“I don’t hate people who colour-blind cast but I hate people who colour-blind cast and pretend that they’re not, who pretend that these bodies on stage don’t actually carry specific meaning.” Even though we’re not using it to burn crosses, it’s influencing our gaze, it’s influencing the way we look at and receive all kinds of stories. “It’s like us knocking heads against a glass, which is the reality of how we view racial thinking being in the world. But now for the last three years my shows have been in the summer which is the slot that no one actually pays attention to. He muses: “For a long time I was programmed in February which is Black History Month which is when people think black people will buy tickets. Jacobs-Jenkins is aware of only one black artistic director of an off-Broadway house. The owners of the means of artistic production are still overwhelmingly white. Few theatre audiences in New York are likely to reflect the demographic makeup of today’s America. Photograph: Scott Suchman/Woolly Mammothīroadway and Hollywood might appear to be in the vanguard of diverse, progressive America but for the past two years no black actors were nominated for an Oscar. Jon Hudson Odom in An Octoroon: the New York production experimented with black-, white- and redface. 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.” “It’s like a matrix or a system of values that we all operate in and live inside of every day but, for some reason for artists of colour, we get labelled as writing about race when actually, 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. Race is not like a thing you opt into as a conversation. Jacobs-Jenkins observes: “I think everyone is always writing about race. Try flipping it around and analysing the whiteness of Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams. A critic in the Washington Post commented: “Jacobs-Jenkins appropriates, makes his own, a story of white America, and this presages a more hopeful time when the ethnic identity of a playwright might not prompt a mention.” While some of Jacobs-Jenkins’s works do explore black identity, his award-winning play Appropriate is made up entirely of white characters. Those are definitely the works that people wind up responding to for whatever reason I’ve certainly written plays that don’t do that.” “So I have to like explain my presence, my skin colour. “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. James Konicek, Kathryn Tkel, Jon Hudson Odom and Erika Rose in An Octoroon. People tell me I’m white and I believe them …” Yet to bang on about race every time Jacobs-Jenkins’s name comes up seems reductive, trite and an injustice. To ignore his identity as a black man in the still white-dominated theatre world would be fall into the pretence of post-racialism satirised by Stephen Colbert’s parody news host: “I don’t see race. It is both Jacobs-Jenkins’s calling card and his burden. His play An Octoroon, which opens in his home city of Washington this week, “may turn out to be this decade’s most eloquent theatrical statement on race in America today”, in the view of the New York Times. He has lived and breathed theatre ever since and, now 31, is regarded as one of America’s hottest young playwrights, already with a clutch of awards. It was my first real professional theatre experience.” Jacobs-Jenkins recalls: “There was just something about seeing people of colour occupying that landscape. The notoriously protective Beckett estate reportedly tried in vain to stop it. Samuel Beckett’s two wanderers in space and time, Vladimir and Estragon, were played by African American actors, Thomas W Jones II and Donald Griffin, who improvised black slang and even hip-hop long before Alexander Hamilton learned to rap.
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