Last year’s most talked-about, most unforgettable production is returning to Woolly for a limited three-week run: An Octoroon by new MacArthur "Genius Grant"-winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
A plantation on the brink of foreclosure. A young gentleman falling for the part-black daughter of the estate’s owner. An evil swindler plotting to buy her for himself. Meanwhile, the slaves are trying to keep things drama-free, because everybody else is acting crazy.
An Octoroon, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Obie-winning (2014 OBIE Winner Best New American Play) riff on a 19th century Dion Boucicault's melodrama that helped shape the debate around the abolition on slavery, is an incendiary adaptation that the New York Post called “entertainingly demented.”
Part period satire, part meta-theatrical middle finger, it’s a provocative challenge to America’s lasting legacy of slavery and the racial pigeonholing of 1859—and today.
