SDA’s ‘An Octoroon’ is spirited, audacious


Photo from USC School of Dramatic Arts

Multicolored lights engulf the room. A dance breaks out onstage as Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” blasts in the background. Challenging theatrical norms from the very beginning, this sequence opens into a moving tale about American slavery.

The School of Dramatic Arts put on a production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, a satirical yet harshly real examination of modern race relations through a 19th-century lens. Directed by Anita Dashiell-Sparks, the sold-out show kicked off the drama production season, running from Sept. 28 to Oct. 1 at the McClintock Theatre.

The central purpose of An Octoroon — to deconstruct human behavior as it relates to ethnicity and culture — is relatively straightforward, but to unpack the plot of the play is a challenge in itself. The production begins with a speech from Jacobs-Jenkins (Rahjul Young) himself, who confesses his struggles to grasp what it means to be a black playwright in society. Another playwright (Dominic Piccinini), this one white, steps into the scene, belittling his problems. This promptly begins an intense, uncomfortable swearing match between the two artists.

Jacobs-Jenkins then shifts the focus to a Louisiana plantation in 1859. George (Rahjul Young), heir to the Terrebonne Plantation, falls in love with Zoe (Cherie Carter), the daughter of George’s uncle and a slave. Although Zoe has lived a relatively privileged life growing up in the house with a proper education, she acknowledges that she and George cannot be together due to the fact that she is an “octoroon,” or a person who is one-eighth black. The rest of the play deals with the damaging emotional implications of the pair’s star-crossed love, as well as the stories of the plantation’s humorously eccentric group of slaves.

As mentioned before, the production does justice to the complexities of what it means to be black in a white-dominated world. Instead of asking how we as a society — or in this case, an audience — can heal the discord between different ethnic identities, Jacobs-Jenkins questions whether such a social issue is even solvable.

Such issues are approached in a skillfully unorthodox fashion. Acknowledging that we fundamentally dismantle and analyze racial stereotypes by placing ourselves in the position of the “other,” the production controversially uses the elements of “whiteface,” “redface” and “blackface” on characters George, Wahnotee (Dominic Piccinini) and Pete (Cattien Le), respectively.

“The thing that struck me so profoundly was that none of the actors were putting on the face of the culture they identify with,” Dashiell-Sparks said. “To have the transformation take place in front of the audience’s eyes and the other characters’ eyes was very important.”    

Another interesting production choice was, in fact, not an element of the story at all. The seats were arranged in a manner reminiscent of a tennis match, with two crowds of spectators facing each other, the play’s action separating them. As a result, discomfort was created as audience members’ reactions to the play’s hot-button topics were monitored as closely as the actors themselves.

“The audience being able to be a reflective mirror for each other, sitting across from each other in this gallery setup, was so crucial along the themes of accountability and what it means to bear witness to the things that are occurring,” Dashiell-Sparks said. “Do we take action? Do we speak? Do we remain silent? And why?”

However, this tension was expertly broken up by the comedy embedded in the play’s dialogue. For instance, after finding out that the rest of the slaves fled the plantation without her, sassy servant Minnie (Julissa Merius) remarks, “I did not wake up thinkin’ this was where my day was gonna go.” She later dresses up in gold stilettos to impress the buyers at a slave auction, gloating to fellow servant Grace (Gabrielle Rosser), who earlier called her “ghetto.” The production makes use of numerous references to modern culture to hint at the immediacy of the play’s themes, as evidenced by the use of West’s song. 

“One of the things that helped us to be inside those heavy themes was the irony, the wit, the satire,” Dashiell-Sparks said. “It was almost like the playwright gave us a gift of that space of play and interaction and levity to dive into the harshness and gritty realities of what it was like to live in these conditions.”

But what truly communicates these messages is the absence of the fourth wall. Characters frequently involve audience members in their dilemmas, even physically moving them onstage to be a part of the production themselves. In a sense, the lessons of the play are not preached; they are experienced.

“I think [breaking down the fourth wall] was very impactful because you as an audience member are a participant in the story as it is unfolding,” Dashiell-Sparks said. “It constantly forces us to take down our boundaries and to break down our bias, our prejudice. It allows us to be uncomfortable and understand why we are uncomfortable in any given moment in the play.”

Boldly unapologetic and hilarious in its own right, An Octoroon is a nuanced, introspective production that forces people to consider how they make judgments, understand and love each other. In a nutshell, as a disembodied narrator announced in closing, “the whole point of this thing was to make you feel something.” And that it did.