Editorial

Nicholas Daly and Aoife Monks

Debt is a theme that runs through Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon. When the Irish-born writer, actor and impresario wrote the play in 1859 after a series of flops, he was severely in debt and badly in need of a hit. To entice audiences to the struggling Winter Theatre on Broadway, Boucicault promised its lessee, William Stuart, a ‘Mississippi piece’, that is, one set among the slave plantations of the American South.¹ New York audiences were fascinated by the plantation culture of the South, with its contrasts of genteel living and the most brutal exploitation of enslaved people.  In The Octoroon Boucicault would offer them a little of both for the purposes of entertainment.

Of course, debt is crucial to the story of the play too. Boucicault reworked the romance plot of Thomas Mayne Reid’s recent novel The Quadroon: Adventures in the Far West (1856), in which the white narrator falls in love with the beautiful mixed race ‘quadroon’ Aurore Besançon on a Louisiana plantation. In Boucicault’s version, George Peyton, just back from Europe, and heir to the financially ruined Terrebonne plantation, falls for the white-appearing Zoe, only to find that she is mixed-race and is enslaved.  When the debts of the plantation are called in, she is auctioned off with the field hands and servants, but when the scheming villain M’Closky buys her, she takes poison. M’Closky’s villainy is revealed, but it is too late for Zoe, who dies.

Boucicault’s The Octoroon has come to be seen as one of the first ‘American’ plays. It established many of the conventions of the Wild West and frontier drama that have been so influential for the stage and screen ever since.² But while the play is centred on the question of race, with Black, mixed-race and Native American characters populating the stage, these characters were all played by white actors in the original production – including Boucicault’s Scottish wife Agnes as Zoe, who as the star, was to receive half of the profits.³ Here Boucicault drew on the popular blackface entertainment of the period, the minstrel shows that had been pioneered by Thomas Dartmouth Rice. With their mixture of comic sketches and song and dance, these turned slavery into light entertainment, fostering the idea of the South as a pleasant pastoral survival in a modern age, rather than the most brutal end of the transatlantic cotton industry. Boucicault’s play relied upon the depiction of people of colour whose own voices and experiences were absent from his stage, producing a series of theatrical debts that have underpinned show business ever since.

When Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play An Octoroon made its off-Broadway debut in 2014, it demanded that these debts be acknowledged.  He did so by deploying the extreme images and feelings that made up Boucicault’s melodramatic practice, exploring what it means to ‘inherit’ a theatrical canon, and a form like melodrama, that did so much to promote – and invent – racial hierarchies. This exploration of melodrama was part of Jacobs-Jenkins’ ongoing investigation into theatrical form that has characterised his body of work, navigating blackface minstrelsy in Neighbours (2010), theatrical naturalism in Appropriate (2014), medieval drama in Everybody (an adaptation of Everyman, 2017), and Greek tragedy in Girls (an adaptation of The Bacchae, in 2019).

An Octoroon takes up the theatricality of Boucicault’s melodrama with relish, mining its capacity to expose the constructed nature of inherited racial categories.  After all, Jacobs-Jenkins implicates himself personally into the act of wrangling with the inheritance of this text, making a Black playwright named “BJJ” the lead character in the play, who goes on to ‘white-up’ and play both George and M’Closky, as if embodying the good/evil moral dualities of melodrama itself. And yet, the hyper-theatricality of melodrama is also the source of Jacobs-Jenkins’ own ambivalence towards the source material. Melodrama showed audiences that race was performed rather than being innate, but this did not undo racial violence. It rather demonstrated the harm that performance can do. Boucicault’s ‘American play’ established the conventions of ‘happy’ enslaved people, murderous ‘Indians’, and lynch law as a source of entertainment, while relying on the violent absences wrought by the minstrel stage. These tropes have had long-standing repercussions not only for the subsequent casting and narrative practices of stage and screen, but also for the ways in which people of colour and the legacies of slavery have been perceived in the world ever since.

Boucicault’s play was itself deeply ambivalent about the meanings and politics of slavery, minimizing the culpability of southern plantation owners, and the moral discomfort of audiences. The villain of the piece is M’Closky, a Connecticut Yankee, and a version of the social-climbing and avaricious ‘gombeen man’ who appears in his Irish plays; the planters by contrast are warm-hearted, generous, and even willing to pay a few extra dollars to keep enslaved African American families together. Boucicault had some experience of the South, having leased a New Orleans theatre for some months in 1856. We do not know if he ever attended the city’s notorious ‘fancy girl’ auctions of light-skinned African-Americans, though in an unpublished 1855 letter he states that he defended slavery as an institution while in the South.⁴ Later in a much-cited letter to the London Times (20 November 1861) he claimed that although slavery was deeply objectionable, he had ‘every facility for observation’ of slavery while in New Orleans, and had ‘never witnessed any ill-treatment’ of enslaved African-Americans; he felt that the ‘restraints upon their liberty [were] so slight as to be rarely perceptible.’

Jacobs-Jenkins harnesses Boucicault’s ambivalence in the face of slavery to investigate the performative dimensions to racial identity and expose the theatre’s role in producing racial hierarchies and injustice. He does this by harnessing Boucicault’s emphasis on extreme spectacle and emotion.  The play was, after all, a ‘sensation drama’, subordinating plot and character to spectacle.  Boucicault’s philosophy in such productions was always to ‘hit the public between the eyes.’⁵ Here, the major special effects spectacle is the burning steamship, though the photograph that captures the murderous M’Closky in Act 2 was also a novelty.  Jacobs-Jenkins uses the visual and affective dimensions of the play to confront his audience with their own activity of ‘looking’ and ‘feeling’ as intensely political – and historical – acts.  His use of sensation resists sensationalisation, insisting instead that spectators watch themselves watching and consider their own culpability in the making of racist images and feelings onstage.

It’s perhaps not surprising then, that so many reviews of Jacobs-Jenkins’ play mention walk-outs during the show, while its critical reception has tended to be adulatory.  This mixture of responses echoes those of the audiences to Boucicault’s play, which stirred up both abundant hostility and acclaim.  Before the opening night the New York Herald on December 5 had already denounced it as a ‘work of disunion and treason’, one that would help to stir up an ‘abolition aroma.’  In an even more hysterical article, the Spirit of the Times suggested on December 17 that the hit play was a ‘libel on the South.’⁶ Boucicault and Robertson claimed that there had been death threats, though it is possible that this was an attempt to generate further publicity. When the show went to London, the Civil War had begun, and while there was a good deal of sympathy for the South in Britain, audiences still expected their heroines to live happily ever after. After brief resistance, the commercially minded Boucicault gave in, and tacked on a happy ending to The Octoroon, in which George and Zoe are at last united.

Jacobs-Jenkins asks us to consider not only the kinds of endings we might want from a 19^th century melodrama, but how we want the story of theatre making itself to be told. This special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review’s Interventions has invited a range of scholars and artists to do the same, investigating the relationship between ‘The’ and ‘An’: between Boucicault’s source text and Jacobs-Jenkins’ radical reworking. These include short essays that explore the function of images in both plays, focusing in particular on tableaux, photography and make up, and essays that consider of politics of feelings like grief, sensation and the silences inside the law. Final essays explore the reception, pre-histories and afterlives of these plays, finishing with beginnings and endings.

Interspersed with these essays, we include interviews with artists who have worked on productions of these plays in London and Dublin, and we end with an ‘epistolary exchange’ between three scholars who identify (or have been identified) as mixed-race. They think through Zoe’s mixed status, but ultimately identify not with Zoe as the ‘tragic mulatta,’ but with the conversations between Minnie and Dido, which bookend Jacobs-Jenkins’ text. These are the enslaved women, who barely appear in Boucicault’s original. They are prefaced in the printed text with Jacobs-Jenkins’ reminder that: ‘I don’t know what a real slave sounded like. And neither do you.’ It is Minnie and Dido’s conversations, their snatched moments of friendship, that remind us of the enslaved people whose voices were not included in Boucicault’s play but to whom that play is indebted.  In our inheritance of the legacies of this play, Jacobs-Jenkins insists, we must try to listen for those lost voices even if we can never quite hear them.

Nicholas Daly is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.  He writes about nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, drama and popular culture, and his  publications include Literature, Technology and Modernity (2004), Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (2009); The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York (2015); and Ruritania: A Cultural History from The Prisoner of Zenda to the Princess Diaries (2020). He is Aoife Monks’ collaborator on the AHRC- funded research network Boucicault 2020: Circuits of Skill. This special issue is one of its outcomes.

Aoife Monks is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries and Director of the Centre for Creative Collaboration at Queen Mary University of London.  Her research focuses on costume and backstage work at the theatre, as well as engaging with histories of virtuosity, entrepreneurialism and Irishness during the Celtic Tiger economy in Ireland. She is the PI (with Nicholas Daly) of the AHRC funded research network Boucicault 2020: Circuits of Skill –  this special issue is one of the network’s outcomes.