, the taciturn drunken Indian and the unsentimental auctioneer Lafouche – although he plays all three in a realistic mode.  Diana Donnelly’s role as the patently scheming Dora could have been very funny except that neither Donnelly nor Hinton are able to bring out the humour in the character.  Ryan Cunningham is quite effective as the slave boy Paul, but he goes way over the top as the old plantation slave Uncle Pete.  

Other than the acting itself, a key sign that Hinton does not understand the radical humour of the play is the lugubrious sensitive but original music of Ryan deSouza which would much better serve a tragedy by Ibsen that a boisterous melodrama.

By the end of Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, we think that the Festival could simply have presented Boucicault’s original drama, with black-, white- and redface or with colour-blind casting, and allowed the ironies of what we hear from the 1859 of the play resonate or grate on our 21st-century sensibilities.  The discussion such a production would provoke both about melodrama and about the representation of race would be as much or more than what Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation seeks.

Since the likelihood of any theatre daring to take the risk of staging Boucicault’s The Octoroon is so low, Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation will surely be the only way most audiences will ever have to experiencing Boucicault’s historically important play on stage.  If only Jacobs-Jenkins’s had given his adaptation a satisfying conclusion and if only Hinton had understood the play’s humour, this production, driven by Sills’s tremendous performance, might have inspired rather than dulled the senses. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Diana Donnelly as Dora and André Sills as M’Closky; Lisa Berry as Dido, Kiera Sangster as Minnie, Diana Donnelly as Dora, André Sills as George and Ryan Cunningham as Uncle Pete; Ryan Cunningham as Uncle Pete, Starr Domingue as Grace and André Sills as George and M’Closky. ©2017 David Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.