Rather than execute this, the actors explain and act out what happens. An Octoroon, quite appropriately, ends in the dark. The most overt of this is Zoe's status as an "Octoroon," a person who is one-eighth black. First performed at the Public Theater in New York in 2010, and subtitled an epic with cartoons,[12] Neighbors depicts what happens when the Crows, a family of minstrels played by actors in blackface, move in next door to the PattersonsRichard, a black classics professor, Jean, his white wife, and Melody, their teenage daughter. Study Guide! References External links. [50] Chase Quinn, Laughing (and Crying, and Laughing Again) about Slavery, Hyperallergic 24 February 2015. http.//hyperallergic.com/185346/laughing-and-crying-and-laughing-again-about-slavery/ (accessed 20 May 2015). Searching him, George finds the letter which resolves the conflict of Terrebonne's future. [45] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 20. Even the title shows this sense of exhaustion with the abundance of the race question and critics viewing his work through a racial lens. Jacobs-Jenkins reframes Boucicault's play using its original characters and plot, speaking much of Boucicault's dialogue, and critiques its portrayal of race using Brechtian devices. Make an argument for each side of the slavery argument here, analyzing how the play could be read as both anti- and pro-slavery. Certainly, they belong to a different theatrical world and tradition than the Pattersons. Again, Wahnotee and Paul are presented so sympathetically (especially Wahnotee) that it seems to confirm the author's approval of their feelings and characters. [11] Jacobs-Jenkins grew up in a home full of black memorabilia such as mammy dolls and Colored Only signs, according to Laura Collins-Hughes in Provocative Play Sees the Faces Behind the Blackface, The Boston Globe, 16 January 2011. http://archive.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2011/01/16/neighbors_exposes_racial_history_on_stage/ (accessed 5 December 2016). Jacobs-Jenkins nods most explicitly towards his sources in American family drama when Rachael, trying to draw her squabbling in-laws back to the topic of what to do about the photo album, says, Can we sit around being casually dysfunctional later and focus for one second? (59). For Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins has deliberately built his play on slippery foundations, the kind likely to trip up any dramatist, performer or theatergoer. But even if your response is an emphatic "No", you should still check out this superb play that employs black, white, and redface in unexpected ways while reclaiming a lost gem of the American stage. The technique is explicitly pedagogical and in An Octoroon inventively meta-adaptive as the contemporary playwright BJJa stand-in for Jacobs-Jenkinsis joined by the Playwrightthe author of the source play Dion Boucicault in teaching the audience how they should respond to the adaptation. [5] Jacobs-Jenkinss innovative work makes possible a fresh and experiential interracial discussion of race relations in Americaa discussion that is much needed in the present tense political climate. Summary. They represent for him his worst nightmare about how his white neighbors might perceive him despite his education and professional, middle-class standing: People will see them and . [17] On white obsession with black male bodies in minstrel shows, see Lott, Love and Theft, 3, 9. Your answer to that question may very well determine your decision to buy a ticket to the world premiere of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins'An Octoroon at Soho Rep. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. AN OCTOROON. Besides race, what are some representations of slaves and slavery that are not complicity with the dominant ideology of this time? An Imperative Duty Full text HTML version scanned from 1893 edition published by Harper . 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. Ironically, The Octoroon premiered in New York four days after famed. The next time we see River, she has taken over the kitchen as Shelly eventually does to make bouillon for Dodge. [39] Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire. Moments later, he reveals, "Just kidding. And try to guess who that is dressed up as a Beatrix Potter-style rabbit. His use of humor during the play most clearly shows Jacobs-Jenkinss belief that there is now enough time passed between the days of The Octoroon and his own time that not only can he adapt and deconstruct the themes of the original play and its context, he can laugh at it. Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon are all intrageneric adaptations; that is, they are plays that adapt other plays, or in the case of Neighbors other performances, in the same dramatic genre. The Crows wear black paint, have huge red lips, and, except for Jim, and Zip in his conversations with Jean, speak with the caricatured dialect and malapropisms of their nineteenth-century originals. Appropriate opens with the initially unexplained arrival of Franz and River jumping through a window into a very disorderly living room cluttered with old and new furniture as cicadas hum in the background (15). Jacobs-Jenkinss excavations in this play are broad rather than deep and as much literary as theatrical or performative. That b*tch is dying cuz she old as hell." Familiar character types, too, reappear in Appropriate, further establishing the plays generic affiliation with the American family drama that Jacobs-Jenkins set out to adapt for his own purposes. eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. Jacobs-Jenkins uses Melody and Jean to introduce the audience to the Crow family as people rather than cartoons. A romantic relationship develops between rebellious Melody and shy Jim Crow, beginning with the awkward tenderness of the moment when Jim gently removes an eyelash from Melodys face (232). 3 (Fall 2016): 286. Sound No. The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center But the show must go on, and the writers, it seems, are short on actors, for reasons political as well as practical. It all culminates in a thrillingly ridiculous duel with himself (ingeniously choreographed by J. David Brimmer). Also, it's incredibly funny. An Octoroon is fearless, dangerous theater that challenges conventional notions of history and performance. https:www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/16/383567104/one-playwright-s-obligation (accessed 11 February 2019). [1] Jeff Lunden, One Playwrights Obligation To Confront Race And Identity In The US, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 16 February 2015. Sign up today to unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. Rhoda lived her whole life "passing" as a white person. As a punishment Diana denies him wind to sail to Troy and requires the sacrifice of his daughter to appease her. The debt-ridden, lost plantation over which the family quarrels evokes A Streetcar Named Desire and Dividing the Estate, as well as the play that lies behind both of them, The Cherry Orchard. Like stratigraphic layers in archeology, the layering of past and present in Neighbors requires complex seeing. [8] Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). Jacobs-Jenkins is speaking here of Everybody (2017), his adaptation of the medieval morality play Everyman. His prologue perfectly shows how Jacobs-Jenkins feels trapped by his works being put into a different box because he is a black playwright although he [doesnt] know exactly what that means, and he just wants to create works to tell human stories, not necessarily always dealing with the race issue in America. Appropriate/An Octoroon. Nataki Garrett directed the first production of An Octoroon outside of New York with Mixed Blood Theatre Company in the fall of 2015. Jacobs-Jenkins has clearly done his research, and makes a hard case for the reader that we still have to talk in certain ways about certain topics. The blown-up photograph of a real-life lynchingagainst which background George makes an impassioned defense of Wahnotee against the wild and lawless proceeding of lynch-law (51)is profoundly shocking but also positions spectators as complicit in the voyeuristic gaze of the photographs enthralled white gawkers.[50], While this is the most disturbing moment in the play, there is no ambiguity about the kind of horrified response called for by the photograph of the lynching. Jacobs-Jenkins pulls the camera back to capture the angst-ridden playwriting process itself: A monotone young black playwright, BJJ (Chris Myers), stands before the audience in his undies and recalls a therapy session. Ostensibly 19th-century slaves, their diction is so modern in its wit and inflection, they could easily be transplanted to any stoop in Bedford-Stuyvesant without causing much of a stir. The second is the date of "The Octoroon - Themes" eNotes Publishing Underscoring the link, Toni sarcastically refers to her brother as Beauregarde Big Daddy Lafayette (35). The device of racial cross-casting inevitably creates a gap between actor and character, superimposing the stylization of Brechtian distance on the stylization of melodramatic stereotyping. He's quickly echoed in a snide tone by a white onlooker, who just so happens to be Dion Boucicault (Danny Wolohan). Tonis diatribes may be more unrelenting than Violets in August: Osage County, but the two matriarchal figures engage in similarly vitriolic attacks against members of their family. In "An Octoroon," the projection of a lynching photograph grounds this playfully postmodern riff on Dion Boucicault's "The Octoroon" in historical horror. As a symbol, the album suffuses the consciousness of both characters and audience. It is, however, precisely the similarities in formal attributes (and in dramatic adaptation, in styles of performance)not just resemblances in events or charactersbetween adapted work and adaptation that enable the complex layered seeing advocated by Jacobs-Jenkins. [40] Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 13. Toni complains that she has always done most of the work; Rachael believes that her father-in-law was anti-Semitic. Suddenly, the back wall of the stage falls forward, blasting us with a gush of air and revealing a snow-white stage, covered in cotton (design by Mimi Lien). They give an almost Brechtian commentary on the main plot while letting us in on their own lives as slaves: While sweeping up the cotton, Minnie asks, "You really think Mrs. Peyton's upstairs dying from heartbreak?" Boucicault puts his audience on a thrilling emotional roller-coaster for its own sake as is typical of melodrama; Jacobs-Jenkins abruptly alternates not only pathos with laughter and laughter with horror but also emotional engagement with critical detachment to produce in his contemporary audience a Brechtian self-consciousness about their own and other spectators reactions. The debate is not, for starters, simply a matter of black and white. Appropriate bears many of the generic markers of American family drama. The album is deeply embedded in the action of the play as the characters try to figure out what it means and what to do with it. In Adaptation and Appropriation (2006) Sanders notes that while adaptations serve to perpetuate and confirm the canonicity of adapted works, they also frequently subvert the assumptions of their source texts or reinterpret them from a contemporary political perspective to make them fit, in a quasi-Darwinian sense, for new cultural environments. In the first lecture Richard explores the origin of tragedy in our lives, suggesting that it comes from choices we have made in the past that haunt us deep into our very present (240). transform as a part of life. The audiences self-reflections that Jacobs-Jenkins so carefully constructs in response to all three of his plays constitute a further layer in his archeology of seeing.. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Obie-award winning play "An Octoroon," at the Gamm Theatre through Feb. 20, pokes at sensibilities, pries at prejudices and pushes at closed gates in a person's mind. At the end of the play the Crow Family Minstrels do not give us the comeback show that their rehearsals have perhaps led us to expect but something much more radical. date the date you are citing the material. An Imperative Duty is a short realist novel by William Dean Howells published in 1891. For his research into Boucicaults aesthetic principles and into melodrama see Foster, Meta-melodrama, 286, 290, 293 and Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something.. Since Boucicault will be playing an American Indian, he slaps on redface. Robert Vorlicky DORA played by a white actress or an actress who can pass as white. It may include transmotivation, transfocalization, or transvalorizationterms used by Grard Genette in Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), an important theoretical work on the relation between hypertext (adaptation) and hypotext (adapted work) that anticipated by a couple of decades the recent surge in adaptation studies. I think this play is a work of genius. In Neighbors Jacobs-Jenkins updates blackface minstrelsy; in Appropriate he borrows, or appropriates, characters, situations, and motifs from every play that [he] liked in the genre of American family drama in order to cook the pot to see what happens;[2] and in An Octoroon he adapts Dion Boucicaults nineteenth-century melodrama The Octoroon as his own meta-melodrama. Jacobs-Jenkins has commented that these three plays are all kind of like me dealing with something very specific, which has to do with the history of theater and blackness in America and form.[3] In a more recent interview Jacobs-Jenkins sharpens his earlier ideas about theatrical form in a striking image that will inform the rest of this essay; he says that he thinks of genre or old forms as interesting artifacts that invite a kind of archeology of seeing.[4]. *thunder clap*. The unseen album, telling its symbolic story of a long line of corpses (112), of incest and infanticide, prefigures the more shocking album of lynchings and dead black bodies that mesmerizes the Lafayette family in Appropriate. Richard, however, blames the sacrifice not on the gods (standing in for white people in his mind) but on the demands of Agamemnons uncouth, country-ass soldiers with no self-control, sitting in the port raping women and drinking all the time and aint got no jobs and dont talk Greek good (292)clearly, for Richard, a version of the Crows. As well as giving vigorous contemporary voices to Dido, Minnie, and Grace, Jacobs-Jenkins replaces their unquestioning loyalty to their owners in Boucicaults play with aspirations and dreams of their own. Minnie comforts Dido and they look forward to their new lives on Captain Ratts boat. That sense of uncertainty is part of the fun. After the conclusion of their show the Crows take a curtain call, but that is not the end. Word Count: 356. While all three plays perform similar kinds of cultural work, in each play Jacobs-Jenkins adapts a different historical form of theatrical entertainment and adopts correspondingly different kinds of innovative adaptive strategies designed to manipulate audiences into a self-conscious recognition of their own complicity in the racial assumptions he excavates. Similarly, Ben Horner (in blackface) gives committed performances in the dual roles of Uncle Tom-esque Pete and adorable slave boy Paul. Zoe falls in love with George as well, though others are shocked that the two would wish to marry (it being, of course, illegal at the time). Bill Demastes Dion Boucicault's drama was inspired by his visit to the American South and The Quadroon (1856), a novel by Thomas Mayne Reid. Director Sarah Benson pushes a breakneck pace to squeeze Boucicault's four acts, as well as Jacobs-Jenkins' metatheatrical frame, into 2 hours, 15 minutes. [19], Dobama Theater in Cleveland Heights, Ohio presented An Octoroon from October 21, 2016 to November 13, 2016, directed by Nathan Motta[20], The first West Coast premiere of An Octoroon was held at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed by Eric Ting with Sydney Morton in the title role. His most recent play, Appropriate, is about a white family that discovers an album of lynching photos while cleaning out a deceased patriarch's home. The plantation is in dire financial straits, but could be saved if George were to marry Dora (Zo Winters), a wealthy young heiress from a neighboring estate. 2 (2017): 151. [10] Vallejo Gantner, artistic director of PS 122 along with theatre critics Elisabeth Vincentelli and Adam Feldman, argued that although it was not unethical to publish the email, it may not have been "nice" to publish it. Zip Coon, very well-dressed, sporting a top hat, and walking jauntily and dandily (250, 230, 238) is the classic dandy of nineteenth-century minstrel shows; Mammy, ample of bosom (301) and forceful of manner, channels Hattie McDaniels character in Gone with the Wind (310), while Topsy is both picaninni and a version of Josephine Baker. It is in the interstices between adapted work and adaptation, or to use Jacobs-Jenkinss archeological metaphor, in the stratigraphy, that the important cultural and political work of adaptation takes place. When a black actor in whiteface makes a racist remark (Georges reference to the folksy ways of the niggers down here, for example), the line is necessarily italicized and held up for the audiences critical inspection. [6], An Octoroon had a workshop production at Performance Space 122 from June 19 July 3, 2010, featuring Travis York, Karl Allen, Chris Manley, Ben Beckley, Gabe Levey, Jake Hart, Margaret Flanagan, Amber Gray, Mary Wiseman, LaToya Lewis, Kim Gainer, and Sasheer Zamata. Shepards dark vision of American plenty (the harvest of corn, carrots, potatoes that grow where the murdered baby was buried) rising out of the familys (symbolically Americas) destructive past informs and transforms into Jacobs-Jenkinss vision of an America falling apart, undermined by its legacy of racism.[41]. The two scream expletives at each other Marina- and Ulay-style before BJJ gives up and they begin the play in earnest. BJJ stops the action of the play. [32] Erin Keane, Review/Family Secrets Fester in Appropriate, 89.3 WFPL News Louisville, 20 March 2013. http://wfpl.org/review-family-secrets-fester-appropriate/ (accessed 30 December 2016). The actor who plays BJJ - in this case, the astonishing Ken Nwosu - goes on to don whiteface and appear as both the heroic George and the villainous M'Closky. This point goes all the way back to our early readings of Gilroy and theory, so Jacobs-Jenkins uses these well known texts as his foundation for An Octoroon, while also moving drastically past these notions. The audience is catapulted into a space that plays to their stereotypes and questions our societys relationship to humanity and our history. By signing up you are confirming you are 16 or over. Stacy Wolf, Frank Hentschker, Executive Director And the slaves Pete and Paul, according to Jacobs-Jenkinss textual directions, are to be played by a Native American actor (or an actor who can pass as Native American) in blackface. [4] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Archeology of Seeing. Gain full access to show guides, character breakdowns, auditions, monologues and more! 2 (2015). Rhoda's father was Mrs. Meredith's brother, a white man, and Rhoda's mother was a southern woman of one-eighth black ancestry. At this point the play celebrates the history of African-American entertainment from Josephine Baker, channeled by Topsy in her diamond-studded halter top and banana skirt (309), to artists such as Sister Sledge, Beyonc, and others, whose songs may be incorporated here or may have been used throughout the play as in the New York production of Neighbors. Lafouche comes to run the auction of the property and announces Zoe will be sold. with Siobhan OFlynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 170. 3. About their apparently imminent sale, for example, Dido says, This is about the worst damn day of my life! Melody, looking different now, meets Jim at the stage door and asks him how he feels, and the actor playing Jim Crow starts to tell her how he really feels (319). This leads to a hilarious scene in which he switches between the two characters engaged in a fight to the death. Rachael makes a point of excusing both her father-in-laws anti-Semitism and what she sees as his racial prejudice because he cannot be held responsible for how he may have been brought up to feel or think about other people (40, 42). An Interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lila Neugebauer, Signature Theatre. The earliest minstrels were white performers in blackface, but there were also troupes of African-American performers. Stay abreast of discount offers for great theater, on Broadway or in select cities. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. It toys with the plot of Dion Boucicault's 19th century play "The Octoroon . online is the same, and will be the first date in the citation. Racial thinking has the potential to limit black authors to a very specific style because of fears of being insensitive to racial issues as youve hinted at. In the plays final sequence, representing an indeterminate period of time marked by stylized blackouts followed immediately by the lights coming up again, the audience bears witness as the house, established by now as a representation of America, is casually inhabited by various strangers and literally falls apart. BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant explain the significance of the fourth act, the sensation scene in melodrama. This leads to another theme in the idea that what is legal is not always right, and what is illegal is not always wrong; the law is not necessarily just. [53] Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something., [54] For Jacobs-Jenkinss knowledge of American family drama see Wegener, About Appropriate, 146. By presenting characters in whiteface, blackface, and redface, Jacobs-Jenkins can look at "blackness and how to represent social constructs onstage that are so tied to a specific culture of nation. Ed. eNotes.com [12], An Octoroon premiered Off-Broadway at Soho Rep on April 23, 2014 and closed on June 8. In his own defense, Jacobs-Jenkins writes in the stage direction, "I don't know what a real slave sounded like. [52] See Foster, Meta-melodrama, 30001. [43] In all three plays Jacobs-Jenkins adds innovative techniques to the toolbox available to theatrical adaptation and further wrinkles to adaptation theory. [24] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Margaret Gray, Spotlight Shines Brighter on Appropriate Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Los Angeles Times, 24 September 2015. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-branden-jacobs-jenkins-20150927-story.html (accessed 27 April 2017). In the very end, this music finally gives us the respite for contemplation that we desperately need to process the madness we've just witnessed. Ariel Nereson In the auction scene he has to fight himself over Zoe. She is currently working on ambivalent motherhood in contemporary adaptations of Medea. Hutcheon also notes the Darwinian implications of the term adaptation. A Theory of Adaptation, 31. Toni returns from Atlanta, Bo and Rachael from New York, and Franz and River from Portland. Though Toni denies this accusation and is shocked when later Rhys refers to Rachael as the Jew bitch, her own unreflecting anti-Semitism is apparent when she thoughtlessly says that she is not some kind of shylock (77, 34). In parallel scenes the Pattersons, themselves relatively new to town, enact the realistic drama of modern marital and generational conflict inflected by anxieties over social and professional status in a new job, new school, and new neighborhood. Jacobs-Jenkins introduces Jims real feelings. . David Krasner An Octoroon is "this decade's most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today." - The New York Times Performance Dates & Times Thursday, September 28, at 7:30 p.m. Friday, September 29, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, September 30, at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, September 30, at 8 p.m. Sunday, October 1, at 2:30 p.m. Theatre Communications Group: New York, 2019), 7374. This is not the first time Jacobs-Jenkins has grappled with race: His 2010 show Neighbors featured a cast of white actors playing an offensively stereotypical black family. I washed it away (97). Though I cant remember any of them now. Interspersed among the Crows comically fraught rehearsal scenes and the Pattersons emotionally fraught domestic scenes are two lectures on Greek tragedy given by Richard to his students and four Interludes, in which Zip, Sambo, Mammy, and Topsy each in turn performs a grossly exaggerated version of the specialty acts typically included in minstrel shows. The Crows have been on hiatusthe word is used repeatedly (231, 235, 242)after the death of Jim Crow, Sr. for an uncertain period of time, suggesting that they may have come literally from the nineteenth century, and are, like Pirandellos Six Characters, in search of their life on the stage in the form of their much-vaunted comeback (261). [5] Suzan-Lori Parks anticipates Jacobs-Jenkinss use of an archeological metaphor for a slightly different purpose. The kind of dramatic excavation practiced in Neighbors is thus a form of both pedagogy and political protest. [33] Stephen J. At the beginning of his performance, dressed in straw hat, striped suit, and enormous bowtie, Jim looks ridiculous, but also amazing (285). [55] See Collins-Hughes, Provocative Play Sees the Faces Behind the Blackface, and note 11 above. He has written an American family drama about blackness in America that has no black characters in it but in which their absence pervades and powers the play. For the details of this argument see Verna A. Your email is never published nor shared. The steamboat blows up, and as I have remarked elsewhere, The two women are trapped inside Boucicaults plot just as Tom Stoppards reimagined Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are trapped inside Hamlet and Dido and Minnies real-life counterparts were trapped in the institution of slavery.[48] Nonetheless, as Merrill and Saxon cogently observe, by focusing on Dido and Minnies hopes and fears for themselves instead of on Zoes tragic death in the plays last scene and by granting them critical insights into their condition, Jacobs-Jenkins forces todays audiences to refocus their attention on the material conditions and lives of ordinary black women rather than the eponymous octoroon.[49], Jacobs-Jenkins similarly reconfigures and overlays Boucicaults sensation scene with a more relevant one of his own. A photograph of a real murdered human contrasts with the original play's use of a photograph for justice.[4]. Its even worse than the first time I got sold! And Minnie replies, Yeah, I didnt wake up thinkin this was where my day was gonna go (41). Although this concept for a play sounds controversial on paper, I dont think that he explicitly makes these changes just to make an audience for his work because of mere curiosity. Minnie imagines coasting up and down the river, lookin fly, the wind whipping at our hair and our slave tunics and shit, being admired by the muscle-y men on the boat, and eating fresh fish instead of these fattening pig guts (42). The play begins with BJJ, in a black box telling the audience a conversation he and his therapist had, to get him excited about playwriting and to overcome depression. Humana Festival 2013 The Complete Plays, edited by Amy Wegener and Sarah Lunnie (New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2014), 146. in Ben Brantley, A Squabbling Family Kept in the Dark, New York Times, 16 March 2014. http:www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/theater/in-appropriate-branden-jacobs-Jenkins-subverts-tradition.html?-r=o (accessed 12 August 2015). I think the comedic elements in the play especially show how Jacobs-Jenkins breaks the racial protocol so condemned by Gilroy. Vivian Oparah and Cassie Clare in An Octoroon. [35] Horton Foote, Dividing the Estate. An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. They watch us. The Octoroon is a drama of plantation life and miscegenation in antebellum America, written by an Irishman who visited the South. [10] Simultaneous tak[ing] in implies the audiences experiential engagement with what they see and hear; consideration of separate layers (as in archeology) requires Brechtian critical distance and analysis. [3], Jacobs-Jenkins recommends the play be performed with 8 or 9 actors,[4] with male characters played using blackface/whiteface/redface, and female characters portrayed by actresses that match the characters' race.[1]. The second date is today's Vol. Pete, George, and Dora acquaint themselves when Zoe enters to meet George. Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon enable the multiple-layered seeing that Jacobs-Jenkins is talking about because they require comparative viewing across the adapted and adaptive works themselves and across the cultures or historical periods that produced them. Pete sends Paul to go find a letter that would promise enough money to save Terrebonne. [40] The photo album in Appropriate, by contrast, belies the apparent absence of blackness in the play by embodying and giving it an explosive motivating power that forces the white characters to confront a legacy of racism that they prefer not to acknowledge. 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