"An Octoroon" at Berkeley Rep.
Dion Boucicault, one of the most popular theatre writers, made melodrama. He fashioned it, in the English-speaking world, into the dominant genre of theatre in the 19th-century. His plays coincided with a quantum leap in theatre stage capabilities, resulting in highly wrought emotional dramas, with complex plots, huge sets, complex stage effects—elephants, real trains and earthquakes rattled 19th-century American theatres—, and wringed tears out of audiences’ eyes. Berkeley Rep spins Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ two-act adaptation of Boucicault’s The Octoroon as a 21st century bricolage, in two acts, a mash-up of theatrical genres, and commentary on race in America, the South, and specifically Louisiana, the setting of this 1859, pre-Civil War, spectacular, condensed onto the small stage of Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre. A far cry from Boucicault’s Winter Garden, a 2000-person venue. And mash-up is the right word, a term coined by Boucicault in this play, as Jacobs-Jenkins’ Octoroon mixes standard realism, Brechtian theatre, vaudeville, stand-up, hip-hop, ragtime, melodrama of course, and other theatrical and musical styles in an engaging, brilliantly acted, occasionally un-even work which deserves to be seen by anyone who wants to see compelling, though-provoking and extremely relevant theatre.
Jacob-Jenkins tears up the original, tosses out the fatty excess, and leaves us with a lean version with plenty of authorial interpolations. It takes the first 15 minutes of the roughly two-hours show to get through two, separate, sequences featuring actors as Jacobs-Jenkins and Boucicault, respectively, venting, musing, joking, put on blackface and redface, transmogrifying from authors into characters. The cast is almost uniformly excellent: Lance Gardner shines in the central role as Jacobs-Jenkins’ stage doppelganger and the protagonist and antagonist of the play, George and McCloskey, respectively; Jasmine Bracecy as Dido and Afi Bijou as Minnie provide humor and perspective as slaves with a distinctly contemporary edge; Sydney Morton bring pathos and heartfelt earnestness as the octoroon, Zoe, and Afua Busia and Ray Porter round out the cast, the former excellent as the slave Grace, and Porter engaging in three roles, as Boucicault, the native American Wahnotee, and the plantation owner LaFouche. Porter is the only actor who slips up: he seemed to have some line issues at times, and his Irish accent as Boucicault, seems lost somewhere between Cork and Fresno.
Without giving more away, as the show is still in previews, and a must-see. I have complained in the past about the general low quality of Bay Area acting – this is a welcome relief. And while the shallow stage of the Peet's Theatre pushes the show in the direction of vaudeville rather than melodrama, the show managed to captivate the audience for almost the whole time. The second act drags whenever too much exposition gets thrust upon the listeners, but that's par for the course when whittling down a five-act melodrama into a two hour version.
Jacob-Jenkins tears up the original, tosses out the fatty excess, and leaves us with a lean version with plenty of authorial interpolations. It takes the first 15 minutes of the roughly two-hours show to get through two, separate, sequences featuring actors as Jacobs-Jenkins and Boucicault, respectively, venting, musing, joking, put on blackface and redface, transmogrifying from authors into characters. The cast is almost uniformly excellent: Lance Gardner shines in the central role as Jacobs-Jenkins’ stage doppelganger and the protagonist and antagonist of the play, George and McCloskey, respectively; Jasmine Bracecy as Dido and Afi Bijou as Minnie provide humor and perspective as slaves with a distinctly contemporary edge; Sydney Morton bring pathos and heartfelt earnestness as the octoroon, Zoe, and Afua Busia and Ray Porter round out the cast, the former excellent as the slave Grace, and Porter engaging in three roles, as Boucicault, the native American Wahnotee, and the plantation owner LaFouche. Porter is the only actor who slips up: he seemed to have some line issues at times, and his Irish accent as Boucicault, seems lost somewhere between Cork and Fresno.
Without giving more away, as the show is still in previews, and a must-see. I have complained in the past about the general low quality of Bay Area acting – this is a welcome relief. And while the shallow stage of the Peet's Theatre pushes the show in the direction of vaudeville rather than melodrama, the show managed to captivate the audience for almost the whole time. The second act drags whenever too much exposition gets thrust upon the listeners, but that's par for the course when whittling down a five-act melodrama into a two hour version.
RSS Feed
