'An Octoroon' and 'The Liquid Plain'

At first I thought it was inspired by the success of Twelve Years a Slave, last year’s Oscar-winning film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, followed by this year’s Selma, with its powerful performance by David Oyelowo. But the inception of these plays predates these Hollywood blockbusters. No matter — racism in this country today and its origins in American slavery is apparently on everyone’s mind, if the theater is any reflection of the zeitgeist (and it should be).

Of the playwrights — I count at least four — tackling the topic of racism and American history this season, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has undoubtedly taken the most unorthodox, attention-getting approach. His new play An Octoroon, recently at the Theatre for a New Audience, is a crazy concoction of just about every dramatic form you can think of. It’s so wildly entertaining and hyper-theatrical that you forget he’s writing about the same topic (slavery) that’s being treated with such solemnity and reverence by other playwrights this season.

A black playwright, whatever that means

Jacobs-Jenkins shocks us by coming out on stage at the top of the show to introduce himself (actually, it’s an actor playing him, but never mind, the effect is completely disarming). “Hi, I’m a black playwright, whatever that means,” he says, and we’re already captivated (oh, I forgot to say, he’s in his underwear). Apologetically, he explains that his therapist has encouraged him to fulfill his dream — namely, to adapt an 1859 melodrama about slavery called The Octoroon by an Irish writer named Dion Boucicault and to play a part in it himself.

Thereupon we descend down the playwright’s rabbit hole, through the looking glass, into a loopy meta-theatrical world where black actors put on white face, white actors put on red face, and racially mixed actors put on black face to reenact scenes from Boucicault’s melodrama. Set in the Civil War-era South, it features forbidden love between races, slave auctions, runaways, exploding steamboats, and more.

Absurdity and futility

Have I lost you already? I was lost, too, at first. But when I finally sat back and stopped trying to make sense of it — that’s when it made complete sense. Jacobs-Jenkins is inviting us to laugh at the absurdity of slavery — and the futility of recounting that chapter in American history at this point. We don’t yet know how to tell the story, he’s saying, so for the time being we may as well laugh at our inability to do so, together. And he succeeds.

He makes us laugh at the tradition of depicting race in the theater, where black actors put on white face and vice versa. He makes us laugh at slavery itself, with slave girls speaking in 21st-century urban vernacular while wading across a stage knee-deep in cotton balls. Every once in a while a large man with a giant rubber rabbit’s head sneaks across the stage and disappears (rumor has it that it’s Jacobs-Jenkins himself). The playwright is playing with us.

At one point toward the end of the melodrama, the backstage wall collapses, blowing thousands of cotton balls into the shocked faces of the audience. Next, three actors come on stage, debating how to end the play, while horrific photos of lynchings are suddenly projected on the huge upstage screen. Director Sarah Benson has created a theatrical spectacle with Jacobs-Jenkins’s vision and directs her splendid eight-member ensemble on Mimi Lien’s sensational set, where you never know what’s going to happen next — a suitable metaphor for our violent history.

Mother, daughter, ghost

Over at the Signature Theatre, playwright Naomi Wallace draws from another chapter in the history of American slavery. Set in 1791 and 1837 on the docks of Bristol, Rhode Island, The Liquid Plain tells the story of runaway slave Adjua (Part I) and her daughter (Part II), and their struggles for freedom and identity. Commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of their American Revolution cycle, Wallace and her cast give voice to the countless nameless, forgotten souls (runaways, sailors, sea captains) upon whose backs American history was built. Kwame Kwei-Armah directs this melodrama with theatrical flair. The ghostly image of Adjua’s younger sister, thrown into the sea by a cruel slave ship captain, reappears throughout the play, a haunting reminder of slavery’s unforgivable injustices.

Wallace’s title, The Liquid Plain, comes from a poem written by Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American poet, who was transported on a slave ship to America in the late 1700s and sold to the Wheatley family in Boston. By gracing her play with Wheatley’s verse, Wallace is honoring all those forgotten souls whom we are remembering today in the American theater.

Elsewhere in New York . . .

Meanwhile, the Public Theatre has made two memorable contributions this season on the subject of slavery and American history. Suzan-Lori Parks’s moving Father Comes Home from the Wars Parts I, II, and III at the Public Theater earlier this fall is the first installment of a nine-part historical epic about a slave named Hero. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s sensational new musical Hamilton reminds us that our forefathers were far from saints: Washington and Jefferson were slave-owners, which Miranda underscores by casting African-American actors to play the roles of these two presidents.