[NEohioPAL] Review of "An Octoroon" at Dobama Theatre

[Bob Abelman via NEohioPAL]

Dobama’s ‘An Octoroon’ requires due diligence before promised provocation



Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics

  



“Hi, everybody,” says an actor in his underwear. “I’m a ‘black playwright.’ I don’t know exactly what that means.”



So begins Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Obie Award-winning “An Octoroon” which, in an act of defiance and artistic integrity by Dobama Theatre, is being introduced to Cleveland audiences in a month other than February.  



The play is an innovative adaptation of an antebellum melodrama called “The Octoroon,” about the financial woes that have befallen a Louisiana cotton plantation and its impact on the community of slaves.  The original work was written by Irish immigrant playwright Dion Boucicault and played in New York’s Winter Garden Theatre in 1859 not long after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom's Cabin” and not long before the Civil War.



Jacobs-Jenkins' re-envisioning is not so much about Black History as unresolved American History.  Of course, in the hands of a man nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, it is also an audacious statement about the current state of race relations that comes with implied talking points intended to provoke discussion.  



For more of this review, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/. 
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