REFOCUSSING THE LENS ON RACE AND IDENTITY IN AMERICAN THEATRE

“Hi, everyone. I’m a black playwright. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I’m here to make you feel something.”

This is the opening line to An Octoroon, another Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play, written just after Appropriate. The line represents the dilemma that Jacobs-Jenkins has faced since his earliest plays achieved notice, and acclaim - that of writing about race, not writing about race (but the assumption that you were, because of your race), and resisting being defined by race.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins undoubtedly brings a voice on race and identity into his work - sometimes explicitly, often not. When he was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, the Foundation noted (amongst other things), his use of a “historical lens to satirise and comment on modern culture, particularly the ways in which race and class are negotiated in both private and public settings."1

Partly for that reason, his work has been described as both ‘subversive’ and ‘innovative’. But as Jacobs-Jenkins points out, race is, and has always been, part of the conversation. Playwrights such as Sam Shepherd, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, he says, have been telling stories about race long before him, but it has gone unnoticed by the majority, because the dominant viewpoints being expressed were their own: “So, do you think that you’ve not been making work about race? You’ve been making work about whiteness.”2

The very urge to define him as ‘an African American writer’ highlights the otherness that his work seeks to highlight. “If you look at every classic American play, they’re basically all about the idea of race and relation and an evolution of culture, otherness and how we deal with it. So I don’t know, it’s a tricky question to ask because if you’re going to ask me, you’ve got to ask everyone.”3

“I feel like I’m put in a position where I have to engage with what people bring to my work, which is an expectation for me to talk about race because it’s not normal for a black writer to be writing in the theatre,” he says. “So I have to like explain my presence, my skin colour.”4

In Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins has written a story about family, relationships, otherness, and most definitely one about race, whilst not showing a single character of colour. What - or rather, who - is missing from the stage speaks even more loudly by absence. This is undoubtedly part of why Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ work is so remarkable - he amplifies the conversations we may not have heard or had chosen to ignore…“he makes the audience work. It’s about never letting us be comfortable, never allowing us to occupy a place of feeling like we know it all - because we don’t.”5

Appropriate, and other works by Jacobs-Jenkins, remind us that the familiar can look completely different, with just a change of focus.

“I think theatre is about checking in on some controversial ideas among the people and seeing where we all square in our relationship to those ideas and also with each other.”6

The ideas presented in Appropriate may, or may not, be controversial to you, but we hope that you enjoy the conversations they spark.