Walking on a stage covered with cotton balls is a tricky business. It’s all too easy to slip into a pratfall. And forget about running or dancing or hopping like a bunny, as the characters sometimes unwisely attempt in “An Octoroon,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s coruscating comedy of unresolved history, which opened on Thursday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn.
But it feels right that the people occupying this production, first seen last year at Soho Rep, should be required to move on what might be called terra infirma. For Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins has deliberately built his play on slippery foundations, the kind likely to trip up any dramatist, performer or theatergoer.
“An Octoroon,” you see, is all about race in these United States, as it was and is and unfortunately probably shall be for a considerable time. That’s race as a subject that no one can get a comfortable hold on.
Directed by Sarah Benson, in a style that perfectly matches its mutating content, “An Octoroon” is a shrewdly awkward riff on Dion Boucicault’s “The Octoroon” (notice the change in article), a 19th-century chestnut about illicit interracial love. Boucicault’s melodrama was a great hit in its day but is now almost never performed, except possibly as a camp diversion for private amusement.
Its story, of a romantic plantation owner and the girl of mixed race he adores, was set in the Old South — the land of cotton, a kingdom built on the labor of African slaves. Old times there, it seems, are not forgotten at all.
When it opened in May to ecstatic reviews, “An Octoroon” became one of the town’s hottest tickets. An Obie award winner, it seemed to confirm the reputation of its author as one of this country’s most original and illuminating writers about race. There was excitement when it was announced that Theater for a New Audience would be restaging Ms. Benson’s Soho Rep production, but also a certain apprehension.
Unorthodox, highly stylized plays on incendiary topics tend to have limited shelf lives, especially when they’re wrenched out of their birthplaces. Perhaps “An Octoroon” was best suited to a rough-edged performance in a tiny theater. Besides, it was being almost entirely recast for the new production, and there was concern that the original chemistry might evaporate.
Yet in its current incarnation, “An Octoroon” feels even richer and more resonant than it did before, both funnier and more profoundly tragic. Strange as it seems, a work based on a terminally dated play from more than 150 years ago may turn out to be this decade’s most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today.
Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins’s central point here — as it was in his “Neighbors” and “Appropriate” — is that we don’t even have the vocabulary to discuss what continues to divide Americans according to skin color. The debate is not, for starters, simply a matter of black and white. (An octoroon, just so you know, is a person whose ancestry is one-eighth black; that fraction is enough to doom the play’s title character, played by the exquisite Amber Gray.)
Still, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being “a black playwright,” without knowing exactly what that means. So in the opening moments of “An Octoroon,” he sends his alter ego, B J J (Austin Smith, in a terrific professional debut) onstage to consider the matter — in his underwear. It is a fitting prologue for a play that perpetually examines itself, from every possible angle, and yet manages to transform self-consciousness from something that paralyzes into something that propels.
B J J isn’t the only undressed playwright onstage for long. He is joined by a cranky, drunken Boucicault (Haynes Thigpen), who is annoyed by how completely his star has sunk since his death some hundred years ago.
But the show must go on, and the writers, it seems, are short on actors, for reasons political as well as practical. So B J J puts on whiteface, the better to portray both the hero (the idealistic young heir to a plantation) and villain (a wicked, lust-ridden, newly rich overseer). Since Boucicault will be playing an American Indian, he slaps on redface. And his assistant (Ian Lassiter), who looks rather like a Native American, blackens up to embody both an old family retainer and an addlebrained boy slave.
From the get-go, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins is cannily exploiting the assumption of false identity that is the starting point for theater, to make us question who is who or who is what. The detailed variations on this theme multiply into dizziness.
For instance, a white baby doll, standing in for an infant slave, is given a partly blacked-up face. And try to guess who that is dressed up as a Beatrix Potter-style rabbit. (Psst, it could well be Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins himself.)
The acting swings wildly in technique, from the grotesque (and comically inspired) affectedness of Mary Wiseman as a snooty Southern belle to the wrenching sincerity of Ms. Gray, who created the title role at Soho Rep. And then the female house servants — pricelessly played by Maechi Aharanwa, Pascale Armand and Danielle Davenport — describe life as 19th-century chattel in the manner of 21st-century African-American girlfriends gossiping. The implicit contrast is hilarious, and harrowing.
This production — designed with bountiful imagination by Mimi Lien (set), Wade Laboissonniere (costumes), Matt Frey (lighting) and Matt Tierney (sound) — repeatedly calls attention to its own artifice. The show pauses to note how the theater used to manipulate its audiences with jerry-built plots and plot-hole-covering sensationalism.
It then manipulates us by just such means, including one truly upsetting video projection toward the end. Yet as the production keeps switching approaches, it also finds inklings of validity in each one, including that of Boucicault’s original script.
It uses satire and archival re-creation, jolting anachronisms and subliminally seductive music (performed by the cellist Lester St. Louis) to try to get at its horrible, elusive center: the imponderably far-reaching legacy of American slavery.
“An Octoroon,” quite appropriately, ends in the dark. But the questions it never stops posing light up a very murky night.
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