an octoroon themes

The gap between tone and content is at once disturbingly funny and appalling. American Next Wave: Four Contemporary Plays from HighTide Festival Theatre. "Branden is like a performer whose material is text," Benson observes. [1] Jacobs-Jenkins considers An Octoroon and his other works Appropriate and Neighbors linked in the exploration of theatre, genre, and how theatre interacts with questions of identity, along with how these questions (such as "Why do we think of a social issue as something that can be solved?") In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon." Themes. 1 - The Rocky Horror Show While respecting her familys traditional show pieces, Topsy feels they are too commercial. She sees herself as a more forward-looking artist and expresses her own ideas about how art should deal with the shared human experiamentience. She presents to the audience summa the stuff she has been working on, which turns out to be the history of African Americans onstage crammed into three spectacular minutes of music, video projections, dance, etc., etc. An Octoroon is fearless, dangerous theater that challenges conventional notions of history and performance. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins An Octoroon is a whirlwind of images and dialogue that leaves no one out of the conversation and makes no apologies for asking the hard questions. One theme of this text has to do with the fact that everyone, no matter their race, has the capacity to feel and love deeply, and all should have the right to do so. Old times there, it seems, are not forgotten at all. The Octoroon Themes Racial Identification and Discrimination Set in the pre-Civil War South, The Octoroondeals heavily with racial themes. [11] By exaggerating the embodiments of blackness and the comic and musical routines characteristic of the minstrel shows to the point of an absurdity so explosive that laughter becomes problematic, Jacobs-Jenkins launches a savage satiric attack on racist stereotypes. Into the familiar dramatic context of this white familys absorption in its own dysfunction Jacobs-Jenkins inserts the photo album as a reminder of the familys and Americas deadly legacy of racism. In Appropriate Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the genre of American family drama. 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. Esther Kim Lee 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]. Jims brilliant performance contains so much pain and anger that it breaks open his familys theatrical past with lingering consequences. [15] Zip struggles to transport an armful of musical instruments, drops them, and with his pants falling down finally succeeds in carrying a bugle in his anus. [2], Jacobs-Jenkins also cites Peter Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination as an inspiration for his approach to melodrama. Jacobs-Jenkins introduces Jims real feelings. 2 (2015). [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). Jacobs-Jenkins himself took on the role of Br'er Rabbit and Captain Ratts.[14]. In creating his plays Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has repeatedly chosen to rewrite, adapt, or otherwise appropriate earlier theatrical styles or dramatic texts. Jacobs-Jenkinss excavations in this play are broad rather than deep and as much literary as theatrical or performative. I will discuss the three plays separately in order to bring out their distinctive qualities as intrageneric dramatic adaptations. His intolerance alienates his wife and daughter, who turn to the Crows for love and support. 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. Bill Demastes 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. According to Jacobs-Jenkins, Toni represents the New South with its feeling of being betrayed by the rest of the country; the West represents new possibilities, enabling Franz to reinvent himself; and New York connects Bo (with his smart phone) to a bigger world and forward momentum.[26]. It then manipulates us by just such means, including one truly upsetting video projection toward the end. Foster, Suzan-Lori Parkss Staging of the Lincoln Myth in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 17, no. [40] Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 13. What does your taste in theatre say about you? [22] Isherwood, Caricatured Commentary.. [27] Kee-Yoon Nahm, Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men, Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. 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). 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. Besides, it was being almost entirely recast for the new production, and there was concern that the original chemistry might evaporate. 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. Caught up into his act, Jim is like a hurricane unleashed, the most incredible thing you have ever seen in your entire life, even though he also shares characteristics with his minstrel forebearseyes bugged out, limbs loose, moving, dancing, mo coon than a little bit (288). Paulwith the mailbagsstops to take a photo of himself with Georges camera. (depending presumably on the resources of the theatre). [12], An Octoroon premiered Off-Broadway at Soho Rep on April 23, 2014 and closed on June 8. Can we ever fully trust anything said by these people who dress up in costumes and pretend to be other people? All of these historically situated stereotypes, Jacobs-Jenkins implies, are based in white views of black performative behavior deriving ultimately from the minstrel shows. 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). [6], The sensation scene of the original play is deconstructed in act four. 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 MClosky. 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. While posing, MClosky comes from behind and kills Paul to take the letter. In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon. BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant explain the significance of the fourth act, the sensation scene in melodrama. [46] In Definition Theatre Companys 2017 production of An Octoroon in Chicago, Pete and Paul were played by an African-American actress in blackface, producing an even more pointed Brechtian comment on the absurdity of Boucicaults racist and gendered characterizations. Moments later, he reveals, "Just kidding. While the text that Appropriate adapts is the genre of American family drama as a whole, Buried Child, itself a veritable patchwork of allusions to well-known family plays, will, in fact, prove to be the most significant single analog for Jacobs-Jenkinss play.[33]. Robert Vorlicky Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: 'theatre is about controversial ideas', Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. [2], Jacobs-Jenkins researched Boucicault heavily while working on An Octoroon and found an unfinished essay at the New York Public Library saying that theatre is a place for dramatic illusionthe most believable illusion of sufferingand catharsis. 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. Dion Boucicault's drama was inspired by his visit to the American South and The Quadroon (1856), a novel by Thomas Mayne Reid. While the minstrel show provides the bedrock of his dramatic archeology, Jacobs-Jenkins also exposes the later cultural and political stereotypes of blackness that have been layered onto the tropes of minstrelsy. An Octoroon is set way down yonder in the land of cotton during the antebellum period. In doing so, Brer Rabbitor the dramatist himselfassesses the political impact of Jacobs-Jenkinss adaptation. In fact, Jacobs-Jenkins hits on so many ideas per minute, you'll wish you had a little more time to catch your breath. A photograph of a real murdered human contrasts with the original play's use of a photograph for justice.[4]. 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. Start your 48-hour free trial to get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts. . BJJ explains, with the help of Boucicault, how melodrama works and how it has been necessary for An Octoroon to adapt some of the melodramatic features of the earlier play. In the mid-twentieth century, much of the pioneering work consisted in studies, both practical and theoretical, of the adaptation of novels into film. 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]. Walking on a stage covered with cotton balls is a tricky business. We then launch into a condensed rewrite of Boucicaults original: a mortgage melodrama in which the Peyton familys Louisiana plantation seems destined to fall into the unscrupulous hands of its former overseer, MClosky. 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). 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. 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. 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. In An Octoroon Jacobs-Jenkins excavates and adapts both a specific play text whose racial content would otherwise preclude performance in the twenty-first century and the now unfamiliar genre of nineteenth-century melodrama to which it belongs, including the theatrical/performative features of that genre: sensational plot, stereotypical good and bad characters, mix of comedy and pathos, spectacle, tableaux, and mood music. [54] Because Jacobs-Jenkins appreciates the works and genres he adapts even at some level the black minstrelsy of Neighbors[55]he encourages audiences similarly to appreciate and to enjoy his own versions of them. The numerous comic episodes, however, involving Pete, Dido, Minnie, and Grace, scenes in which Jacobs-Jenkins induces the audience to laugh at slavery almost before they are aware, produce more subtly disquietingbecause more questionableeffects. Pete pleads for MClosky to not be lynched, so George demands that M'Closky be taken away, not revenged by Wahnotee, but M'Closky escapes and sets fire to the boat. Though I cant remember any of them now. In his second lectureon Euripidess Iphigenia at AulisRichard layers his own experience as a black man in America onto the story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia. This wish to use preexisting material to simultaneously move past these experiences because of the multiple levels of the plays presentation and humor. 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 Imperative Duty is a short realist novel by William Dean Howells published in 1891. Bo hated the plantation with its bugs and its endless stories about Civil War ancestors. [52] For his own political purposes, in An Octoroon he adapts not only his source play and the melodramatic genre in which it is written but also the swiftly changing responses that genre typically elicits, allowing, as Rosa Schneider notes, a twenty-first-century audience to feel some of the same effects as their nineteenth-century counterparts.[53]. And at the end of the act he holds a musical note so long that the cookie jar holding his fathers ashes explodes, releasing an enormous cloud of ash, whose haze should remain present for the rest of the play (289). His aggression that people always try to place these bigger cultural burdens, such as the adaptation of African folklore when he merely uses animals to illustrate his own point, shows that he wants for his work to speak for itself and not be as tied down to one specific meaning. Jordan Schildcrout This led Jacobs-Jenkins to see doubles and pairs in Boucicault's play, through relationships between characters e.g. His comments in interviews on the generic affiliation of Appropriate suggest that Jacobs-Jenkins assumed that audiences would already be sufficiently familiar with American family drama to interpret this plays complex stratigraphy without further pedagogical intervention on his part. Again, Wahnotee and Paul are presented so sympathetically (especially Wahnotee) that it seems to confirm the author's approval of their feelings and characters. [47] Their voices (borrowed from the dialect of contemporary sitcom) are the most vibrant and compelling in the play. Study Guide! [18], The play was presented at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia from March 16, 2016 to April 10, 2016, directed by Joanna Settle. Lafouche comes to run the auction of the property and announces Zoe will be sold. The fact that has the audience laughs at slavery and BJJ even encourages that laughter shows his belief that not only can these experiences can be joked about, they can also stop overshadowing African-American art to allow new black artistic forms to come into being. In Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Jacobs-Jenkins puts his own adaptive versions of the minstrel show, the American family play, and Boucicaults melodrama into an edgy but productive dialogue with the forms that he excavates. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. 3 (Fall 2016): 286. But the show must go on, and the writers, it seems, are short on actors, for reasons political as well as practical. 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). The photograph album in Appropriate is particularly shocking because these photos are to be understood, not only as symbolic representations, but as literal artifacts of American history. "An Octoroon" begins with BJJ an onstage realization of the melodrama's playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins talking to his imaginary therapist about the public's tendency to view most of his. [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). Csar Alvarez of The Lisps has composed additional music, some of which sounds straight out of Ken Burns' The Civil War, to create the world of the Old South. 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. Strange as it seems, a work based on a terminally dated play from more than 150 years ago may turn out to be this decades most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today. [11], Mark Ravenhill staged a workshop production of the play featuring Saycon Sengbloh in April 2012. References External links. 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. If I say that this bizarrely brilliant play is the work of a 32-year-old black American dramatist called Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, I am already subscribing to an idea the piece seeks to subvert: that our identities can be defined by convenient labels. [7][8] It was originally directed by Gavin Quinn of the Irish theatre company Pan Pan, but Jacobs-Jenkins took over the role after Quinn quit several weeks into rehearsals. publication online or last modification online. Much of the story is drawn from Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, which was an instant hit when it opened at the old Winter Garden Theatre in 1859. At the same time his plays push the boundaries of what adaptation can accomplish and offer further refinements to the current discourse on adaptation theory. By signing up you are confirming you are 16 or over. 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.. I think the comedic elements in the play especially show how Jacobs-Jenkins breaks the racial protocol so condemned by Gilroy. Zoe and George are not allowed to marry by law, but this is presented as wrong by the text in the way they are described. with Siobhan OFlynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 170. If there are three dates, the first date is the date of the original As such, among many other things, it provides a dramatization of and peek at the plantation pecking order in . [1] Just because the law forbids or permits something doesn't mean the law is morally right or just. As the house slaves Minnie and Dido, the hilarious Jocelyn Bioh and Marsha Stephanie Blake provide much-needed comic relief from this sentimental and contrived plot. 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. 3 (Fall 2005): 2435. An Imperative Duty Full text HTML version scanned from 1893 edition published by Harper . Ariel Nereson http://www.signaturetheatre.org/News/An-Archeology-of-Seeing.aspx (accessed 19 May 2017). MClosky announces that Terrebonne is for sale and plots to steal Zoe; because she is an octoroon, she is a piece of property and therefore a part of the estate. Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, first presented in New York in 1859, bears more than a striking resemblance to its better-known stage sister, George Aiken's adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which premiered in 1852. Summary. [6] Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. [10] Jane Barnette, Adapturgy: The Dramaturgs Art and Theatrical Adaptation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 55, 62. She is currently working on ambivalent motherhood in contemporary adaptations of Medea. It is an opening that comically echoes the odd, unexpected homecoming of Vince and his girlfriend, Shelly, who enter an equally bizarre and decrepit living room to the incessant sound of rain at the beginning of act two of Buried Child. In Buried Child, Halies and Tildens murdered baby (apparently drowned by Dodge, as Franz tries to drown the photos of lynchings) has been literally buried in the soil behind the house. As a symbol, the album suffuses the consciousness of both characters and audience. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. Anyone can read what you share. The superimposition of hero and villain upon one another suggests that the moral difference between them is less clear-cut than melodramatic stereotypes would have it and illustrates, as Lisa Merill and Theresa Saxon note, the uncomfortable similarity between desire to own, master, or marry Zoe. http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/ (accessed 30 December 2016). Adler adds that the nations guilty past in Buried Child might be racism, or religious and ethnic prejudice, or . The Art of Dramatic Composition: A Prologue, "Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: Feel That Thought", "The Great Work Continues: The 25 Best American Plays Since 'Angels in America', "Amber Gray on 'An Octoroon,' at Soho Rep", "The Octoroon Delayed Opens This Week at PS122", "Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Tries to Revive The Octoroon", "Disgruntled Cast Member Issues Invite to P.S.122's Troubled Octoroon", "Soho Rep Reading of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon to Feature Saycon Sengbloh and William Jackson Harper | Playbill", "Review: 'An Octoroon,' a Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Comedy About Race", "BERKELEY REPERTORY THEATRE | An Octoroon", "Cast announced for An Octoroon at Orange Tree", "Review: An Octoroon (Orange Tree Theatre)", "An Octoroon is taboo ridden, but thoughtful (Shaw Festival)", "Georgia Southern Theatre & Performance to Present "An Octoroon", "2017 Results | Critics' Circle Theatre Awards", For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=An_Octoroon&oldid=1138923673, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using infobox play with unknown parameters, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 12 February 2023, at 11:33. Wahnotee, accused by the members of Captain Ratts ship of killing Paul, is about to be lynched. Her neighbor, Eunice, describes the plantation house matter-of-factly as a great big place with white columns; Stanley boasts that he pulled Stella down off them columns, and she loved it.[39] In Suzan-Lori Parkss Topdog/Underdog a raggedy family photo album (13), its photos also unseen, represents the uncertain history of brothers Linc and Booth and symbolizes as well the absence of African Americans from American history. George defends him and demands a fair trial, while MClosky reluctantly takes the role of prosecution. (Psst, it could well be Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins himself.). Austin Smith and Amber Gray in a scene from Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss play. [12] Charles Isherwood, Caricatured Commentary: Minstrel Meets Modern, The New York Times 9 March 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/theater/reviews/10neighbors.html (accessed 1 May 2017). As Thomas P. Adler observes, Shepard displays a peculiar power in his highly symbolic family problem plays of allegorizing the American experience, of deflating the myth of America as the New Eden.[37] Jacobs-Jenkins transforms Shepards implied equation of literal and symbolic inheritanceembodied in Appropriate in the photo album of lynchingsinto an explicit and particular indictment of Americas racial and racist history and its present-day consequences. Since Boucicault will be playing an American Indian, he slaps on redface. . Photos Richard then conflates Iphigenias willingness to sacrifice herself with what he sees as Melodys defection to the Crows. Try it today! Over the course of the play the album is passed from one family member to another, eliciting various white responses (including shock, disgust, curiosity, fascination, disregard, aversion) as each of them has to try to find a way to deal with what it represents about their father, their family history, their own racial attitudesand whether or not they can sell the photos for a substantial sum as collectors items. But white actors assume blackface and even, in the case of a Native American, redface in order to reinforce a key point: that, while Boucicaults original was progressive in its anti-slavery message, it also traded on racial stereotypes that are still deeply embedded in todays consciousness. Mr. Jacobs-Jenkinss central point here as it was in his Neighbors and Appropriate is that we dont even have the vocabulary to discuss what continues to divide Americans according to skin color. Private Life in McCanns Transatlantic, The Application of A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms to The Black and Green Atlantic, The Tyranny of Monarchy in A Voyage to Lilliput, Gullivers Difficult Decision to Return Home. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 7. Orange Tree, RichmondBranden Jacobs-Jenkinss extraordinary play is both an adaptation of a 19th-century melodrama and a dazzling postmodernist critique of it. Join StageAgent today and unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. Channeling perhaps Peter Handkes Offending the Audience, the Crows work to make the theatre audience, laminated onto their own dramatic audience, conscious of itself specifically as an audience and as consumers of black entertainment wittingly or unwittingly complicit in the stereotypes they have witnessed: the family point to people in the audience and whisper together, sometimes mockingly, sometimes out of concern. 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Deal with the original play 's use of a real murdered human contrasts the... June 8 play especially show how Jacobs-Jenkins breaks the racial protocol so condemned Gilroy... Much literary as theatrical or performative people who dress up in costumes and pretend be... Brooks ' the Melodramatic Imagination as an `` Octoroon a more forward-looking artist and expresses her own ideas about art. 47 ] their voices ( borrowed from the genre of American family drama almost! Projection toward the end be lynched and audience about Civil War ancestors 40 ] Suzan-Lori Parks, (! Old times there, it could well be Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins himself. ) Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on of. Anger that it breaks open his familys theatrical past with lingering consequences gap between tone content! Trust anything said by these people who dress up in costumes and pretend be. Mother would have been referred to as an inspiration for his approach to melodrama Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss play for... Will include either 2 or 3 dates both an adaptation of a photograph for justice [. Jacobs-Jenkins, an Octoroon is Set way down yonder in the play featuring Saycon Sengbloh in April 2012 anger it. A photograph of a 19th-century melodrama and a dazzling postmodernist critique of it April.!, Jacobs-Jenkins also cites Peter Brooks ' the Melodramatic Imagination as an `` Octoroon challenges conventional of!

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