Abstract
Dion Boucicault's 1859 sensation melodrama The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana attracted audiences with emotionally charged situations, such as a slave auction, combined with the visual sensation of a realistic depiction of a scene of spectacular danger, the onstage burning of a steamboat. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' 2014 adaptation called An Octoroon, while departing significantly from Boucicault's approach to visual storytelling, also uses a visual sensation to create an emotional impact. Jacobs-Jenkins invites an audience to enjoy Boucicault's storytelling, revisiting a melodrama now rarely revived, while simultaneously inviting them to engage with and critique the troubling racial stereotypes of the original.
Dion Boucicault's 1859 hit play The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana is a typical example of the sensation drama – melodrama employing realistic depiction of exciting dangers and disasters to enhance emotionally thrilling situations. A form pioneered by Boucicault, sensation drama was notable for showing scenes of spectacular danger as well as strikingly realistic pictures of life. The ‘sensation’ came not just from the physical peril of the characters or the high stakes emotional turmoil, but also from the sense that the audience was viewing a scene taken directly from contemporary life. Boucicault, the commercial showman, was able to exploit provocative material to draw a crowd, while carefully avoiding taking a too explicit stand on the controversial social issues raised by the dramatic situation. Branden Jacob-Jenkins’ 2014 adaptation called An Octoroon, while departing significantly from Boucicault's approach to visual storytelling, also uses a visual sensation to create an emotional impact. Jacobs-Jenkins invites an audience to enjoy Boucicault's storytelling, revisiting a play now rarely revived owing to great challenges that discourage production, while simultaneously inviting them to engage with and critique the troubling racial stereotypes of the original.
By 1859 Boucicault, prolific playwright, actor, and stager of plays, had begun to achieve particular success with melodramas employing novel scenic effects, such as Pauvrette, featuring an avalanche, and The Corsican Brothers, which introduced the ghost glide. 1 He also had turned out melodramas based on current news events, such as Jessie Brown: or, The Relief of Lucknow 2 or offering recognisable glimpses of familiar cityscapes, as in The Poor of New York. 3 Another melodrama in Boucicault's signature style, combining spectacular scenic effects with realistic details of contemporary life, The Octoroon offered a highly topical examination of American slavery, with a premiere on 6 December 1859, just days after the hanging of John Brown.
The Octoroon is appropriately considered a sensation drama, though it received the label retrospectively. The term sensation drama caught on when Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn, adapted from Gerald Griffin's novel The Collegians, became a hit in 1860. The New York Times noted ‘its striking merits as a sensational drama’ on 7 April 1860 and advertisements begin to label it a sensation. 4 William Winter attributed to Boucicault the invention of the term ‘Sensation Drama’, which became widely used following the success of The Colleen Bawn. 5 During the 1860s, sensation novels, borrowing their name from sensation drama, became the rage. These novels sometimes drew inspiration from true crime stories in the newspapers, as well as from coverage of divorce cases. According to Andrew Maunder, their ‘shocking plots which were believed to assault the nerves and make the flesh “creep” centered on the depiction of lurid, exaggerated or sensational events in which murder, adultery, bigamy, illegitimacy, kidnapping, madness and fraud proliferated’. 6 In drama, a sensation scene usually means the thrilling combination of technical/scenic elements and a life or death situation in the play (sometimes also involving acrobatic skills on part of the performers). The term came to suggest both the sense of physical spectacle and related bodily response of an audience and the idea that sensations were widely popular, much discussed, must-experience events. Whether occurring in the city where the audience lived or displaced to an interesting setting more remote in time or place, the sensation usually connected to the audience's excitement in seeing the recreation of the real world played out right in front of them. Lynn M. Voskuil notes, ‘playgoers were amazed because sensation scenes seemed so real; they grew excited because they could feel as if they were really there’. 7 She further suggests that an audience could actively suspend disbelief, being simultaneously aware of the artifice of a theatrical illusion in front of them and excited by seeing scenes displayed and enacted in such a life-like way.
Boucicault's The Octoroon was sensational in several ways – not just in its big action sequence of a burning boat and pursuit of the escaping villain, but also in its ‘real’ detailed picture of contemporary life (including photographic apparatus and a Southern plantation setting as the Civil War approaches) and in the emotional sensation, particularly of the slave auction and the ‘impossible’ romantic subplot of the white-appearing heroine who can never marry the white hero. Adapted by Boucicault from Mayne Reid's novel The Quadroon, The Octoroon, with the subtitle ‘Life in Louisiana’ begins with the recognisable structure of a rent day play. Mrs Peyton is about to lose Terrebonne, her plantation. Boucicault, supposedly knowledgeable about Louisiana owing to a brief period managing the Gaiety in New Orleans in 1855–56, relies on conventions of the minstrel stage with actors in blackface depicting the happy slaves of Terrebonne. Of course, in presenting his play of contemporary American life, the Irishman would have had more first-hand experience of Louisiana than had most of his original audiences in New York and later in London.
The title character is Zoe, natural daughter of Mrs Peyton's deceased husband Judge Peyton. Though Zoe is white in appearance and portrayed by a white actress – Boucicault's wife Agnes Robertson originated the role – her legal and social position is nevertheless defined by the fact that she is one-eighth black. Also on the scene is George Peyton, the judge's nephew and heir, recently returned having spent years being educated in Europe. George falls in love with Zoe, not realising she is mixed race. Of course, most of the other male characters are also attracted to Zoe, including the villainous former overseer, Jacob M’Closky, and the current overseer, Salem Scudder, who notes that Zoe is ‘worth her weight in sunshine’. 8 Zoe is believed to be a freed slave until M’Closky discovers papers that show her father was in debt at the time of her emancipation and not legally able to remove her from property status. In order to intercept a letter that will save the plantation and foil his plans, M’Closky kills the young slave boy, Paul. Unaware that the murder has been captured by a camera with a new self-developing plate, M’Closky pins blame on Wahnotee, an Indian character, who is presented as Paul's loyal friend and guardian. In Boucicault's original five act version of The Octoroon the villain is apprehended and dispatched and the plantation saved, but not before Zoe, enacting her destiny as a ‘tragic mulatto’, kills herself. 9
The premiere of The Octoroon at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City was immediately controversial, with critics divided about whether the piece was abolitionist or anti-abolitionist, with earliest assertions appearing in print before the play had even been performed.
10
Joseph Jefferson, the original Scudder, would later note, there were various opinions as to which way the play leaned—whether it was Northern or Southern in its sympathy. The truth of the matter is, it was non-committal. The dialogue and characters of the play made one feel for the South, but the actions proclaimed against slavery, and called loudly for its abolition'
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While Boucicault's intentions for the piece remain in dispute, part of his aim was clearly to make money. Boucicault and Agnes Robertson, originating the roles of Wahnotee and Zoe, were involved in a contract dispute with William Stuart and Thomas C. Fields, managers of the Winter Garden. 17 Boucicault attempted to end the run of The Octoroon, citing safety concerns after his wife received threatening letters for appearing in the piece. 18 However, his main motivation appears to have been to retain a larger share of the hit play's profits for himself. When Stuart and Fields replaced Boucicault and Robertson in The Octoroon and continued to run the play, Boucicault sought an injunction to prevent further performances. While the legal challenge played out slowly in court, The Octoroon continued to play at the Winter Garden until 21 January 1860, when the managers closed their production and sold the scenery and rights (which really belonged to Boucicault who had copyrighted his play) to the managers of the New Bowery Theatre. Two days later, The Octoroon, with the cast from the Winter Garden production, began a run at the New Bowery, while a rival production opened at the old Bowery Theatre the following day. 19 More than two years later Boucicault eventually won a judgement against the managers of the New Bowery production. This was an example of Boucicault's vigilance in bringing actions against unauthorised productions of his plays, even as he was willing to allow other managers to stage them if they paid him. Multiple promptbooks survive for The Octoroon documenting productions subsequent to the original. Unlike some of his later Irish sensation melodramas (Arrah-na-Pogue, The Shaughraun), which were used extensively as vehicle pieces by Boucicault the actor, the appeal of The Octoroon was not dependent on Boucicault appearing in it. By selling permission to stage the play to various actor managers, Boucicault could continue to earn money from his play while he performed other material. In a letter dated 5 November 1874, Boucicault estimated that The Octoroon had been performed 1800 times. 20
For the London premiere of The Octoroon at the Adelphi in November 1861, Agnes Robertson returned to the role of Zoe while Boucicault assumed the role of Salem Scudder. The strongest indication that Boucicault may have intended The Octoroon to make an abolitionist statement is seen in his stated reluctance to change the play's ending to please an English audience. After a review in The Times on 19 November 1861 reported audience disappointment with the unhappy ending that left Zoe dead rather than married to George, Boucicault published a letter asserting [i]n the death of the Octoroon lies the moral and teaching of the whole. Had this girl been saved, and the drama brought to a happy end, the horrors of her position, irremediable from the very nature of the institution of slavery, would subside into the condition of a temporary annoyance.
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In any version, The Octoroon almost entirely disappeared from the stage in the later twentieth century. This was not merely owing to changing tastes in popular entertainment. The racial politics of the piece – including several slave characters apparently derived from the minstrel show – made it virtually un-producible, although it continued to attract the interest of scholars. 25 The Octoroon provides a popular text for considering legal and social definitions of race. Jennifer DeVere Brody notes how Zoe disrupts ‘oppositions of slave and free, white and black’ while ‘underscoring the extent to which race must be understood as “performative”’. 26 Joseph Roach proposes that ‘[t]he body of the white-appearing octoroon … offers itself as the crucible in which a strange alchemy of cultural surrogation takes place’. 27 Considering the scene where Zoe directs George's attention to the signs of blackness faintly visible on her body, Daphne A. Brooks marks ‘the text's obsession with voyeurism and visually policing racial liminality’. 28 Moving beyond a focus on white and black identity, Katy L. Chiles analyses the complexity of racial and ethnic coding in Boucicault's play, noting that it ‘dramatizes the problems and processes of passing or assimilating into a specific kind of U.S. “whiteness”, and it stages the anxieties this provoked for national identity formation in the mid-nineteenth-century United States’. 29
Boucicault's The Octoroon initially attracted audiences with its sensation, relying both on visual sensation and emotionally charged situations bound up with contemporary racial tensions. Jacobs-Jenkins engages with many of the questions raised by scholars in recent years about racial identity and the performance of race in The Octoroon, while finding a way to bring Boucicault's popular melodrama back to the stage. After examining the sensations of Boucicault's play and evidence of how the visual sensation was staged, this paper will consider the radically distinct approach to visual sensation in Jacobs-Jenkins adaptation of the play.
Sensation of the Burning Boat
The most famous sensation of Boucicault's play was the burning of the steamboat in Act IV. As Boucicault described the scene in the stage directions the setting is ‘The wharf. The Steamer “Magnolia,” alongside, L., a bluff rock, R.U.E.’ 30 At the top of the act, most of the male characters, except for George, gather at the boat as cotton is being hauled on board just before departure. M’Closky calls attention to a few barrels of turpentine that have been loaded and could easily catch fire. Wahnotee is apprehended and communicates that Paul is dead and he has buried him. His bloody axe, a half emptied rum bottle, and the smashed photographic apparatus are also discovered. M’Closky calls for Wahnotee to be lynched, but Scudder intervenes and the men agree to hold a trial on the spot. When Pete discovers the photographic plate with an image of M’Closky killing Paul, the gathering becomes a makeshift trial of M’Closky. He is found guilty, but Scudder keeps the crowd from carrying out a lynching on the spot. Instead, M’Closky is put down the aft hatch, where he immediately starts a fire. Boucicault's printed directions note ‘Cry of “fire” heard—Engine bells heard—steam whistle noise.’ The Captain orders the boat to be cut free from the shore. The directions state ‘The Steamer moves off—fire kept up—M’Closky re-enters, r., swimming on.’ After a speech, M’Closky swims off left. The stage directions continue, ‘Wahnotee swims on—finds trail—follows him. The Steamer floats on at back burning. Tableaux.’ 31
Promptbooks from early productions of The Octoroon give a good indication of how the burning boat sensation scene was staged. In all extant promptbooks, a large scenic unit representing the boat is placed somewhat downstage for most of the act and is drawn offstage shortly after the fire action begins. A much smaller cut-out of a boat is then pushed into view upstage, creating the impression of the same boat seen at a distance out in the river. It is the smaller boat that is seen burning up. The scene plot found in the James Stark promptbook in the New York Public Library instructs the stagehands to set the scene with ‘wood’ wings and to ‘set waters X stage and foreground’, with second and third grooves indicated as the position for water.
32
Similarly, the scene plot included in the Henry Willard, Howard Athenaeum promptbook, indicates that scenery should be placed in grooves 6 and 3, with ‘wood’ at back. The scene is further described as ‘Landing of the Achafala (sic) River. Dark water Landscape. Set waters and foreground, down to set steamboat, to work off … . Platform from stage to boat.’
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The scene plot in the Stark promptbook provides additional details: Large practical steam boat Xs stage. The boiler deck must be cut out with platform behind and gang way plank about two feet wide, down stage—The windows of the Cabin must be transparent and lit up. This steamer occupies the whole stage with bow off L. and backs off R 2. Boat tracks ready behind foreground R to X to RC. Then small profile steamer to come on from R to C on fire.
34
A landing on the Atchafalaya river—A steamboat with planks on shore, fills the scene—The boiler deck with boilers, R.H.—Freight, cotton bales, wood, L.H.—Cabin deck and guards above lighted from within—Through the boiler-deck is seen the river and the opposite shore—R.H. in front, a small rock, out from the mound of the bank—On the L.H. in front, trees, and a pile of wood, placard, 2.25—‘Night’—An iron basket with pine knots alight is hoisted on a pole, L.H.—Ratts, C., is discovered chaffering with a man, the owner of the wood; he is counting the price on a piece of shingle—A file of negroes are rolling on cotton bales from R.H. 1 E., up the plank R. on the steamer, and off R. and returning—A file of deck-hands are piling wood, coming on L.H. E. and on to steamer by plank, L.H. and off L. then returning.
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The men hurry about, shouting, the steamer moves off; backing, her bow follows off. The scene now reveals the river and the water flowing in the moonlight. A red glow and confused noise off R. Presently McClosky, swimming down stream, appears in the river, he lands L.H. behind some reeds.
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Sensation of New Technology
Another sensation that Boucicault included in his play was the use of new technology, in this case a photographic ‘apparatus’, to solve the murder case and advance the plot. At the start of Act II, which takes place at the wharf, Scudder has set up his camera with four plates, one of them ‘prepared with a self-developing liquid’, which he has invented. 43 In utilising this plot device Boucicault relies on audience familiarity with photography, combined with their uncertainty about exactly how the technology works. It was not especially important that cameras did not work precisely as shown on stage, as the incorporation of a yet to be invented technology contributed to audience perception that the stage spectacle provided a realistically detailed, novel and up-to-the-moment depiction of contemporary life. By ‘anticipat[ing] the day when photos would be regularly admitted as evidence in courts of law, and subsequently implicated in all aspects of the law enforcement system’, 44 Boucicault provides a hint of the power of a new technology, at the very start of what will become the ‘very culture of photographic surveillance’. 45 While not as spectacular as the burning boat, the solution of the murder through photographic evidence provides a sensation of novelty, with the excitement of thwarting a villain in a new way. Boucicault does not simply present the photo plate as objective evidence of M’Closky's guilt, an idea that could be readily accepted by an audience who had seen the murder enacted on stage, but gives the moment greater emphasis by ‘representing the camera as an instrument of divine justice’. 46 As no human within the world of the play witnessed the crime or deliberately photographed it, Scudder declares that ‘the eye of the eternal’ was responsible for capturing the image. 47 The camera thus serves as a deus ex machina, both a plot device miraculously freeing an innocent man and ‘one of the most literal Gods-in-a-machine ever to grace a stage’. 48
Sensation of the Auction Scene
The focus of Act III is the auction of the Terrebonne plantation slaves. This is simply staged with a table in Mrs Peyton's house used as an auction block. Boucicault does not opt to recreate the full spectacle of the New Orleans slave auctions, held in the rotunda of the St Louis hotel and described as performances by Roach in Cities of the Dead. According to Roach, the ‘fancy-girl’ auctions of quadroons and octoroons, featuring ‘the sale of relatively well-educated and relatively white women into sexual bondage’, were an especially popular draw in New Orleans. 49 Boucicault exploits the emotional sensation of Zoe's unfolding situation as her status rapidly changes from natural daughter and freed former slave of Judge Peyton to slave and purchasable property. While the plight of the black slaves on auction is treated somewhat comically (old Pete dances to increase his purchase price, while Solon, Grace, and their children express relief at not being sold apart), the picture of a white woman in such a vulnerable position transforms the routine proceedings into a thrillingly high-stakes situation. In the play, Boucicault uses the auction as a dramatic hazard primarily affecting a single heroine, rather than explicitly interrogating the whole institution of slavery. For example, the threat of the family being forcibly separated is minimised when the kindly owners of neighbouring plantations agree to avoid that outcome once it is called to their attention.
Sensation of Impossible Love
In the second act when Zoe informs George that she is an octoroon and legally forbidden from marrying him, George suggests leaving the country together. However, Zoe upholds the social expectations of the time and place, refusing a marriage that would upset Mrs Peyton. Later as she anticipates sexual violation at the hands of M’Closky, who purchased her at the auction, Zoe concludes that the only solution is to kill herself. Zoe swallows poison and Act V concludes with an emotional tableau of Zoe dying, gazing on George, who holds her head as she reclines on a sofa, and then ‘George lowers her head gently.—Kneels.—Others form picture’. 50 Following this tableau, Boucicault specified a second picture with directions, ‘Darken front of house and stage. Light fires.—Draw flats and discover Paul's grave.—M’Closky dead on it. –Wahnotee standing triumphantly over him.’ Beyond wrapping up a plot strand by conclusively demonstrating that Wahnotee has killed M’Closky, this reveal moves the audience from the tragedy of Zoe's suicide back to a more traditional melodramatic emphasis on poetic justice through vengeance against the villain. In addition, the second tableau provides additional spectacle including a glow of fire to recall the burning steamer.
Many readers of The Octoroon would only be aware of the tableau of Zoe's death. John Degen has pointed out that Arthur Hobson Quinn left out the final tableau in the edited version of the play that he included in Representative American Plays (NY, 1917).
51
Following Quinn, the final tableau is missing from several other published versions of the play, but existing promptbooks document that the double tableau was a regular feature of early productions of the play.
52
There is some variation in how the final stage picture is described in the promptbooks. A bit more emphasis is given to the character Salem Scudder in the last act of a promptbook which belonged to actor Charles Wheatleigh. In this version, Scudder wipes Zoe's head with a wet cloth. When Zoe asks to look at George, ‘Scudder raises her in his arms. George kneels beside the couch.’ Scudder is given the last line, ‘Poor Child; she is free!’ The directions continue, A pause. Tableau. The stage becomes dark. The scene above opens, and discovers the scene of the landing. Paul's grave, R.H., the river at the back. The body of McClosky [sic] is stretched across the grave, his face and neck traversed with blood. The Indian, Wahnotee, is passing from the spot.
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All this sensation helped to make The Octoroon a popular play in the first couple decades after it was written. Although there have been revivals of the play in the US over the years, increasingly productions of The Octoroon are viewed as curiosities, both because the sensation drama and its special effects which wowed audiences in 1859 now seem quaint and because the racial stereotypes of the original have become unacceptable.
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The problem of how to share The Octoroon with a contemporary audience is cleverly solved by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who wrestles with the racism of the original and also develops a new approach to scenic spectacle and visual sensation in his An Octoroon. Jacobs-Jenkins has stated that he was obsessed with Boucicault's play since he encountered it in graduate school, noting that ‘despite its being offensive, it's an effective piece of theatre’.
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Beyond studying the production history of The Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins found inspiration in Boucicault's essay ‘The Art of Dramatic Composition’ in which Boucicault observes that ‘drama is a thing to be seen’.
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Of particular interest to Jacobs-Jenkins is Boucicault's idea that If such an imitation of human beings, suffering their fate, be well contrived and executed in all its parts, the spectator is led to feel a particular sympathy with the artificial joys or sorrow of which he is the witness. This condition of his mind is called the theatrical illusion.
The meta-theatrical approach to the play is set up in the prologue where an author stand-in character called BJJ introduces himself as a ‘black playwright’ and adds ‘I don't know exactly what that means’. 63 He is soon joined onstage by a character called Playwright, who identifies himself as Dion Boucicault. Though the use of blackface is unmarked in Boucicault's play, Jacobs-Jenkins makes the wearing of blackface, and by extension the performance of racial identity, part of his spectacle by having actors apply make-up onstage before playing characters in whiteface and redface, as well as blackface. BJJ, making reference to an early workshop production of Jacobs-Jenkins’ adaptation in which two white actors left the production, 64 puts on white make-up to play the roles of George and M’Closky. Playwright applies red make-up to perform the role of Wahnotee – a part performed in the original production by Boucicault. Meanwhile, the Assistant, a part Jacobs-Jenkins says should be ‘played by a Native American actor, a mixed-race actor, a South Asian actor, or one who can pass as Native American’, puts on blackface to play the roles of Pete and Paul. 65 Jacobs-Jenkins’ casting notes provide the reader with an indication that racial identity is a central concern of the play, as well as offering clear guidance to any theatre that plans to produce An Octoroon, with ‘actor ethnicities listed in order of preference’. 66 In performance, the white, black, or red make-up applied to the faces of actors who read as African-American, white, and Native-American signals to an audience not just that the actors will be performing characters whose race does not match their own, but that this performance of race is a key element of the production to be noted and observed. Before he even begins to present the events of Boucicault's play, Jacobs-Jenkins has alerted his audience to pay attention to the way race is understood and performed within the world of the play. In Boucicault's script and his own productions of the play, the use of blackface and redface is not pointed up in any way. Whiteness is the default setting and whites maintain the power to define and regulate racial others. With the discussion in his prologue about being a ‘black playwright’ Jacobs-Jenkins suggests that white continues to be the implied normal status that allows a white playwright to be named simply as playwright. The cross-racial casting of the male characters, emphasised with garish face paint, calls attention to racial categories and hints that the social construction of those categories may be more significant than any biological essence. The inequality of nineteenth-century racial categories reflected in the representation of race within popular culture of the period still haunts contemporary race relations. By contrast, Jacobs-Jenkins does not suggest cross-racial casting for the female characters. 67 This provides another perspective on the significance of race and the degree to which times have changed. The tragic aspect of Zoe's fate is diminished by the end of Jacob-Jenkins’ play, which may remind an audience that being one-eighth black does not hold the same dire legal and social consequences in 2015 as it did in 1859.
As Jacobs-Jenkins reworks Boucicault's story, he streamlines it by reducing the number of characters. For example, Scudder is eliminated and his camera given to George, while Mrs Peyton is left offstage (or ‘upstairs dying’ to quote another character).
68
He also reimagines the female slave characters, noting in his stage directions, ‘I don't know what a real slave sounded like. And neither do you.’
69
Reviewing the original production Ben Brantley noted, the female slaves … gossip blithely and casually, in 21st-century vernacular. The incongruity is hilarious… . Then the laughter dies in your throat, because what these characters are talking about so lightly – the only reality they've ever known – is unspeakable.
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Beyond inviting audience critique of the underlying racial prejudice of the source material, Jacobs-Jenkins also tackles the other major obstacle to staging the play by reconceiving the scenic spectacle and visual sensation. Part of the original appeal of Boucicault's play was the sensation of the burning riverboat, but recreating that spectacle using the techniques of 1859 would be unlikely to impress an audience accustomed to Hollywood blockbusters and computer generated images. Any newly designed, realistically thrilling steamboat fire is likely to be beyond the resources of any particular production and distract from Jacobs-Jenkins’ main interest in revisiting the play. Even the use of nineteenth-century scenic conventions such as changeable flats set in grooves, and back shutters or drops would be more labour intensive to reconstruct and employ today now that they are no longer the standard practice, with stock units representing ‘woods’ or other generic locales available in every theatre. Not surprisingly then, the scenic elements specified in Jacobs-Jenkins text are much different from those in Boucicault's.
For his prologue and fourth act Jacobs-Jenkins specifies an ‘empty, unfortunate-looking theatre’. 72 For the play's premiere at the 73 seat Soho Rep in 2014 the prologue was played in what appeared to be a mainly empty, unadorned performance space. Set designer Mimi Lien provided a surprise set change to the plantation of Act I, accomplished by a back wall falling forward as the character Playwright exited through a rear door, revealing a white back wall and white floor covered in cotton balls. 73 When the production was restaged for a run at the larger Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn in 2015, the falling back wall effect was retained, though in a more elaborate system involving ‘pneumatics and safety sensors’. 74 The spectacle of an unusual set change is not specified in Jacobs-Jenkins’ text. His direction stating ‘[t]he empty, unfortunate-looking theatre, again’ 75 for Act IV, is a marked departure from Boucicault's Act IV which calls for ‘The Wharf. The Steamer ‘Magnolia’ alongside, L. a bluff rock, R.U.E.’ and ends with the burning steamer floating by at the back of the stage. The Soho Rep production accomplished the change away from the plantation by pushing over the back white wall, a repetition of the earlier falling wall effect. 76
Jacobs-Jenkins makes no attempt to visually present the spectacle of the most noted sensation scene in Boucicault's The Octoroon. Instead, Jacobs-Jenkins has his characters describe what happens in Boucicault's Act IV. They mark the action, rather than fully, mimetically embodying it. Presenting the action in a Brechtian manner, Jacobs-Jenkins has his characters deliver lines such as ‘And George's like’, ‘And someone's like’, or ‘And they're basically all like’ to frame paraphrases from Boucicault's ship board trial and near lynching scene. Jacobs-Jenkins sets this up with a discussion between BJJ and Playwright. The two writers explain that owing to ‘limited resources’ the audience will NOT be seeing something that was a major part of the appeal of the original, while they also provide some audience education about the sensation scene. In this way, Jacobs-Jenkins not only conveys how the nineteenth-century sensation drama worked on stage, but also primes his audience to receive the substitute sensation scene of his play. Playwright explains that the sensation should convince an audience ‘for just a second, that what they're seeing is real and dangerous and sort of novel’. 77 Later in their recounting of the plot, BJJ asserts that the sensation of solving a murder with a photograph would have been exciting and novel for nineteenth-century audiences, but would no longer have the same effect. The character proposes other possibilities for creating a sensation for the contemporary audience, such as sacrificing an animal or setting the actual theatre on fire.
Then, after letting the audience know that the sensation scene is important, but also suggesting that it is an effect that can no longer be accomplished, Jacobs-Jenkins delivers his sensation. BJJ says he wants to try something and has Assistant wheel out a projector and project a lynching photo onto the wall. For the Soho Rep production the image selected was that of the 7 August 1930 double lynching in Marion, Indiana. Projection designer Jeff Sugg reported we used a long fade of something coming into focus, with the photo projected onto a scrim. Then behind the two figures were black sculpted replicas of this image in Styrofoam, which had slight movement to them, creating double-edge images.
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Once the image is projected, the newly sombre actors restart their enactment of the central actions of Act IV (the defence of Wahnotee, discussion of the newly discovered photographic evidence, the accusation of M’Closky) ‘in the light of the projection’, and continue the performance after BJJ calls for the projection to be turned off. Rather than scenic spectacle, actor skill is showcased as a single actor plays both George and M’Closky in a dramatic confrontation between the two characters. After the character Pete enters to announce that M’Closky has set the boat on fire, spectators of the Soho Rep production experienced a simple fire effect created with smoke, some red light and sirens. Jacobs-Jenkins stage directions call for the sound of fire and men panicking. He writes ‘Actual fire would be great’. 80 Yet a reader has to assume Jacobs-Jenkins does not expect real fire on stage as he gives both Playwright and Assistant lines describing the boat on fire and ensuing chaos. While Jacobs-Jenkins provides stage directions that could be realised in a simple, low-budget manner, he leaves the exact design choices open for interpretation, suggesting sensational possibilities for theatres with both the imagination and means to achieve spectacular effects. A notable production that played with real fire was presented at the National Theatre, London, in 2018, having originally been staged at the Orange Tree Theatre in 2017. In Georgia Lowe's arena stage design, sections of wooden flooring are pulled up part way through the show to reveal a flooded understage. 81 BJJ pours some petrol on the water and, in the words of Helen Lewis of the New Statesman they ‘SET THE STAGE ON FIRE. This is not a metaphor. Petrol. A lighter. Flames.’ 82
Once the boat fire is underway Wahnotee attacks M’Closky with his tomahawk and with M’Closky's knife, an action that closely resembles that in Boucicault's four act version. Jacobs-Jenkins makes an addition to this action by having Wahnotee find rope to wrap around M’Closky's neck and drag him off. In the performance at Soho Rep videotaped for the Theatre on Film and Tape archive, the blond wig got knocked off of M’Closky during this action, revealing the BJJ character. 83 The layered image suggests not only Wahnotee's revenge on the villain M’Closky, but also a lynching enacted on the body of the African-American actor performing the role of the ‘black playwright’.
After Wahnotee drags a screaming M’Closky off stage, Jacobs-Jenkins specifies that the noise and flames build and then are suddenly extinguished. Assistant wanders in with a small lantern and reports ‘Then the boat explodes’. After a stage direction suggesting a possible shower of cotton balls onto the audience and the lantern going out, Assistant says ‘Sensation’. Then, after a beat, ‘Anyway. The point of this whole thing was to make you feel something’. 84 In this conclusion to Act IV, Jacobs-Jenkins underscores how his play, like Boucicault's, utilises a visual sensation to create an emotional response in an audience. However, rather than heightening the melodrama, Jacobs-Jenkins’ visual sensation jolts an audience out of laughing at the over-the-top racism of a previous era. As one production reviewer noted ‘he shows us just one photograph that sears the horror of racism into your retina’. 85 The photographic image Jacobs-Jenkins presents is not the fictional lynching, nearly enacted in the play, of a wrongly accused Native American, or the quickly averted lynching of a guilty white man. Instead, it is the documentation of an actual lynching of two black men. Verna A. Foster asserts that Jacobs-Jenkins included this image ‘[t]o shock his contemporary audience into experiencing, and not just intellectually recognizing, a monstrous act of injustice’. 86 If this sensation works as intended, an audience is stunned into trying to make sense of what they are seeing and its connection to the unfolding theatrical entertainment. They are encouraged to ask, ‘[i]s there a relationship between the two’? 87 While the play does not provide a definitive answer to the question of ‘the illusion of suffering versus actual suffering’, Jacobs-Jenkins presents the lynching as a real-world consequence of the racial prejudice and violence portrayed in the popular culture artefact of Boucicault's play. He is in dangerous territory as the inclusion of the image could be perceived as exploiting the actual suffering of real individuals as a short cut to creating an emotional response in his audience. There is also the potential that the shock value of the image will diminish with overuse, eventually creating no more sensation than a burning two-dimensional cut-out of a steamboat. Ben Brantley's second review notes how, after the playwright interrupts the play to explain that ‘the theater used to manipulate its audiences with jerry-built plots and plot-hole-covering sensationalism’, Jacobs-Jenkins ‘then manipulated us by just such means, including one truly upsetting video projection toward the end’. 88 Despite this focus on manipulation, Brantley asserts that An Octoroon ‘a work based on a terminally dated play from more than 150 years ago may turn out to be this decade's most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today’. The lynching photo selected for the Soho Rep production includes a number of white spectators, inviting further reflection on the connection between racial stereotypes consumed as entertainment and the horrifying celebration of deadly violence on view in the projected image. 89
The conclusion to Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon also turns the focus back to the audience. Jacobs-Jenkins’ Act V does not end with a tableau of mourners surrounding Zoe, with a second, upstage tableau confirming the death of M’Closky. Instead, Jacobs-Jenkins sends Zoe off-stage with her bottle of sleeping potion and turns his attention to Minnie and Dido, slaves whose fate is not considered worthy of attention in Boucicault's play. Though both are comically unaware of plot developments that will change their lives, their anachronistic banter invites an audience to think about all the people oppressed by slavery, not just the single tragic octoroon. When they exit, Br’er Rabbit enters with a gavel and a tomahawk and looks directly at the audience. Rather than an emotionally charged double tableau that ties up all the plot elements, Jacobs-Jenkins gives his audience a challenge of how to process these signs of injustice, representing the slave auction, the murder of Paul, and the wrongful accusation of Wahnotee. 90 The last image is followed by a blackout and Jacobs-Jenkins' final stage direction, ‘[e]veryone sings’. 91 In the Soho Rep production the cast sang, ‘when you burn it down what do you put there in its place?’ 92 The question is apt as Jacobs-Jenkins’ adaptation seems to answer a question about what to do with this historical artefact of theatrical performance. He has remade Boucicault's play into a work that is accessible and engaging for a twenty-first century audience. He provides a taste of the original play, rather than a close replica, offering it as an object of interest to be examined and critiqued. Rejecting the stage technology and design elements that had made Boucicault's play so popular in the nineteenth century, Jacobs-Jenkins nevertheless does borrow a technique from Boucicault in relying on a visual sensation for emotional impact. He then pushes it a step further, expecting his audience to not just be entertained by feeling for the characters in an exciting situation, but also to be pushed to grapple with the real-world implications of depictions of racial and social injustice.