A few years ago, I told a journalist who was writing about the now thirty-two-year-old playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins that I thought he should write a play about love—that which cannot be explained. One of the more cerebral dramatists of his generation, the Obie Award-winning Jacobs-Jenkins delivered his first pieces on a sharp, powerful ray of thought, but it sometimes happened that his characters couldn’t get out of the way of their own thinking. Or not their thinking, exactly, but their attempts to disrupt the received ideas about any number of things, including race and what constitutes a society.
In his first full-length play, “Neighbors” (2010), Jacobs-Jenkins set out to address “a three-hundred-year history of black people in the theatre.” (He has never lacked ambition.) The piece’s protagonist, Richard Patterson, is a rather uptight black professor of political philosophy, who is married to a white woman. Patterson relies on his wheat-paste tolerance—he’s almost a parody of academic “whiteness”—to help him keep it together in a world that he thinks it’s an achievement to belong to. It’s hard to tell whether he knows that his docility is a stereotype of black behavior. Maybe it’s all an act. Anyway, his world view gets majorly messed with when a black family, in blackface, and with names like Sambo, Mammy, and Topsy, move in next door. These tokens of minstrelsy are loud and disruptive, caricatures of the kind of blackness that Patterson has sought to escape. As tensions between the neighbors mount, certain questions arise, such as: What defines a black man if he has been shaped by racism’s idea of him? And is black skin a mask that dictates behavior or does the mask free one to engage with the minstrelsy at the heart of American blackness? “Neighbors” didn’t quite come together, because it couldn’t: the stage can contain only so many ideas, and sometimes it felt as if Jacobs-Jenkins’s weren’t entirely worked through. He’d suffered some of the horrors of racism—no black man can avoid them—but he hadn’t figured out how to embody that legacy; it took him some time to learn how to sculpt the flesh and blood that would support his characters and their provocations.
Jacobs-Jenkins worked as an assistant in The New Yorker’s fiction department from 2007 to 2010, and it was through him that I first heard about Young Jean Lee’s identity-based theatre pieces and Thomas Bradshaw’s scripts about racism as a form of spiritual and physical debauchery. After I saw Jacobs-Jenkins’s play “Appropriate,” in 2014, I understood how committed he was to rooting around in and talking back to “the culture”—that is, the theatre history that was capable of producing him and, before him, Sam Shepard and Lorraine Hansberry and Eugene O’Neill, distinctly American voices that contributed to his own. “Appropriate,” the story of a white family grappling with the death of its patriarch, is both an homage to and an investigation of writers like Shepard, who drew a map of this country through so many tired living rooms furnished with recrimination and repression.
The frenzy of “Appropriate” (there’s a black secret in the attic, as there is in most of American life) led to the beautiful high hysteria of the brilliantly crafted “An Octoroon” (also 2014). From Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play “The Octoroon,” about a white Southerner who falls in love with a mixed-race woman, Jacobs-Jenkins fashioned a kind of theatre-essay, whose parentheses are filled with dialogue about performing blackness, the theatre as a live art, and the basic concerns that haunt the thinking mind trapped in a body that’s defined by skin color, gender, or speech: life makes each of us a target for someone else. “An Octoroon” isn’t just an alternative to the irony-free “black American theatre” of Hansberry and August Wilson; it’s part of it—and part of many other things, too, because Jacobs-Jenkins’s surrealism grows out of naturalism, the strange circumstances that make us open our mouths, hoping to be heard, even as we forget to listen. By experimenting with numerous theatrical genres in a single work, like “An Octoroon” or his new play, “Everybody” (directed by Lila Neugebauer, at the Signature), Jacobs-Jenkins is displaying how serious he is about the form. Again and again, he poses these questions: What can the theatre do, besides talk? What makes a play? Is it love?
With “Everybody,” Jacobs-Jenkins has written a play about love—or, rather, a play that shows how impossible it is to write about love—and it fills the heart in a new and unexpected way. Like “An Octoroon,” “Everybody” is both a response to and a dismantling of an earlier text: “The Somonyng of Everyman,” a fifteenth-century morality play about Christian salvation and how to achieve it. In the original, a Messenger enters, imploring the audience to listen. Then God announces that Everyman has become so craven and materialistic that he can purge himself of these impulses only by dying. Naturally, Everyman doesn’t want to die, at least not alone, so he gets Death to agree that he can take a companion on the journey to the other side. Everyman approaches Fellowship, who flakes, and Kindred, who declines, and Good Deeds, who is too weak to make the journey—Everyman has neglected her for too long. After Everyman repents of his sins, Good Deeds does gather her strength, and she calls on Beauty, Discretion, Strength, Knowledge, and Five Wits to join them. But she is the only figure who’s willing to go with Everyman into the wormy grave.
Jacobs-Jenkins follows this plot structure, but, instead of Good Deeds, it’s Love who accompanies Everybody into the afterlife; Love is as imperfect as all the other figures, but he doesn’t forsake Everybody. Thinking about the original script while watching Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation is like listening to an expert d.j. play two records at once, and at different speeds. The playwright’s interest in colloquial speech and in “niceness” as a tactic are fully expressed during the first moments of the play, when Usher (the excellent Jocelyn Bioh, who also plays God and Understanding) takes the stage. Because she’s dressed like all the ushers at the Signature, we assume that she is one. But when she continues on long beyond the time it takes to ask us to silence our cell phones and unwrap our candy now, all the while smiling “pleasantly,” it becomes clear that she, like the Messenger in “Everyman,” will be our stern but civil guide into this strange, earthbound terrain.
Everybody is played by one of five actors (there are nine cast members) who is chosen by lottery before the performance. On the evening that I saw the show, Brooke Bloom brought a calm confusion to the role, which was reminiscent, in comedic terms, of the Woody Allen-era Diane Keaton. Her Everybody was a poetic evocation of that cosmic joke otherwise known as life, though her humor was worn down, at times, by scenes that didn’t quite work, such as the voice-overs of Everybody’s thoughts that play as she eats a hot dog or sits chatting with Kinship or whomever. Or whatever. Are these characters people? Is Love just an idea?
Love (the well-cast Chris Perfetti, who always plays the role) is not an easy emotion. He’s the last character Everybody asks to accompany her on her journey, when, of course, he should have been the first. Love is resentful at having been made to wait, and then seemingly vindictive. Before he goes with Everybody, he requires her to strip down to her underwear and run in a circle, reciting over and over, “I don’t love how my body keeps changing!” It’s a killer moment, one of the best I’ve seen in contemporary theatre—we are all the cruel custodians of a mortality that we can’t prevent—and it goes on for a long time before Love and Everybody disappear into death, to reëmerge as dancing skeletons electrified by eternal being.
Those skeletons reminded me of Antonin Artaud’s writing from Mexico, where he did so much of his thinking about the theatre. In a 1936 lecture, he noted, “For me, the essence of Surrealism was an affirmation of life against all caricatures.” And it was in this surreal moment that, in my mind at least, all of us sitting in the theatre abandoned the beings we were supposed to be and became atomized into this lovely, wordless physical manifestation of a feeling that Jacobs-Jenkins couldn’t control with his considerable intellect but allowed to dance free in his considerable heart. ♦
