Abolitionist John Brown was hanged just three days before the play's debut, which is seen as one of the catalyst events that started the Civil War. Theatre Communications Group: New York, 2019), 7374. Jordan Schildcrout [11] Jacobs-Jenkins grew up in a home full of black memorabilia such as mammy dolls and Colored Only signs, according to Laura Collins-Hughes in Provocative Play Sees the Faces Behind the Blackface, The Boston Globe, 16 January 2011. http://archive.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2011/01/16/neighbors_exposes_racial_history_on_stage/ (accessed 5 December 2016). [47] Schneider, Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something.. The Octoroon Themes Racial Identification and Discrimination Set in the pre-Civil War South, The Octoroondeals heavily with racial themes. Assistant announces that the boat explodes. B J J isnt the only undressed playwright onstage for long. Wahnotee, accused by the members of Captain Ratts ship of killing Paul, is about to be lynched. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. More literally educational are Richards lectures on Greek tragedy, which can be seen as his form of performance, or his interludes. [22], From May 18 to July 1, 2017 An Octoroon was performed at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London[23] in a production directed by Ned Bennett and designed by Georgia Lowe. 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. Cellist Lester St. Louis helps create the dun dun dun with his live accompaniment, which underscores much of the show. [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. Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications The image of Franz holding the sodden remains of the photos of dead black people laminated onto Shepards image of Tilden holding the remains of the dead baby elicits especially clearly what Jacobs-Jenkins calls an archeology of seeing. The meaning of this moment in Appropriate lies in the stratigraphy, and especially in the gap between layers that provides space for interpretation. Orange Tree, RichmondBranden Jacobs-Jenkinss extraordinary play is both an adaptation of a 19th-century melodrama and a dazzling postmodernist critique of it. The photo albums in Buried Child and Appropriate reveal what has been kept hidden. *thunder clap*. Your email is never published nor shared. "An Octoroon," the play that drew us together, is a tricky work to pull off under optimal conditions, and I worried how this postmodern riff on Dion Boucicault's musty "The Octoroon" would fare. 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. The older Indian man cares so deeply about the young black boy that he will remain on the plantation as long as Paul does, and he eventually murders Paul's killer (which is made to seem very just). That is very much the point of an extraordinary play, first seen at New Yorks Soho Rep, that defies categorisation and that proclaims Jacobs-Jenkins as an exciting new dramatist who questions what it means to be dubbed a black playwright. 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. Though she is legally a slave and the property of Mr. Peyton, she has not been treated as one; he tried to free her, not realizing that a legal loophole prevented it. Even the title shows this sense of exhaustion with the abundance of the race question and critics viewing his work through a racial lens. Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss Neighbors Appropriate, and An Octoroon by Verna A. She is considered to be property by law, but this is also presented as wrong. Club members can see a different show every night of the week. 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. BJJ clarifies that in the time of the play, a photograph was a novel/innovative/contemporary way for the plot to be resolved. In his own defense, Jacobs-Jenkins writes in the stage direction, "I don't know what a real slave sounded like. The device of racial cross-casting inevitably creates a gap between actor and character, superimposing the stylization of Brechtian distance on the stylization of melodramatic stereotyping. In doing so, Brer Rabbitor the dramatist himselfassesses the political impact of Jacobs-Jenkinss adaptation. 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. This is the first of many such moments that straddle the line of sincerity and satire. It is in the interstices between adapted work and adaptation, or to use Jacobs-Jenkinss archeological metaphor, in the stratigraphy, that the important cultural and political work of adaptation takes place. At the beginning the incessant chatter of cicadas fills and sweeps the theater in pulsing pitch-black waves (13), assaulting the audiences senses in an almost Artaudian manner for what seems like an unbearably long time; at the end alternating darkness and light represent the passing of many years as the house falls apart and the cicadas fall silent. Download the entire The Octoroon study guide as a printable PDF! For much of the play Jim Crow refuses to take on the eponymous role of his late father, though by the end he too performs his part in a rousing version of the minstrel song and dance number Jump Jim Crow, his new-found talent inspired apparently by the admiration of Melody.[14]. . England, England, Front Of House at Prince of Wales Theatre The implicit contrast is hilarious, and harrowing. Franz and River are startled by the waking of a figure on the couch, who turns out to be Rhys, Tonis son, just as Shelley is startled by Dodge, Vinces grandfather, whom she arouses from sleep. 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]. It is a fitting prologue for a play that perpetually examines itself, from every possible angle, and yet manages to transform self-consciousness from something that paralyzes into something that propels. An Octoroon most closely adheres to, though it also transcends, Hutcheons definition of an adaptation as an extended, announced, deliberate revisitation of a particular work of art. Neighbors and Appropriate expand the parameters of adaptation in other ways, the former by adapting and recontextualizing an historical form of popular entertainment, the latter by adapting not a particular play, but an entire dramatic subgenre. Robert Vorlicky In August: Osage County, for example, Barbara conflates the decay of home and family with the decay of America: This country, this experiment, America, this hubris: what a lament, if no one saw it go.[34] In Dividing the Estate when family members, no longer able to depend on money from their land, contemplate getting jobs at Whataburger, schoolteacher Pauline comments, Thats what they say America is becoming, you know, a service economy.[35] And in Buried Child when Shelly tells Vince that his home is like a Norman Rockwell cover, Vince replies, Its American.[36] This American house with its fraught relationships and dark secrets is explicitly Vinces inheritance (128), willed to him by his grandfather, Dodge. think were related! (250). Brer Rabbits gaze is designed to ensure that spectators take note of their own and each others responses to racist stereotypes presented as comic. I washed it away (97). The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. . [45] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 20. Last Updated on June 19, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. Buhahahaha! In the form of a stump speech (in minstrel performances a ridiculous lecture replete with malapropisms on a topical subject[20]), Topsy talks to the audience about what she hopes they have been enjoying so far. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); The Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT), http://www.signaturetheatre.org/News/An-Archeology-of-Seeing.aspx, http://archive.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2011/01/16/neighbors_exposes_racial_history_on_stage/, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/theater/reviews/10neighbors.html, http://blastmagazine.com/2011/01/14/stage-review-neighbors-at-company-one/, http://www.broadwayworld.com/boston/article/Company-One-Wants-You-to-Meet-the-Neighbors-20110117, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-branden-jacobs-jenkins-20150927-story.html, http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/, http://wfpl.org/review-family-secrets-fester-appropriate/, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, Creative Commons (CC) license unless otherwise noted, Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss, Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space by Jessica Brater, Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhls Plays of Mourning by Seokhun Choi. New York NY 10016. Looking back over the semester, I thought it was only fitting to end on An Octoroon. Not only does it apply multiple themes from across the class, even going all the way back to January, but it brings all this history together to put his own spin on it, making parts of the play nearly incomprehensible without the proper context of these older texts and plays. Zoe and George are presented very sympathetically, however, as characters who are good and moral, and this seems to indicate that the author recognizes and approves of their love. Locating 'Dixie' in Newspaper Discourse and Theatrical Performance in Toronto, 1880s-1920s Jan 2018 [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. At the Orange Tree, Richmond, until 24 June. 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. [11], Mark Ravenhill staged a workshop production of the play featuring Saycon Sengbloh in April 2012. 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. It toys with the plot of Dion Boucicault's 19th century play "The Octoroon . Grace wants to escapeshe is co-head of the Runaway Plannin Committee (40)and Minnie and Dido at least want to choose the nature of their servitude, supposing that if they can persuade Captain Ratts to buy them to work on his steamboat, they will enjoy a life of romantic adventure. [2], Jacobs-Jenkins also cites Peter Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination as an inspiration for his approach to melodrama. His most recent play, Appropriate, is about a white family that discovers an album of lynching photos while cleaning out a deceased patriarch's home. Myers gives a tour de force in his triple roles as the blas black playwright, the charming leading man, and the mustachioed villain. Richard explains that the origin of Agamemnons tragedy lies in events that occurred before the action of the play begins. Zoe falls in love with George as well, though others are shocked that the two would wish to marry (it being, of course, illegal at the time). 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. [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. Jacobs-Jenkinss plays variously demonstrate how adaptation operates creatively in producing new works and also critically and politically, not in this instance by reinterpreting the adapted texts, but by exposing how their damaging and supposedly outdated racial assumptions continue to inform contemporary racial attitudes. This place has historyour history.[25] If the plantation clearly symbolizes Americas history, the members of the Lafayette family represent its contemporary cultural geography. [2] In a 2018 poll by critics of The New York Times, the work was ranked the second-greatest American play of the past 25 years. She is currently working on ambivalent motherhood in contemporary adaptations of Medea. [5] Suzan-Lori Parks anticipates Jacobs-Jenkinss use of an archeological metaphor for a slightly different purpose. [36] Sam Shepard, Buried Child. This strategy is most apparent in his depiction of the enslaved female characters, who are little more than comic props in The Octoroon. The womens fantasy, however, will prove ephemeral. 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. "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. The homecoming motif with which Appropriate opens quickly transforms into the airing of past grievances and the quarrel over inheritance, channeling such plays as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Dividing the Estate. The diverse ways in which Jacobs-Jenkins excavates old forms in these three plays both reveal and create new layers of historical meaning that call for new ways of seeing and thinking about Americas racial heritage. About their apparently imminent sale, for example, Dido says, This is about the worst damn day of my life! Even the notion of what makes a play is up for grabs, as this tumultuous piece is both an adaptation of The Octoroon, a popular 19th-century melodrama by Dion Boucicault, and a postmodernist critique of it. It is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon, which premiered in 1859. Besides race, what are some representations of slaves and slavery that are not complicity with the dominant ideology of this time? Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon are all intrageneric adaptations; that is, they are plays that adapt other plays, or in the case of Neighbors other performances, in the same dramatic genre. [10] Vallejo Gantner, artistic director of PS 122 along with theatre critics Elisabeth Vincentelli and Adam Feldman, argued that although it was not unethical to publish the email, it may not have been "nice" to publish it. Gain full access to show guides, character breakdowns, auditions, monologues and more! Note: When citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. He does acknowledge, however, that his wife, Halie, has a family album that can explain the heritage . Reviewer Chase Quinn observed that the audience at Soho Rep was in an unceasing state of anxiety, as each audience member was left to negotiate for him or herself when and how much to laugh. This play is set in Creole Louisiana, before the Civil War, on a plantation called Terrebonne. 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. While An Octoroon revisits many of these themes, it does so in a more formally challenging way. [40] Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 13. Just because the law forbids or permits something doesn't mean the law is morally right or just. Vol. The tension slackens slightly in the second half when Jacobs-Jenkins summarises Boucicaults sensational climax. Perhaps An Octoroon was best suited to a rough-edged performance in a tiny theater. For the details of this argument see Verna A. The detailed variations on this theme multiply into dizziness. Appropriate/An Octoroon. For instance, a white baby doll, standing in for an infant slave, is given a partly blacked-up face. [37] Thomas P. Adler, Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, in Matthew Roudan, ed. Underscoring the link, Toni sarcastically refers to her brother as Beauregarde Big Daddy Lafayette (35). 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. 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. While An Octoroon revisits many of these themes, it does so in a more formally challenging way. Jacobs-Jenkins here invites audiences to engage in an act of complex seeing, requiring them simultaneously to cheer Jim for his newfound expertise and to censure his embodiment of his nominal stereotype, to admire aesthetically what they must also condemn historically. An Octoroon is set way down yonder in the land of cotton during the antebellum period. the Vietnam War. Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, 121. date the date you are citing the material. 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]. [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). [42] Jacobs-Jenkins retains most of Boucicaults main characters and substantial amounts of his dialogue as well as his plot. Certainly, they belong to a different theatrical world and tradition than the Pattersons. He's quickly echoed in a snide tone by a white onlooker, who just so happens to be Dion Boucicault (Danny Wolohan). A theater and a slave plantation in Louisiana, College/University, Diverse Cast, Ensemble Cast, Mature Audiences, Regional Theatre, Front Of House at Prince of Wales Theatre. But as audiences laugh (or squirm) at the Crows outrageous minstrel show turns, or speculate knowingly about the quarrels of the Lafayettes, or weep for Zoe and laugh at the performances of Minnie, Dido, and Pete, Jacobs-Jenkins simultaneously compels contemporary spectators to confront the racial assumptions he has excavated along with the dramatic forms that contain them and to worry about their own and each others complicity in the continuing legacy of those assumptions. Log in here. Bo hated the plantation with its bugs and its endless stories about Civil War ancestors. By layering African-American history onto Greek myth, Richard constructs an alternative archeology of seeing to Topsysand Jacobs-Jenkinssexcavation of the minstrel show that is the plays main focus. Unlike historical excavations, which lead archeologists ever deeper into the past, in Neighbors Jacobs-Jenkins excavates upwards into the present, reaching his deepest layer in the feelings of a putative contemporary actor beneath those of a reluctant performer beneath those of a minstrel character. eNotes.com Research Playwrights, Librettists, Composers and Lyricists. Finally, by placing his minstrel characters in a contemporary context and eliciting empathy for them as human beings and as artists, Jacobs-Jenkins opens up a yet more complicated and difficult way of seeing his nineteenth-century source material while confronting audiences with the ways in which the minstrel stereotypes continued to operate in popular culture and populist politics throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Sign up today to unlock amazing theatre resources and opportunities. Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve, Managing Editor: Jess Applebaum Maybe they giggle (319). In fact, Jacobs-Jenkins hits on so many ideas per minute, you'll wish you had a little more time to catch your breath. They watch us. BJJ, Playwright, and Assistant explain the significance of the fourth act, the sensation scene in melodrama. 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. Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer, 2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center An Imperative Duty is a short realist novel by William Dean Howells published in 1891. Jorge Huerta Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: 'theatre is about controversial ideas', Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Unlike most of the plays of the time, however, the central "tragic action" of the play centers not around the fate of a The Octoroon is a drama of plantation life and miscegenation in antebellum America, written by an Irishman who visited the South. A theatrical, melodramatic reality is created to tell the story of an octoroon woman (a person who is black) named Zoe and her quest for identity and love. As both the most recent text of the course as well as our last, I think Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss An Octoroon points to the complex hope of a world in which black artists can create works which are separate from the recycling of previous black narratives in America. Following Boucicault, Jacobs-Jenkins skillfully manipulates how his audience responds from moment to moment. publication online or last modification online. Jims performance, so admired by Melody that she gives the dazed Jim a blowjob, seems, according to Jacobs-Jenkinss stage directions, designed to be genuinely remarkable and worthy of the theatre audiences admiration as well as Melodys. [32] Erin Keane, Review/Family Secrets Fester in Appropriate, 89.3 WFPL News Louisville, 20 March 2013. http://wfpl.org/review-family-secrets-fester-appropriate/ (accessed 30 December 2016). Intrageneric adaptation has received less theoretical attention than intergeneric or intermedial adaptation. (An octoroon, just so you know, is a person whose ancestry is one-eighth black; that fraction is enough to doom the plays title character, played by the exquisite Amber Gray.). Stacy Wolf, Frank Hentschker, Executive Director George proposes to Dora, but Zoe confesses their love, which turns off Dora. The second is the date of . Dion Boucicault's drama was inspired by his visit to the American South and The Quadroon (1856), a novel by Thomas Mayne Reid. The play reiterates a lot of themes I've heard before, but does it in a fresh way that's both thoughtful and provoking. [6], The sensation scene of the original play is deconstructed in act four. Significantly, the character of Zoe loses the definite article she has in Boucicaults title to become simply an octoroon: one of many rather than a symbol of her race. This leads to a hilarious scene in which he switches between the two characters engaged in a fight to the death. Like many another melodrama of the period, The Octoroon presents its audi- ence with a dashing hero, a dastardly villain, a bumbling spokesman for goodness, and a woman who almost loses her family home. An Imperative Duty Full text HTML version scanned from 1893 edition published by Harper . A panel of scholars and artists discuss the contemporary relevance and themes of Branden Jenkins-Jacobs play "An Octoroon"Featured panelists are:Dr. Theda Pe. Where Boucicault cleverly uses a photograph of the real murderer of Paul to prevent a miscarriage of justice, Jacobs-Jenkins has to go further to produce a similarly sensational effect for his contemporary audience. Foster, Meta-melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicaults The Octoroon, Modern Drama 59, no. 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. The next time we see River, she has taken over the kitchen as Shelly eventually does to make bouillon for Dodge. [6], An Octoroon had a workshop production at Performance Space 122 from June 19 July 3, 2010, featuring Travis York, Karl Allen, Chris Manley, Ben Beckley, Gabe Levey, Jake Hart, Margaret Flanagan, Amber Gray, Mary Wiseman, LaToya Lewis, Kim Gainer, and Sasheer Zamata. Walking on a stage covered with cotton balls is a tricky business. This led Jacobs-Jenkins to see doubles and pairs in Boucicault's play, through relationships between characters e.g. [34] Tracy Letts, August: Osage County (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 12324. eNotes.com, Inc. [41] Bottoms suggests that Buried Child is dealing metaphorically with Americas collective tendency to bury the intolerable memories of its bloody history of slavery and genocide, and so forth (The Theatre of Sam Shepard, 176). Yet in its current incarnation, An Octoroon feels even richer and more resonant than it did before, both funnier and more profoundly tragic. Foster is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago. Advisory Editor: David Savran From left, Haynes Thigpen, Austin Smith (on the ground), Amber Gray and Mary Wiseman. Such plays, with their focus on family dysfunction and buried secrets,[23] include Eugene ONeills Long Days Journey into Night, Tennessee Williamss Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sam Shepards Buried Child, Horton Footes Dividing the Estate, and Tracy Lettss August: Osage County. Hutcheon also notes the Darwinian implications of the term adaptation. A Theory of Adaptation, 31. Boucicault puts his audience on a thrilling emotional roller-coaster for its own sake as is typical of melodrama; Jacobs-Jenkins abruptly alternates not only pathos with laughter and laughter with horror but also emotional engagement with critical detachment to produce in his contemporary audience a Brechtian self-consciousness about their own and other spectators reactions. date the date you are citing the material. An Octoroon is weird in all the right ways, but it's also just so clever! Word Count: 465. [38] Verna A. Like stratigraphic layers in archeology, the layering of past and present in Neighbors requires complex seeing. BJJ is focused on a play, The Octoroon, but runs into issues staging it because the white actors quit, so he applies whiteface in order to play them himself. 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. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. In the nineteenth century, Rhoda's mother would have been referred to as an "octoroon. The family return after their fathers/grandfathers death to the old family home in Arkansas: a decaying mansion with ancestral and slave graveyards on the property of what was once a plantation. Adaptation is a creative, interpretative, and political act. The debate is not, for starters, simply a matter of black and white. Effectively, he adapts melodramas audience for his own meta-melodramatic and political purposes. 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. Fitting to end on an Octoroon by Verna a the play begins Beauregarde Big Daddy (. 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