Photo by Charr Crail
Photo by Charr Crail
AN OCTOROON by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Directed by Judith Moreland
2014 Obie Award Winner for Best New Play
August 30 – October 1, 2017
Capital Stage
Press Release (pdf)
Behind the Scenes of AN OCTOROON at Capital Stage
"This play is provocative and unsettling, uncomfortable, but also hilariously funny."
-- Sacramento News & Review
"...one of the best productions of a great play I have ever seen...Let me start my long list of plaudits with the director of the production."
-- Meals from the Marketplace
"...a remarkable and innovative show, a raucous comedy fueled by deadly serious intent. It’s an audacious, high-risk maneuver, but it manages to shoot the moon. You won’t forget this one, if you have the nerve to see it."
Judge Peyton is dead and his plantation Terrebonne is in financial ruins. Peyton’s handsome nephew George arrives as heir apparent and quickly falls in love with Zoe, a beautiful octoroon. But the evil overseer M’Closky has other plans—for both Terrebonne and Zoe. In 1859, a famous Irishman wrote The Octoroon, a play about slavery in America. Now an American tries to write his own.
“An Octoroon invites us to laugh loudly and easily at how naïve the old stereotypes now seem, until nothing seems funny at all…Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins is using a genre associated with exclamation points to ask questions not only about the portrayal of race in America but also about the inadequate means we have for such portrayals. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to reveal that this show ends—spectacularly and hauntingly—with all of us in the dark.”
– The New York Times