On Churchill at New York’s New World Stages; An Octoroon at Theatre for a New Audience & The Events at New York Theatre Workshop

The New Criterion, April 1, 2015

For a one-man play to work, it needs a very, very good script-writer. Back in the early 1990s, I saw Patrick Stewart’s A Christmas Carol. I would watch Stewart in just about anything, but with Dickens supplying the words, well, it was the best of times. Ronald Keaton has yet to reach the heights of the great Shakespearian, Starfleet captain, and mutant mentor. But this familiar presence on the Chicago stage and quite a bit more besides (manager, director, playwright, fund-raiser, composer, singer) often turned to the best for many of the lines deployed in his single-handed Churchill at New York’s New World Stages. He adapted the script from Churchill’s own words (and from a Reagan-era TV play by James C. Humes, an assiduous laborer in the Churchill mines).

Keaton’s Churchill enjoyed a successful debut in Chicago and moved to New York in February. The setting is the United States in 1946. Churchill is traveling to Fulton, Missouri, to make that speech. Just a year before, British voters had thrown him out of office, scarcely two months after the defeat of Germany. “It may be a blessing in disguise,” soothed Churchill’s wife on Election Day. “Well,” he said, “at the moment it’s certainly very well disguised.” That exchange made it into Keaton’s show. The crowd loved it. This Churchill guy has a future on Broadway.

The laughter was loud enough to suggest that this was the first time that most in the audience had heard that famous reply. If that was the case they didn’t know their Churchill too well. But that they were there at all meant that they knew something and wanted to know more. Overall, Keaton comes across as too likeable, too accessible to be a completely convincing Churchill, a man who, outside his family, could easily play the monument. Keaton has a resemblance of sorts to a rather mangy Last Lion, but he doesn’t sound much like him. The curious intonation is absent; too much American is present. Neither Albert Finney nor Robert Hardy has anything to fear.

Keaton’s more intimate approach was thus a smart way to go. Grand set-pieces would not have worked; instead Keaton depicts an aging statesman reminiscing over what had been, sometimes from a chair, sometimes wandering around the stage, sometimes messing with a painting. And Churchill’s words carry the Chicagoan along pretty well. The greatest hits make their appearances, and so do the greatest inaccuracies. Churchill never grumbled, with reference to De Gaulle, that the “Cross of Lorraine” was the heaviest of all the wartime crosses he had to bear, nor did he joke that naval tradition was “rum, sodomy and the lash,” although he did say that he’d wished he had.

The play could not possibly have crammed Churchill’s contradictions and bewildering immensity into two hours, nor did it try to. A simple set, occasionally crowned by projections above the stage illustrating some of the people and places referred to in the script, reinforces the message, already signaled by a cast of one, that this is a condensed edition. Churchill’s final two decades are omitted altogether, as are other well-known episodes from the previous seven and a good number of inconvenient truths. If there is any unexpected emphasis, it is on Churchill’s fraught relationship with his parents, two narcissists with little time for their adoring boy, rescued by his “Woomany,” the good-hearted Nurse Everest, who gave him the love they never could—a woman to whom the world owes much.

The inner Churchill remains largely elusive, lost in a rush of half-told events, nicely delivered quips, and fragments of ringing speeches—a torrent that swept away hopes of anything more substantial, but was probably what the audience had come for: an admiring portrayal of a man they knew they were right to admire; an evening for celebration, not complication; a chance to revisit a past that had once seemed so straightforward, a past that had once been within touch. “My dad,” said the lady behind me, “was on the USS Missouri.”

Over at Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, the Theatre for a New Audience’s production of Soho Rep’s An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins offered a far more unsettling encounter with the past. Narrowly described, and it should not be narrowly described, An Octoroon, which won an Obie in 2014 for Best New American Play, is a response to The Octoroon, a hugely popular antebellum melodrama by the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault that opened in New York in 1859, and which had itself been influenced by Thomas Mayne Reid’s The Quadroon, an implicitly even more daring novel from 1856.

Laws can sometimes appear sharpest at their edges, and the plight of the enslaved “octoroon” (someone of one-eighth African descent, and under the code of “one drop” defined as black) was not infrequently used by abolitionists as a way to draw whites’ attention to the wider injustices of the Peculiar Institution. That the octoroon depicted often seems to have been a woman, and sexually exploited, is testimony both to their propagandist savvy and, occasionally, more prurient Victorian interests. The much reproduced The Octoroon (1868), by the English sculptor John Bell, was post–Civil War but inspired by Boucicault’s drama. This octoroon has “Caucasian” features and has been stripped naked and (tastefully) chained, neither of which happens to Zoe, the eponymous octoroon of Boucicault’s play, although the villain of the piece, the wicked M’Closky, clearly has something less than respectable in mind for her if he can succeed in seeing her reduced again to slavery.

The core of the story is fairly straightforward. Sophisticated George Peyton returns from the pleasures of Paris to Terrebonne, his now-deceased uncle’s plantation in Louisiana. He meets and falls in love with Zoe, his uncle’s daughter by one of his slaves, long since emancipated and brought up as a part of the Peyton family. The plantation is in dire straits financially. Through chicanery, murder, and a legal technicality M’Closky takes the opportunity to buy both Terrebonne and Zoe. In the end (it’s complicated, but it involves implausible photographic evidence and a steamboat in flames) M’Closky is both foiled and killed, but, despite having “had the education of a [white] lady,” Zoe has learned nothing from Romeo and Juliet: unaware of M’Closky’s demise, she takes poison too soon, but lives on long enough to cede George to the Melanie Wilkes next door. In English productions of the play Zoe and George typically ended up together. Such a happy outcome, with its alarming promise of “quintroons” to come (the elaborate taxonomy is its own giveaway), might have made American theatergoers unhappy: propriety could, however, be preserved by tragedy. Zoe had to die.

Boucicault’s play is an artifact of its times; the n-word runs amok and dialogue, attitudes, and dialect lag not so far behind:

PAUL: It ain’t no use now; you got to gib it up!

WAHNOTEE: Ugh!

PAUL: It won’t do! You got dat bottle of rum hid under your blanket—gib it up now, you—Yar! [Wrenches it from him.] You nasty, lying Injiun! It’s no use you putting on airs; I ain’t gwine to sit up wid you all night and you drunk.

Did I forget to mention that the cast of characters includes, as no one would have put it in 1859, a Native American?

Seventy years later, The New York Times gave a broadly positive review (“an old play that wears its years honorably, even a bit jauntily”) to a revival of The Octoroon from March 1929. It is hard to imagine such a revival today except as an exercise in the highest camp, complete with more trigger warnings than the preparations for Passchendaele. There was none of that in 1929. The reviewer noted approvingly that the cast played it straight: “not once did the players ‘kid’ their parts, not once was fun made of the hoary septuagenarian,” although his observation that the audience “finally got around to hissing” M’Closky hints that the performance might not have been conducted in an atmosphere of total seriousness.

The trick that Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins pulls off (and pulls off brilliantly) in a complex, multi-layered play that uses this ancient melodrama as its own foundation, is not to reject camp but to embrace it. With the additional assistance of slapstick, absurdity, some very dark humor, and one particularly horrific interlude, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins uses the contrast between the audience’s laughter and the tragic story that it is watching to build an uneasy tension that lingers long after the play is over.

That said, An Octoroon opens more than a little uncertainly with a monologue by “BJJ” (Austin Smith) in underwear and a grouchy mood, complaining sometimes amusingly, sometimes not, about his life, the trials of being an African-American playwright (“BJJ” might just possibly refer to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins), gradually applying whiteface as he does so, grim omens of a trying, eat-your-greens evening ahead. Eventually, BJJ, who has by now admitted to liking and trying to adapt The Octoroon, is joined on stage by “Playwright” (Haynes Thigpen). The two swap insults for no obvious reason. BJJ storms off leaving Playwright alone. He turns out to be a caricature of Boucicault, heavily drunk, heavily Irish, and mightily peeved that he’s been forgotten not much more than a century after his death. He had been a “fecking world-class famous fecking playwright.” And so he was: some of you feckers didn’t know? Playwright is joined by an assistant (Ian Lassiter), starts applying redface, and preparing for a production to come. This sequence ends with him, by then in full Indian headdress, dancing around to some rhythm-heavy music that, like almost everything that had preceded it, goes on too long.

Then the scenery shifts dramatically (well done, Mimi Lien), transformed into some sort of Terrebonne and everything is quickly forgiven. Jacobs-Jenkins, his writing energized by the dialogue with the long-dead Boucicault, weaves in and out of the Irishman’s play, adding, subtracting, toying, teasing, and, while he’s at it, reducing the fourth wall to rubble. Some of Boucicault’s characters vanish altogether; others are reduced to a reference. Two younger slaves, Dido and Minnie, a Greek chorus of sorts, both comment—in caustic, distinctly twenty-first-century language—on the proceedings and, directly or indirectly, on a life both monotonous and arbitrary, one in which they can be sold, split off from their families, torn away from everything they know, used.

MINNIE: Whatchu think of the new mas’r?

DIDO: Mas’r George?

MINNIE: Yeah.

DIDO: He a’ight. He don’t seem to really know what he doin’ just yet but he’ll figure it out. Having slaves can’t be that hard.

MINNIE: Would you fuck him?

DIDO: No, Minnie! Damn! Would you?

(Beat. She would.)

MINNIE: But I kind of get the feeling you don’t really get a say in the matter.

Meanwhile the plot whirls on. Austin Smith reappears in whiteface as both George and M’Closky, and is superb as both. His George is a sly rendering of the performance that being a cultivated, well-traveled Southern gentleman must have been. He’s good-hearted enough, but about to be hoist on the petard of his own culture’s rules, rules that, up to then, haven’t troubled him too much:

GEORGE: How I enjoy the folksy ways of the niggers down here. All the ones I’ve ever known were either filthy ape-like Africans of Paris or the flashy uppity darkies of New York. Here, though, the negro race is so quaint and vibrant and colorful—much like the landscape. And so full of wisdom and cheer and tall tales. I should write a book. Why Pete was telling me a wonderful folktale, have you heard it? It’s about a rabbit. . . .

Mr. Smith’s M’Closky is a moustache-twirling delight, a leering, crouching, shifty-eyed, silent movie villain (a version of Boucicault’s play was filmed in 1913, and sometimes given the telling, both more disturbing and less, alternative title of The White Slave: disappointingly I was unable to navigate the Polish website where it may or may not lurk). Eventually, Mr. Smith’s M’Closky and Mr. Smith’s Peyton have words, and then start fighting. I don’t like slapstick, but I do like the absurd, and, as Mr. Smith brawls with himself—a drawn-out, sprawling, somersaulting melée (complete with knife)—this play reaches a pinnacle of glorious delirium, reinforced by the blackfaced Ian Lassiter’s wildly exaggerated, cleverly subversive versions of old Pete, a madcap Uncle Remus, and young Paul, an older, scallywag Buckwheat. The cellist (Lester St. Louis) playing César Alvarez’s gorgeous music from the side of the stage couldn’t stop smiling. I just laughed aloud. Oh yes, there was a Harvey-sized Br’er Rabbit who periodically strolled onto the stage to perform some chore or—why not?—just stare at the audience. On some accounts, the man in the rabbit mask was none other than Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins himself— lovely if true.

But Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins may have worried that he had made it too easy to laugh away the nightmare that must lie at the root of any play about slavery. And so BJJ and Playwright introduce the fourth act by explaining that in melodramas that is the act in which the moral is to be found. After a sequence in which Wahnotee barely avoids being strung up by an angry crowd, a large image of an actual lynching is displayed. Photographic evidence of a killing has a crucial role in the play, but now the silenced, silent audience was compelled to contemplate fact, not fiction: the murder of two men, left swinging from the end of barbarism’s ropes.

Hideous though that sight is, it is, in some respects, equaled in horror by the moment when a numbed, broken Zoe (touchingly played by Amber Gray), a slave again, is once more turned into an object. She is just “the octoroon” now, a chattel going for fifteen thousand, going for twenty thousand, gone for twenty-five thousand: sold.

At the New York Theatre Workshop, David Greig’s The Events confronts a more recent atrocity, the 2011 killing spree by Anders Breivik, who one terrible July day blew up eight people in central Oslo and then shot dead sixty-nine of the participants at a summer camp organized by a socialist youth group on the nearby island of Utøya.

Unwilling to make this a play just about Breivik and his crime, Greig moves the setting to his native Scotland, and changes much of the back story. His focus is on the aftermath of a murderous attack and, specifically, its effect on Claire, the leftish, lesbian female vicar (Neve McIntosh) who runs the choir that was its target. The choir was proudly diverse and a natural target for the Boy (Clifford Samuel) on a self-appointed mission to protect his people from being overrun by immigrant masses, but not just that. Amongst his jumble of motives is a longing to make a mark on the world too: “The only means I have are art or violence. And I was never any good at drawing.”

The play is often oblique, and it is more than a touch in love with itself. Its success in conveying a sense of sadness and loss owes a great deal to the strength of McIntosh’s performance as Claire tries to understand an event that has shattered her faith in her God, in herself, and in her certainties. In quiet desperation she staggers from abandoned answer to abandoned answer. As she does so, she meets a series of characters (all played by Mr. Samuel) all of whom, in their different ways, shed some light on what happened while leaving her still in darkness. And at the heart of that darkness is the Boy himself, inadequate, lost, dangerous, and deeply disturbed, but maybe not quite insane enough to give Claire the reassurance that a diagnosis of insanity might bring.

The Events is not helped by the gimmicky decision to feature a different “real” choir at each performance, singing along to what has been described, inaccurately, as a “soaring” soundtrack. This soared to some sort of nadir at the play’s otherwise intriguing time-shifting conclusion (does the drama end with the prelude to the massacre?) when the audience was invited to join in the singing of a song named “We’re All Here.” This may have worked in Norway, but in New York it merely felt like an invitation to wallow in the tears of others.