Octoroon, An

An Octoroon obviously means to be a significant statement on race in America, today and throughout its history, but the play comes over mostly as a satire on a 19th Century melodrama deconstructed and reconstructed for the 21st Century. In its staging at Wilma Theater, the play is also a deconstruction of the deconstruction, trying to be clever multifacetedly but putting over not more than a few serious points. Still, one can’t help admire director Joanna Settle for attempting to fill a space larger than either of two theaters that debuted the play in New York and maintain a close relationship with the audience.

Based on Dion Boucicault’s play Octoroon, its successor uses Boucicault’s plot of the tragedy of a young woman, Zoe, who is in mutual love with George, who has inherited a plantation. They cannot marry because she is a 1/8th Negro of the deceased owner, and when the wicked villain M’Closky comes to foreclose on the property, she stands to be sold as a slave -- to him.

There’s an attempt by white aristocrat Dora, who loves George, to sell her plantation and save his. M’Closky kills a slave boy Paul, and stops a letter that would help George keep his land and prove Zoe’s father had freed her. An Indian, Wahnotee, and the taking of a photograph are involved in defeating M’Closky, but Zoe will still not be able to marry George and thus, she will commit suicide.

To add to Boucicault’s complicated plot, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins throws in a Br’er Rabbit to dance and do tricks and, as a major figure in many African-American tales, to represent deconstruction of the racist social system. The new story also presents the playwright onstage as probably himself and surely as Boucicault, who’s upset that he started the whole thing and is not much regarded for having been and made a tremendous success. Racial roles get a major reversal as George, in particular, is black in white-face.

Of the two best new creations I found in Jacobs-Jenkins’s play, the first is that of three slave women who discuss the historical characters with “insider” gossip, such as George being a wanton and ineffective lover, as if they were doing contemporary chatting up. They’re also funny trying to one-up each other regarding social position or talking of being sold as moving on again. The second powerful innovation is the use of a horrible real historical picture in place of a photograph that figures prominently in the original plot.

There isn’t a poor performance in the lot on the Wilma stage, just as there isn’t much justification for the weird set except that it is a definite construction and reconstruction. There are many contradictory elements, such as the field and house servants coming out from the same platform. There’s a torn-out part of the floor that’s prominent throughout the activity but used at only one point. Why the two plantations are tiny doll houses is a mystery.

All in all, An Octoroon does not seem as powerful against racism today as Boucicault’s play was in its time. And the original play was also more powerfully feminist. I wonder if the later play will provoke as much of a follow-up creation as its predecessor in a century to come.